Safed

The painter Yosef Zaritsky was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kiev. In 1923, he settled in Mandate Palestine, where he became a prominent figure in the development of Israeli art. He associated with the younger generation of artists who were rebelling against the academic style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. During his long life he worked in a number of styles. In the 1920s, his watercolors of Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem combined an intense focus on the Israeli landscape with a commitment to quasi-abstractionism. His later work was more rigorously abstract in style.