In the Ma‘abarah

Ruth Schloss

1953

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Abstract painting of camp with many tents and a luminous rectangular area in middle featuring three figures including a mother and child and a clothesline between the tents. — Ruth Schloss’s artworks were infused with her commitment to social justice and egalitarianism. This painting of a ma‘abarah (refugee absorption camp), made at a time when the new State of Israel was struggling to take in hundreds of thousands of arriving immigrants, emphasizes the crowded conditions. In the center of a jumble of tents, painted in muddy hues, is a brightly colored patch illuminating women, children, and a clothesline, suggesting hope in the midst of hardship.

Credits

Collection of Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Born in Nuremberg, Ruth Schloss immigrated to Palestine as a teenager in 1937. She enrolled in Jerusalem’s New Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied painting under Mordechai Ardon. During the 1940s, Schloss devoted herself to the kibbutz movement, putting aside her art. She resumed painting in 1962, the same year that she opened her studio in Jaffa, which she ran until 1983. Schloss mainly worked with ink and watercolor on paper. Her signature pieces show the influence of the Communist Party and of Soviet socialist realism, a popular aesthetic among Israeli artists at the time. She illustrated books, magazines, and newspapers with figurative imagery focused on the human condition and social oppression. All Schloss’s work carries a charge of social criticism and political commentary. Her later works, however, are larger in scale and more expressive and personally motivated.

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