Moshe Castel

Casino in Montmartre, Paris, 1930s, Oil on cardboard, 46X55 cm. Signed. (2nd Part of text, starting at previous lot page (No. 51)) This painting from the Estate of Miriam Novitch, the first wife of the artist Moshe Castel, is being sold by the ”Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum”. The proceeds from the sale will fund a book memorializing the efforts of the Ghetto fighters. On June 10th, 1943, she was imprisoned for 60 days in the Fresnes prison, after someone betrayed her to the authorities. Later, she was sent to a detention camp that the Nazis had established in Vittel, as she was a British citizen. At the detention camp, she met Polish Jews holding counterfeit passports belonging to South American countries; among them was Itzhak Katzenelson, the spiritual leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who was rescued from the ghetto before his murder. This was a decisive encounter in her life. In discussions with him, Novitch first became aware of the systematic extermination of the Jewish people in the death camps in Poland and the activities of members of the Jewish underground in the Warsaw ghetto. She later declared: ” In Vittel I converted to Zionism.” Over three months in the Vittel detention camp, Katzenelson wrote the famous lament ”Song of the Murdered Jewish People”. The song was written on ultra-thin pages and put in bottles concealed by Novitch underground. On May 18th 1944 Katzenelson, his eldest son Zvi and a group of Jews with false passports were sent to Drancy transit camp and then to Auschwitz – Birkenau where they were murdered. Five months later, the Vittel camp was liberated by the U.S. Army and Novitch began locating the buried papers to save and publish all the writings of Katzenelson. In 1946 she met Zvia Lubetkin and Antek (Issac) Zuckerman, two fighters who survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising. During that meeting Yitzhak Zuckerman set her a task that became her purpose in life: collecting visual and verbal evidence of the genocide of European Jewry. From that day forward Novitch traveled to the devastated cities of Europe, countries that were under Soviet rule, concentration and extermination camp sites and abandoned German military sites – all to gather documents as evidence of crimes that the perpetrators had made every effort to conceal. The documentary material – documents, negatives, Nazi films and records of survivors and victims – were taken to Katzenelson House. It was the first of its kind, an archive of the Holocaust which later became the ’Ghetto Fighters’ House and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum in Memory of Yitzhak Katznelson’, the world’s first museum commemorating the Holocaust and Jewish heroism and the first Holocaust archive in the world. Novitch’s life was a life of asceticism: She wore black. Her travels were exhausting and often in remote or dangerous areas of Eastern Europe. She did not stay in hotels or have meals in restaurants. Instead, she slept in train stations and took night trains to save the cost of accommodation. Even in Israel she had no room of her own: she lived almost until her death in a small room in the office wing of the museum, where she also worked. This was her life from 1946 when she met Lubetkin and Antek Zuckerman until she suffered a stroke in 1986. Her knowledge in the arts and knowledge of the Eastern European art scene in Paris made her a pioneer of finding non-verbal evidence of the Holocaust. Novitch looked for documentation of Jews in hiding, in forests, ghettos and camps, she focused on visual documentation done in pencil, pen or any other material. She called these works ’Spiritual Rebellion’. Mary Novitch was not appreciated for her pioneering activities, for which she sacrificed her private life and the lives of the people closest to her. We believe that the time has come to appreciate her work. Therefore, the sales revenue will be directed toward publication of a book of research, which will include a selection of about 300 sketches from the collection of around 4,000 records compiled by Novitch. We will also continue to have art exhibitions in the museum in her name.

Estimated price: $12,000 - 16,000

Sold for: 19550

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About: Moshe Castel

Moshe Castel was born in Jerusalem in 1909 to a religious family from Castile. At 13 years old he got accepted to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design where he studied for three years. Afterward, Castel traveled to France and continued his education program at the Académie Julian, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Louvre Museum.After acquiring the technical knowledge required for oil painting, he held his first exhibition in Paris in May 1927. Later on, Castel's works were exhibited in important salons in Paris, at special exhibitions in London and Warsaw. In 1933 he returned to Israel, lived in Tel Aviv and presented a solo exhibition at the Technion in Haifa. He then moved to Safed, held a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum and in 1946 was awarded the Dizengoff Prize for painting and sculpture. In 1948 the group of artists Ofakim Hadashim was founded by him (along with others), the group embraced the foundations of abstract European art. Castel himself added oriental motifs to the abstract expressive style, influenced by what he called "Canaanite art", his later works include elements such as the ancient letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and are dealing with national and root themes and biblical stories combined with marks of archaic script. Castel's artistic clear identification is in working with basalt ground, creating a unique, symbolic and expressive style. By using national Jewish motifs his paintings have become more symbolic (Star of David, Moon and Star, Moslems, etc.). Castel's art aspires from Jewish sources on the one hand, and on the other hand is based on In-depth knowledge of world culture: from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Canaanite, Persian, Indian and Russian art, to the most avant-garde trends in contemporary art. Castel participated in various exhibitions in Israel and around the world, including the Venice Biennial and the San Paolo Biennial in Brazil in which he won an award. His murals and reliefs can be found in many places in Israel and around the world (El Al offices in New York, the Knesset building in Jerusalem, the President's House in Jerusalem, the Israel Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan, etc.).