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Emmanuel Mané-Katz (*1894 Kremenschuk/Ukraine †1962 Tel Aviv)
Winterlandscape with Hut
Emmanuel Mané-Katz (1894 Kremenschuk/Ukraine – 1962 Tel Aviv)
Winterlandscape with Hut
1959
Oil on canvas; H: 54, B: 65 cm
Signed lower right: Mané Katz.
LITERATURE: Robert S. Aries: Mané-Katz, The Complete Works, London 1970, vol.1, page 149, no.493
Emmanuel Mané-Katz (Mane Leyzerovich Kats) was born 1894 in the Ukraine into a deeply religious orthodox jewish family. His father was sacristan, „Shammash“, of the Synagoge and his son Emmanuel was supposed to become Rabbi. He first tried to study painting in his country but then he started his studies in Paris at the age of 19. He worked together with Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso and was a member of the „Jewish school of Paris“. With a broad brush and highly intense colours he painted landscapes and stilllives, observed people and painted jewish themes. Scenes from the „Schtetl“ of his east-european homeland are characteristic for his work. 1928 he travelled for the first time to Palestine. Three years later, at the world exposition in Paris, he was awarded a gold medal for his painting „Die Klagemauer“ (The wailing wall). In 1958, four years before his death, Mané-Katz donated his oeuvre and his large collection of jewish applied arts to the city of Haifa. Today his villa on Mount Carmel is the Mané-Katz Museum.
The painting „Winterlandschaft mit Hütte“ (winterlandscape with hut) is a typical motif of the artist. The hut, with its manifaceted black hues, stands dark in an intensively blue-black winterlandscape. Piled-up snow borders the path leading diagonally to the wooden hut in the center of the painting. A bare tree rises into the sky. Its moving branches are accentuated by a stiff rod standing next to the tree . Shreds of clouds in grey and brown are moving across the sky. Not a single human being lives in this wide landscape, lying peacefully under the shrouded sky, and at its horizon the light is bundled in a turquoise line. Everything breathes a coldness that freezes all life.
Mané-Katz is working with a quick and broad brush à la prima with the colour. Large coloured forms are structuring the painting. They are drawing their strength from the contrast of black and white which are supplemented by few hues in blue, grey and brown. The masterly composition is intensified by the pastose application, relief-like at several places, or, due to glazed and thin strokes, lets the canvas shine through.
The painting was created in the late 50´s when Mané-Katz undertook extensive trips through the United States of America, to Japan but also to Israel. However, his landscape „Winterlandschaft mit Hütte“ does not show a real landscape, but rather a landscape memorized from his homeland, the Ukraine. Comparable with his paintings like „Dorf in the Ukraine“ (village at the Ukraine) this motif of the simple village-life returns again and again in his oeuvre through all of his lifetime in different variations. Often one can find in his paintings this tree, standing barely next to a winterly wooden hut.
In the late 50´s and early 60´s, at the end of his life, his style becomes more monumental and largerscaled. His palette is getting darker but shines yet stronger due to the contrasts, the intense colours. He is already struck with an incurable illness, and succumbs to it in 1962 in Tel Aviv.
The expressive landscape paintings by Mané-Katz are full of poesy. They are setting a monument of warm hearted memories to his homeland. Their mystical intensification and wide solitude are looking for the divine in a sanctified nature. They evoke the memory of the distant homeland with sincerety, dignity and grandeur.
Paintings by Mané-Katz can be found in international collections, such as the Tate-Collection, London, the Museum of ModernArt, New York or the Centre Pompidou, Paris.