Ryback, Issachar Ber

Ryback, Issachar Ber or Riback [Рибак, Іссахар-Бер], b 2 February 1897 in Yelysavethrad, Kherson gubernia, d 22 December 1935 in Paris. Artist and art theorist. Born into a poor Jewish family, Ryback began attending evening drawing classes for workers at a local factory at the age of 10. He received a traditional Jewish education in a religious Jewish school (cheder) and later enrolled in a newly established two-year vocational school in Yelysavethrad aimed at training skilled laborers. To support himself after he left home, Ryback joined a team of artisan painters and helped decorate village churches in the Kherson region. He moved to Kyiv in 1911 and studied at the Kyiv Art School under Ivan Seleznov and later in the art studio of Oleksander Murashko. His art education in Kyiv and his artistic style and sensibilities were particularly strongly influenced by his contacts with Alexandra Ekster and Oleksander Bohomazov. Their cubo-futurist art inspired much of Ryback’s own painting, especially of the early period. At the same time, he devoted much time and attention to the study of Jewish traditions in Ukraine. He joined the S. An-sky Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society and, with the society’s support, traveled with El Lissitzky across southern Ukraine, Podilia, and Volhynia, studying and documenting Jewish settlements (shtetls), wooden synagogues, and Jewish folk art.

Ryback was one of the cofounders of the Kultur Lige in Kyiv in 1918. Motivated by his interest in developing a Jewish national style in art, he, along with El Lissitzky, Joseph Chaikov, Mark Epstein, and others, established the Kultur Lige’s art section. Within the Lige’s broader program he illustrated several books, including children’s fairy tales and poetry collections of such Yiddish poets as Leib Kvitko. In addition to his contributions as an artist, he co-authored, with Boris Aronson, an influential article on the development of Jewish art, entitled ‘Di vegn fun der yidisher molerey’ (Paths of Jewish Painting).

In late 1919 Ryback moved to Moscow, where he taught at the Free Art Studio and worked as a stage designer for the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In April 1921, he fled to Kaunas in Lithuania, and relocated to Germany six months later, settling in Berlin. There he became part of the German avant-garde artists’ group Secession. His first solo exhibition, held in Berlin in 1924, featured his early graphic art album Judische Typen aus der Ukraina (Jewish Types from Ukraine). That same year, he published Shtetl, mayn khoreve heym, a gedenkenish (Shtetl, My Destroyed Home, a Memory), a collection of lithographs of his home town that had been partly destroyed by anti-Jewish pogroms.

Ryback briefly returned to the Soviet Union in 1925 and stayed for a year in Moscow, but in 1926 he moved permanently to Paris. There he exhibited a series of graphic compositions ‘Af di Yidishe felder fun Ukraine’ (On the Jewish Fields of Ukraine) and fairly quickly gained recognition in the international art scene, especially among the multiethnic artists of the School of Paris. In his artistic style he moved away from the cubist and cubo-futurist influences that characterized his earlier painting and graphic art toward a more realistic and lyrical expression; he also expanded his creative work to sculpture and returned again to designing theatrical scenery. Illustrating Yiddish children’s books remained an important part of his artistic work.

In 1932, Ryback published his final album of graphic art works, Les ombres du passé / Shotns fun amol (Shadows of the Past). In 1934 he created a series of terracotta painted statuettes, including Hasidic Dance, Simchat Torah, and Folk Dance, for the International Dance exhibition in Paris. These statuettes were later reproduced in porcelain at the Sèvres Porcelain Manufacture and became part of the permanent collection at the Musée de Sèvres. In 1935 Ryback attended an opening of his exhibition in Cambridge, England, but soon after that he died of acute tuberculosis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zalmen, R. ‘Ryback Issakhar Ber,’ in Lexikon fun der Yiddisher Literatur, Presse un Filologie, band 4 (Vilnius 1929)
Kazovsky, H. The Artists of the Kultur-Lige / Khudozhniki Kul'tur-Ligi (Moscow 2003)
Stommels, S.-A, and A. Lemmens. ‘The Graphic Work of Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935): An Outstanding Example of Children’s Book Art,’ in The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917–1937, ed. J. Schulte, O. Tabachnikova, and P. Wagstaff (Leiden 2012)

Larysa Bilous

[This article was written in 2025.]