Tailoring your moniker to suit the marketing lay of the land is not a novel notion. Consider, for example, Emmanuel Radnitzky’s decision to assume the far easier-on-the-tongue-and-ear “Man Ray,” as the iconic 20th-century Dada and Surreal artist was universally known. Moses Vorobeichic had a similar change of titular tack as a young Russian-born Jewish photographer trying to make his way in 1920s Paris, where the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and American writer Ernest Hemingway ruled the artistic and societal roost. And so Moses Vorobeichic segued into the neat professional alias, Moï Ver.
Whether the far snappier tag helped his cause is a moot point. As the Modernism in Transition exhibition clearly shows – it opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA) on July 23 under the curatorship of Dr. Rona Sela – Ver was a gifted pioneering artist. He certainly deserved to achieve success and general acclaim, regardless of his name.
In fact, 20 years after making aliyah, Ver moved to Israel here in 1934, Hebraized his name to Moshe Raviv and, never one to stand still for too long, abandoned photography in favor of painting. There are a handful of his canvases on display at the museum, naturally, at the tail end of the largely chronologically arranged show.
Word of Ver’s envelope-pushing collection will, hopefully, spread even further in the wake of the TAMA exhibition and alert younger generations to his work. This is the first extensive rollout of his oeuvre, which evolved over the course of seven decades, both here and abroad.
Ver was born in a village not far from Vilnius in 1904. His family relocated to the city when he was a small child. Like many Jewish Polish and Russian families of the day, he came from an Orthodox background. However, his burgeoning interest in art drew him to the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, where Walter Gropius was developing a brave new take on modern design.
Several of the school’s architecture students made it over here in the 1930s, escaping the Nazi’s clutches, and set about planning and constructing in Tel Aviv what is now the largest extant collection of Bauhaus edifices anywhere in the world, recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage treasure.
Testing the creative waters was natural to Ver and he moved to the global epicenter of art, Paris, in 1929, after two years in Dessau where he studied art under some of the greatest artists of the day, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In Paris, Ver dived headlong into photography, initially gaining some formal education in the field at Ecole Photo One.
We get some idea of where Ver was at, around that time, from a quite enchanting self-portrait from 1928. The print of the doe-eyed 24-year-old budding artist, with its intriguing angle, composition, and lighting, is anything but standard. The youngster, on a Parisian furlough from his Bauhaus studies at the time, was evidently on the prowl for new horizons of artistic expression.
Once settled into the French capital, Ver quickly established himself as a bona fide member of the artist community there with the publication of his Paris series, in 1930, which he compiled as a roving photographer patrolling the streets of the city capturing its people, buildings and aesthetics, and presenting the irresistible vibe of a modern city. That spawned his excellent Paris series with his singular treatment of images and negatives, and composition.
Ver was not only gifted but he was also fired up to make his mark. The ambitious young artist was quick to pick up on any opportunity to market his quality experimental wares to the wider public, including getting the Jewish Education and Culture Association (Histadrut) of his hometown of Vilnius to furnish him with a weighty letter of recommendation to the organizers of the 1929 Zionist Congress in Zurich.
“The Zionist Congresses were a highly significant forum for presenting Jewish art,” Sela explains. “It was the place for schmoozing and mingling, and getting yourself known by the people who mattered. You got amazing international exposure if you managed to exhibit there.” The letter of introduction from his former hometown Jewish leaders, coupled with his vim and drive, did the trick and Ver duly showcased his evolving oeuvre in Zurich. He was up and running. “He asked himself, how do I get access to such an audience? No one knows me,” Sela continues. The young man was unstoppable. “He starts to engage in photomontage and also photograms,” she adds. “That’s how he starts out.”
Around this time began documenting the Jewish community in Vilnius, and also later took deft pictures of Jews in Poland, including various hachsharah Zionist training programs. Naturally, after the Holocaust, the historical value of these works increased manifold. But, in artistic terms, Ver was always on the cusp of some new discovery. He was a modernist force to be reckoned with, and even his documentary work was infused with surprising angles, perspectives, lighting, and extreme close-ups.
He was also a wizz at typography, which he put to good use with his Students at Narach Yiddish-language album, shot in July 1931 during a trip to Lake Narach, in modern-day Belarus, together with a group of Jewish intellectuals.
The Tel Aviv Museum show is the first time in close to a century that the book has seen the light of day. Ver was a young photographer going places, looking to step fearlessly into the future, while keeping one foot firmly planted in his Jewish past.
The writing on the wall
By 1934, he had seen the Nazi writing on the wall and made aliyah. Like many of his counterparts, he partly made a living by creating images that suited the Zionist political narrative of the day. For one poster in the exhibition, Ver utilized his photo collage skills to produce a quite frankly crass propaganda-oriented image of a sturdy IDF soldier, confidently advancing with rifle firmly clasped, while IAF planes hover above. That is counterbalanced by an oxymoronic image of Jews meekly walking along a street, presumably to a train station headed for a concentration camp. The legend reads: “Behind us – slavery and degeneration. Ahead – sovereignty and independence. That is the battle!” That would not pass PC muster in this more sensitive day and age.
FOR THE next 20 years, Ver produced a large body of work commissioned by the Zionist powers-that-be. He documented kibbutzim and towns, the evolution of Tel Aviv, industry, and the archetypal proud sabra – the “new Jew.” He also produced graphic works, illustrations, and designs of Bauhaus-style furniture in wood and metal.
Ver’s photographic swan song was dedicated to the city of Safed, where he exhibited in 1954, featuring works he had created on a journalistic foray into Palestine in 1932.
He then swapped photography for painting, changed his name to Raviv, and became one of the founders of the Safed’s Artists’ Quarter. His paintings were largely abstract and he often incorporated motifs and texts from the kabbalistic book, Zohar.
Raviv was happy with his latter-day disciplinary shift, which he maintained until his death in 1995. He said the transition was prompted by a “desire to renew our ancient life.” His formative training in the Bauhaus style of design informed his painting, as he continued to straddle old and new, past and contemporary with consummate comfort and ease.
Moi Ver: Modernism in Transition closes Feb. 1, 2025. For more information: tamuseum.org.il/en/
