Medium: Gouache on Paper

Signed: Lower Left

Date Created: unknown

Dimensions: 25 3/4 x 20" with Frame: 31 3/4 x 26 1/4"

Condition: Excellent

Provenance: Estate of Daniel Friedenberg

Biography of the Artist:

Efraim 'Fima' Roeytenberg, born December 22 1914 - died October 16 2005

One of the last of his generation of abstract painters, the Israeli-Parisian artist Fima, who died in Jerusalem aged 90, moved between places and cultures more than most. Born and brought up in Harbin, China, he had a multicultural background that enabled him to develop a personal idiom which sat naturally within the universal language of modernist art. "It is only when I travel on my canvas that I feel at home," he said.

Efraim Roeytenberg, commonly known by his nickname Fima, was the son of Russian-Jewish parents. His father, an engineer who worked on the construction of the Eastern China railway, had settled in the country 10 years earlier. Harbin, with a Russian community that grew considerably after the 1917 revolution, was already a Russian-Chinese city: Fima went to a Russian school, where he also learned Chinese.

In 1933, after attending secondary school, he moved to Shanghai, a thriving cosmopolitan city with its own Russian colony and a growing Jewish community. After a short attempt at studying architecture, Fima turned to art and began studying with a Russian painter and a Viennes portraitist. He soon joined the Russian Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai, and later taught drawing there. He also studied Chinese calligraphy and became interested in Chinese philosophy. It was this part of his education that would prove significant for his career.

He made a modest beginning with a 1947 solo exhibition at the Jewish Recreation Club in Shanghai and a couple of group shows, but his career in China was cut short when, in February 1949, shortly before Shanghai came under communist control, Fima left for the young state of Israel.

His encounter with the new country was a difficult experience. To earn a living, he was forced to work as a construction inspector in the mass building projects of the post-independence years, and had little time for painting. The brilliant Mediterranean light made his attempts to paint even harder, and the local artistic community did not particularly welcome his figurative, anecdotal drawings along Chinese lines. But it was in Israel during the 1950s that Fima made contacts with contemporary art and gradually developed a new language of painting.

In trips to Italy (1954) and to Paris (1956) he encountered the European old masters and modern art. By the end of the decade he was gaining a reputation, and critical, as well as some commercial, success. His 1960 exhibition at the Rina gallery in Jerusalem, owned by the American dealer Bertha Urdang (known for supporting contemporary and avant-garde art), sold out, and led to his discovery by the French critic, Jacques Lassaigne.

This meeting resulted in Fima's move to Paris in 1961, where he later joined the Jacques Massol gallery. He was to remain in Paris for the next 41 years (returning permanently to Israel in 2002), exhibiting in the French capital and abroad. But he kept his Jerusalem studio, and his close contacts with the Israeli art scene, by exhibiting regularly at the Bineth gallery and by taking part in numerous export group shows of Israeli art, such as the 1964 Art Israel shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art.