The Artist:
Shimshon Holzman (1907-1986) (variant name Shimson Holzman) was an Israeli landscape and figurative painter, born in 1907 in Sambir, Galicia. He immigrated to Israel from Vienna, Austria in 1922, settled in Tel-Aviv, and began working as a house painter with his father.
In 1926, Holzman began private studies under Yitzhak Frenkel at the studio of painting arts of the Histadrut School where he also worked with Mordechai Levanon, Ziona Tajar, Avigdor Stematsky, Yehezkel Streichman, Moshe Castel, and Arie Aroch.
In 1929, he made his first of several influential visits to Paris. There, he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and exhibited frequently. Israeli art scholar Gideon Ofrat writes of Holzman's time in France: he "brought from Paris impeccably French interiors and landscapes in expressionistic oils, but replaced them with light hearted aquarelles in the manner of Raoul Dufy and Henri Matisse."
Holzman was a founding member of the Artists' Quarter in Safed, represented Israel at the 1959 Venice Biennale, and participated in a group exhibition of Israeli artists at the opening of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1932. In 1937, he was the first recipient of the Dizengoff Prize, Israel's highest honour for contributions to the Arts. Holzman won the Haifa Municipality Prize in 1948 and was awarded the Dizengoff Prize a second time in 1959.
He died in Tel-Aviv in 1986.
