The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff.
Sculpting a Life is the first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff, and the first work to include stories from her unpublished memoir. Paula J. Birnbaum pulls from a series of interviews in 1957 by the late Israeli journalist, Riva Katznelson, which focused on the artist’s early life in Ukraine, her family’s move to Palestine and Orloff’s life from 1905–10, and her years in Paris through World War I. Orloff’s multiple migrations and forced exiles, combined with her gender and Jewish identities, had a cumulative effect. Although transnationalism evades easy definition, this book shows how this framing lends itself to new directions in the study of Orloff’s life and work. It also proposes a new model for investigating artists’ lives and works, especially women and gender-nonconforming artists, who may also identify as multinational or placeless. Women like Orloff have been overlooked by history and excluded from the canon of modernism within art history. Sculpting a Life brings Orloff to the forefront and shows her historical and artistic significance.
