A great tumult reigns at Villa Seurat this November morning. And not only because not far from this dead end in the south of Paris, the acacia trees on rue d’Alésia are shaken by storm Ciarán. A van waits in front of the studio of sculptor Chana Orloff (1888-1968). The works of this Franco-Ukrainian artist are going to the Zadkine Museum to be exhibited there. Ariane Tamir, 75, granddaughter of the artist, watches over the packaging of the sculptures and at the same time never stops calling her relatives in Israel. His family was hit hard by the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.
That day, Shoshan Haran, 67 years old, great-niece of Chana Orloff and founder of the NGO Fair Planet (which transmits agricultural know-how to African producers), received his family for Shabbat and the Jewish holiday of Sim’hat Torah in his house on Kibbutz Be’eri, 5 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. In the living room, “on a low piece of furniture, next to the window”, the sculpture was placed Inseparable, by Chana Orloff, which Shoshan Haran had inherited from his mother Rina Avron, Chana’s niece: two birds merged in full flight.
Today the house is gutted. “To date, we know that three people died,” says Ariane Tamir. Seven members of the family, all descendants of Chana Orloff, were hostages of Hamas. One of them remains, the other six were released on November 25, after seven weeks of captivity. On site, no more traces of the sculpture Inseparable. Ironically, in the exhibition dedicated to the artist “Chana Orloff. Sculpting the era”, the Zadkine Museum presents a copy.
Chana Orloff was a muse of the Paris school – the great names of arts and letters (Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, etc.), often foreign, who, in the first half of the 20th century, made Paris a center of creation artistic. She was also a modern woman, very independent, who built her life as she saw fit. A personality with multiple identities, a figure in the Montparnasse district but also, as his granddaughter says, a “Israeli at heart”.
“My grandmother was born free”
The sculptor was born under the name Hana Orloff on July 12, 1888 in Tsarekostiantynivka, today Kamianka, in present-day Ukraine, about a hundred kilometers from Mariupol, the city stormed by the Russian army at the beginning of the invasion, in 2022. She is the eighth in a large Jewish family of nine children. His parents are traders, and his mother also takes care of funeral rites in the village. As a young girl, she accompanied her grandmother Léa, a midwife, during childbirth. Long before launching into sculpture, “Hana was confronted very early with the reality of the human body, from birth to death,” observes Ariane Tamir.
You have 85% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.