Wolf Kibel

Wolf Kibel
Self Portrait, oil on canvas laid down on board, 430 x 395 mm
Born	Wolf Kibel (1903-12-16)16 December 1903 Grodzisk Mazowiecki Mazowieckie, Poland
Died	29 June 1938(1938-06-29) (aged 34) Cape Town Western Cape, South Africa
Nationality	Polish, Palestinian, South African
Known for	Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Notable work	Portrait of Freda Kibel (SANG) Still-life with bird (Pretoria Art Museum) Cellist (Pretoria Art Museum)
Movement	Expressionism
Patron(s)	Appelbaum Hayim Nahman Bialik

Wolf Kibel (16 December 1903 – 29 June 1938) was a South African painter and printmaker. He was partly responsible for the introduction of Expressionism to South Africa. His paintings and monotypes have earned him recognition as a sincere and gifted artist.

Wolf Kibel was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a shtetl 32 km from Warsaw, in Russian Poland.

Kibel's father came from a family of singers and was employed by the community in the capacity of hazzan and shocket. He was relatively well paid and able to support a large family, of which Wolf was the third boy and fifth child of six. The family prized artistry; his father not only sang professionally, but carved miniatures, composed cantorial music, wrote verse and did bookbinding. Wolf participated in the choir his father trained and carved grotesques from his father's oil-stones.

At the age of three he was sent to the local school to be educated in Jewish culture. In 1911, when Wolf was eight, his father died, leaving the family bereft of financial support. With the outbreak of the First World War, they decided to move to Warsaw. There Wolf was apprenticed to a bookbinder, but lost this position after an accident. The family moved back to Grodzisk Mazowiecki and Wolf was apprenticed to a maker of shoe uppers. He apparently disliked this enough to run away to the countryside for several days, after which he was allowed to pursue his drawing and painting freely.

A friend of relatives in London, named Appelbaum, looked up the family when he visited Poland to paint a synagogue. It was the first time a professional artist saw Wolf's work. Appelbaum took him to Warsaw, where he met other artists, visited art galleries and read books and periodicals. He was impressed by the paintings of Jozef Israëls and admired the pictures of Jan Matejko.

After the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, nationalist Poles engaged in a wave of pogroms. This hostility, along with the prospect of conscription, persuaded Wolf to go to Paris in 1923. He crossed Czechoslovakia and arrived in Vienna several months later, having journeyed 524 km on foot. The end of the war was also the end of Austria-Hungary, and Vienna was an impoverished city full of refugees. Accommodation was in short supply and Kibel frequently resorted to sleeping in the Wiener Prater.