Lea Nikel, Abstract Painter and One of Israel's Top Artists
Hyfler/Rosner
Lea Nikel, Abstract Painter and One of Israel's Top Artists,
Dies at 86
By KEN JOHNSON NY Times
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http://www.artnet.com/artwork/168305/_Lea_Nikel_Untitled.html
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Lea Nikel, an abstract painter who was one of Israel's most
esteemed artists, died on Sept. 10 at her home in Moshav
Kidron, Israel. She was 86.
The cause was cancer, her nephew Yehuda Bock said.
Ms. Nikel devoted a career of more than 50 years to a form
of expressionistic abstraction sometimes called lyrical
abstraction. Painting with a brusque, generous touch and
favoring high-keyed colors, she created buoyant compositions
consisting of rough-edged blocks of color and scribbly,
calligraphic lines that together convey a sense of
imaginative excitement and urgent sensuousness.
Ms. Nikel was born Lea Nikelsberg in Zhitomir, Ukraine, in
1918, and emigrated with her parents to British Mandatory
Palestine in 1920. She began studying with the painter Chaim
Gliksberg in Tel Aviv in 1935. A decade later, she studied
with Yehezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky, who started
their own school because they thought Israeli art schools
were too conservative.
Ms. Nikel lived and worked in Paris from 1950 to 1961. She
had her first solo exhibition at Chemerinsky Art Gallery in
Tel Aviv and her first solo show in Paris at Galerie Colette
Allendy in 1957. In 1995, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
presented a career retrospective exhibition of her
paintings.
From 1961 to 1977, Ms. Nikel led a peripatetic life. She
lived on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village for a year in
the early 60's; in Rome for three years at the end of the
60's; and, from 1973 to 1977, at the Chelsea Hotel in New
York. After that she remained in Israel.
Ms. Nikel was included in numerous international group
exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1964. In 1995
she received the Israel Prize for painting and in 1997 was
made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister
of culture.
Ms. Nikel continued to paint until just a few days before
her death, and it is a measure of the continued vitality of
her late work that the Sommer Gallery in Tel Aviv, which
specializes in young and emerging artists, mounted an
exhibition of new works by her in 2002.
Ms. Nikel is survived by her husband, Sam Leiman; her
daughter, Ziva Hanan; three grandchildren; and six
great-grandchildren, all of Moshav Kidron; and a sister,
Sara Bock, of Rockaway Beach, Queens.