"Jacques Gotko (1899, Odessa-1944) Russian- Indian women around a fire."
Oil on canvas signed at the bottom right and on the back.
Dimensions: 55 x 47 cm, with frame: 73 x 64 cm
This colorful and expressionist canvas presents a very Gauguinesque subject.
Jacques Gotko, artist name of Yankelli Gotkovski, is a French painter and chief decorator, born in Odessa (Ukraine), who died during deportation to Auschwitz Birkenau.
Originally from Belarus, Jacques Gotko's family took refuge in Paris in 1905. Gotko's father, a steelworker at Fiat, died prematurely in 1913, leaving his wife and children destitute. The young Gotko enters the Academy of Fine Arts, at the courses of Marcel Gromaire.
He has been exhibiting portraits and landscapes at the Salons des Indépendants since 1927.
The art collector Oscar Ghez, of Jewish origin from Tunisia, decided after the war to acquire works by Jewish painters from the Paris school who had died in deportation. He kept these paintings in his museum in the Petit Palais in Geneva and offered 137 of them to the University of Haifa, in 1978.
Museum: Hecht Museum - Haifa, Israel