View artwork »

View exhibitions »

View videos and articles »

Visit our Information Center to browse the artist file »

Leon Engelsberg, an Israeli born in Poland, 1919-1998

Leon Engelsberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1919. Apart from his two older brothers, Engelsberg had a twin sister. As a child, the family lived in the town of Otwock and Warsaw. He attended a general gymnasium and played the violin. In 1939, after the German occupation, he fled to Lvov and from there was deported to the Soviet Union. In 1943 he joined the Polish army that operated under the Soviet army. He served as a strategic gunner and sketched. During his service, he was injured and received a medal of honor. After the war he studied art in Warsaw and was a member of the city's art union. In 1957 he immigrated to Israel and was sent to a transit camp in Kiryat Binyamin, near Haifa. A few months later he moved to an abandoned house in the Abu Tor neighborhood of Jerusalem. His artistic estate was donated by the artist to the State of Israel.

Engelsberg's early works, from the time of his stay in Poland, already crystallized his artistic style, which combined academic painting with trends towards abstraction and expressionism. Alongside landscape descriptions and self-portraits, he also created works on the subject of the Holocaust, which he referred to as "Jewish martyrology paintings."

Education

1946-1950 Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Poland

Awards And Prizes

1991 Shoshana Ish Shalom Prize, The Artists House, Jerusalem
1991 Sussman Prize for Artists Depicting the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem