Restructuring and rediscovering a woman's oeuvre: Chana Orloff, sculptor in the School of Paris, 1910 to 1940.

Chana Orloff, a Russian Jew born in 1888, emigrated with her family to Palestine in 1905 in response to political oppression. There she developed her talents and expanded her ambitions and in 1910 with the aid of her brother, left for Paris to study art and discover herself as a sculptor. In the vanguard of artists now called "L'Ecole de Paris," she created a highly original and personal body of work in which she projected her sense of herself as a woman.Orloff won the accolades of patrons, critics, and the French nation in the decades before the Second World War. In the intervening years her work has been largely unknown and unappreciated despite the fact that many male sculptors of the same era have now been rediscovered.Orloff's brief experience as a sketcher in the couture firm of Paquin is explored for the confluence of fashion and art. Her wood-block prints in the magazine SIC and that avant-garde magazine's early promotion of her sculpture is discussed. The antique art as seen in the Louvre, the gothic sculpture of Chartre Cathedral, the ritual art of Africa, as well as the work of contemporaries especially Constantin Brancusi, Elie Nadelman, and Amedio Modigliani in the early decades of the century, are all considered for their relationship to Orloff's development as a sculptor.Examples from Orloff's large body of works in the areas of animals, portraits, and personal subjects are discussed; careful consideration yielding insights into her personal concerns. The issue of her being called a Jewish artist is explored. Her sculptures are compared to the work of well-known male sculptors who ostensibly deal with the same themes. Orloff's work after World War II and her relationship to Israel until her death in 1968 is briefly discussed.A meaningful examination of Orloff's oeuvre allows a contemporary understanding of the productivity of this Jewish French woman sculptor and enhances our understanding of the work of women. A reconstruction of her work provides a new appreciation of the contribution and importance of the artist Chana Orloff.Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of New York, 1998.School code: 0046