Abel Pann

Abel Pann (1883–1963) was a Russian-born Jewish painter and print-maker who settled in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in the early twentieth century[1] and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art under Boris Schatz.

Abba Pfeffermann (later Abel Pann), born in Latvia[2] or in Kreslawka, Vitebsk, Belarus,[3] was a European Jewish artist who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine and settled in Jerusalem.

[2] Still in 1903, he moved to Paris, where he rented rooms in La Ruche, a Parisian building (which still exists) where Modigliani, Chagall, Chaïm Soutine and other Jewish artists also lived.

[2] In 1912, Boris Schatz, founder and director of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design visited Pann in Paris and invited him to come work in Jerusalem.

[2] According to Haaretz art critic Smadar Sheffi, a work form this period with the simple title "Jerusalem" shows a cluster of buildings at sunset "with a sky in blazing orange."

[2] According to The New York Times, the drawings were published in Paris during the war, but the government intervened to block their distribution on the grounds that they "reflected damagingly upon an ally" (Russia).

[5] Upon his return to Jerusalem in 1920, Pann took up a teaching position at the Bezalel Academy and wrote that he was about to embark on his life-work, the painting and drawing of scenes from the Hebrew Bible.

[3] Other pastels capture the elderly matriarch Sarah looking "absolutely alive" and the care-worn facts of Jerusalem's Yemenite Jewish laborers, posed as Biblical patriarchs.

This familiar theme had for hundreds of years and in the hands of innumerable artists conventionally depicted a mature beauty seducing an innocent youth, Joseph.

According to art critic Meir Ronnen, Pann's interpretation, a late period pastel dating from the 1950s, depicts Potiphar's wife as a spoilt child, an extremely young and very bored girl who is "possibly just one of the lesser playthings of a gubernatorial harem."