The family prized artistry; his father not only sang professionally, but carved miniatures, composed cantorial music, wrote verse and did bookbinding.

Pick-Morino found Kibel a patron, a rich banker, and allowed him to draw and paint his models, some of whom were society ladies, wearing masks.

In Jerusalem he went straight to hospital, and was discharged after two days, still very ill. Peripatetic and homeless, his only possession was a letter of introduction to the director of the Bezalel Art School, Boris Shatz, from Pick-Morino.

His only luck came when he visited a cousin, who worked as an immigration officer, who took him to a private doctor for a course of Salvarsan injections, which cured the malaria.

When Kibel insisted on not imposing on their kindness and made to leave, Popek pressed upon him his saving book, with enough money for him to find a room in the city.

[2] It was in Tel Aviv that Wolf would meet his future wife Freda, and by her accounts they were an active part of a group of outspoken, highly critical and ambitious young people who preferred painting, literature, music, drama, even sport over politics.

[2] Kibel's chief media in Tel Aviv were watercolour and black and white drawing, requiring extreme control, since it dries quickly and mistakes are difficult to correct.

He lived with his brother, who was a cantor in the synagogue in the Company's Gardens, but soon found that they did not see eye-to-eye on his continued pursuit of his art career, and felt regret at having moved to South Africa.

He decided to hold an exhibition at Martin Melck House in December 1931, with the intention of raising money to join his wife and son in Tel Aviv.

Notable exceptions were the art teacher Frank Barrington Craig, who praised his show, and artist Hugo Naudé, who was impressed enough to invite Kibel to his house in Worcester.

Freda Kibel records that he was doing much work from life and using a wide variety of media: pastel, oil, watercolour, tempera, chalk, pen, etching and others.

[1][2] His repeatedly failed exhibitions, the birth of a second child, called Aaron, and the general hostility towards his art, eventually led to tension between the artists and their eviction in 1937.

[2] I want to achieve a very high degree of complexity and order without any sacrifice of the feeling of spontaneity, and to do so through the fullest use of the varied means available, through shape and colour and tone value and paint quality, something like an orchestral effect in paint, in which the various distinct instruments blend together into a richly woven whole.Wolf Kibel is frequently referred to as an expressionist artist, but his expressionism has none of the exuberance of Irma Stern or pastoral qualities of Maggie Laubser.

[6][7] Kibel was a strict formalist and he refused to provide explanations, engage in sales talk or even sign and date his works.

Yet he was keenly sensitive to human values and this led him to avoid the picturesque, such as the impoverished Malay Quarter in Cape Town, which was, and still is, mined endlessly for saleable pictures.

[2] The exhibition contained 45 works, including a tempera portrait of his wife, bought by the South African National Gallery.

He received visits from many friends, notably several times a week from artists Cecil Higgs and Maggie Laubser, but succumbed to the disease after ten months, on Wednesday, 29 June 1938.