[2] Zaritsky, in an interview, talked about his being sent to the front as an officer during the First World War, but then, when he got there, being sent back because the peace agreement between Russia and Germany had been signed.

In 1918 he married Sarah (Sonia), a graduate of the Faculty of Dentistry in Kiev, and the daughter of Rabbi Israel Dov Zabin.

In Kalarash he stayed in his father-in-law's home, where he painted small-scale watercolors, of which only five have survived: three portraits of his wife and two rural landscapes.

In his landscapes of this period as well, Zaritsky divided the format into a sort of mosaic on small canvases that blur the illusion of perspective.

Examples of this can be seen in “Haifa, the Technion” (1924), and in the works called "Jerusalem: Nachalat Shiva" (1924), in which Zaritsky uses an expressionistic technique for dividing the format into separate spaces.

In the middle of the 1920s Zaritsky moved to Tel Aviv and continued to paint the series of landscapes that he had started in Jerusalem.

The works of this group show the influence of late French post-modernism (primarily of the "School of Paris"), which was popular among the artists of the Land of Israel.

[7] Uri Zvi Greenberg said, after a visit to the exhibition, that Zaritsky's work encompasses a different kind of painting which does not reflect "the literality of illustrative art toward the literary subject," the exotic imagery of the Land of Israel, "which drags Arabs from the shuk and their donkeys, by the ears, to the olive press."

Nonetheless, the studio did not last long, and Zaritsky was destined to earn his living in the future, for the most part, from the real estate he owned.

Yona Fischer states that in Zaritsky's rooftop paintings there is an attempt at combining and unifying the light and the dark in his landscapes.

The motive behind the founding of an alternative to the general art association came into being in 1948, with an invitation to mount an exhibition of Israeli artists at the Italian pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

On July 2, 1948, the dissidents published their manifesto in the newspaper Haaretz, stating that the association must emphasize achievements in Jewish painting and not sink into mediocrity.

On November 9, 1948, the new group mounted an exhibition of 18 member artists in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, under the name "New Horizons.

"[12] While artists such as Yohanan Simon, Moshe Castel, and Marcel Janco dealt with Zionist and Jewish symbolism, Zaritsky chose for the exhibition an abstract still life influenced by the cubist painter Georges Braque.

Within the framework of the preparations for the "Exhibition of the Decade," which opened on June 5, 1978, in Binyanei Hauma in Jerusalem, the government commissioned several works of monumental proportions from the members of "New Horizons."

Another notable work was Zaritsky's painting "Otsma" (Power), which had been commissioned by Avraham Yaski, a designer in the "Department of Economic Achievements."

This oil painting was based on a number of motifs that had been appearing throughout his works as a secondary thread since his "Yechiam" period.

[16] As a result of this decision a protest was raised by some of the journalists covering the exhibition, as well as by some of the public, against the intervention of the government in matters of art.

Another monumental work, carried out jointly by Zaritsky and Yitzhak Danziger, was commissioned by the architect Zeev Rechter for the front of the building.

[18] In 1968 Zaritsky was the first recipient of the Sandberg Prize of Israeli Art From the Israel Museum, the money for which was donated by an American philanthropist.

In the many interviews he granted in honor of winning the prize, Zaritsky emphasized his worldview with regard to the independence of the meaning of a painting.

The full portrait, carried out in shades of green, shows Zacks-Abramov in the corner of the canvas, with her hands on her knees.

In addition, in the 1980s Zaritsky created a number of paintings, some of them monumental in size, constructed along the lines of painters like Goya, Picasso, Chagall, etc.

"[19] In 1981 the Israeli Postal Authority issued a stamp depicting Zaritsky's “Jerusalem: The View from Jaffa Gate” (1927).

During the second decade of the twentieth century, Zaritsky stood out because of his modern approach, in contrast to the "Tower of David Period" paintings with their Land of Israel style.

Ran Shechori claimed that "lyrical abstraction" is an original Zaritsky formulation for the French "unformal" or the American "Action painting.

Zaritsky's watercolors, with all the admiration they received at the time, were viewed as significant milestones only retrospectively, after the painter had become the leader of "New Horizons."

Joseph Zaritsky's still lifes and portraits from the end of the 1920s and the 1930s, show the influence of French intimiste painting and sometimes of Matisse.

They also relate to the modernist, contemporary aspect of the modern architecture of Tel Aviv, and to painting for its own sake and not to a figurative theme.

Artists such as Pinchas Abramovich, Yehiel Krize, Arie Aroch, and Shimshon Holzman were all pupils of Zaritsky during those years.