Wolf Kibel

A visit to a physician after the exhibition revealed that he had advanced tuberculosis of the lungs and throat. His health soon collapsed and he was removed to hospital. 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.

Kibel had been feeling ill for some time before his exhibition in 1937. He refused to see a doctor, fearing that a negative diagnosis would derail the exhibition. The exhibition contained 45 works, including a tempera portrait of his wife, bought by the South African National Gallery. Melvin Simmers commented on his coloured monotypes in the Cape Times of 24 June 1937:

Kibel was the first to exhibit monotypes in South Africa in numbers, notably at the prestigious 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg. Working from metal plates, he brought the medium to expressive perfection and respectability as an artform.

His 1935 exhibition at Ashbey's Gallery, opened by Lipshitz, was again met with public abuse, but favourable review by Melvin Simmers of the Cape Times, under the heading Virile Exhibition by Wolf Kibel. 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.

Kibel took up the invitation to visit Hugo Naudé and his wife, stayed on, and learned the technique of etching in his studio. The kindness of the Naudés persuaded Wolf and Freda that Paris would be too difficult an adjustment and Freda and Joseph arrived in Cape Town on 19 January 1933. 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. The influence of Matisse seemed to have disappeared in favour of a personally developed style.

The art galleries in Cape Town were of no interest to Kibel, and he found its citizens indifferent to painting. 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. His work was met with outrage by a public and a coterie of art critics, notably Bernard Lewis of Die Burger, who were unfamiliar with or hostile towards the avant-garde art movements of the time. 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.

Kibel arrived in Cape Town on 27 June 1929, the day their son Joseph was born in Krakow. 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. Kibel soon took lodgings at the house of Roza van Gelden, principal of a primary school, who also offered him a studio at the school in exchange for lessons.

After four years in Palestine, Kibel passed the citizenship examination in Hebrew and became a Palestinian citizen. He had been stateless since birth. Coincidentally, an affidavit arrived from his brother Sam, who had settled in Cape Town, South Africa. The affidavit gave him permission to live in the Union of South Africa. Kibel's brother did not know he had a wife, and Freda left for Krakow in December 1928 where she gave birth to their first child.

In 1925, Kibel left Vienna for Haifa, then to Jerusalem, contracting malaria along the way. 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. He was disappointed by the patriotic Bezalel school pictures the pupils were expected to paint, and decided to go to Tel Aviv.

After the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, nationalist Poles engaged in a wave of pogroms. This hostility, along with the prospect of conscription, persuaded Wolf to go to Paris in 1923. He crossed Czechoslovakia and arrived in Vienna several months later, having journeyed 524 km on foot. The end of the war was also the end of Austria-Hungary, and Vienna was an impoverished city full of refugees. Accommodation was in short supply and Kibel frequently resorted to sleeping in the Wiener Prater.

At the age of three he was sent to the local school to be educated in Jewish culture. In 1911, when Wolf was eight, his father died, leaving the family bereft of financial support. With the outbreak of the First World War, they decided to move to Warsaw. There Wolf was apprenticed to a bookbinder, but lost this position after an accident. The family moved back to Grodzisk Mazowiecki and Wolf was apprenticed to a maker of shoe uppers. He apparently disliked this enough to run away to the countryside for several days, after which he was allowed to pursue his drawing and painting freely.

Wolf Kibel (16 December 1903 – 29 June 1938) was a South African painter and printmaker. He was partly responsible for the introduction of Expressionism to South Africa. His paintings and monotypes have earned him recognition as a sincere and gifted artist.