Bois Gravés: An Artist’s Response to Loss

← v17n2, Fall 2018

Chana Orloff was a twentieth-century sculptor with a distinguished career, but our attention here centers on her response, through art, to personal loss as a young artist widowed by the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Orloff married the Warsaw-born poet Ary Justman in 1916. Both artists had published in the avant-garde SIC (a magazine founded by Pierre Albert-Birot) alongside of Birot, Guillaume Apollinaire, and other writers and artists. In 1916, Réflexions Poétiques appeared as an “ SIC edition” containing poems by Justman (which he himself translated from his native Polish into French) alongside drawings, woodcuts, and photographs of sculptures by Orloff.

The couple’s son was born in 1918, but Justman became ill in early 1919 and died of influenza. Willi Naomi Mendelsohn, in “Sculpting Identities: Chana Orloff and her Portraits,” writes:

Justman contracted Spanish flu after the armistice, like his friend Guillaume Apollinaire, while working with the Red Cross. He died only eight days after his son’s first birthday. After the tragedy of her husband’s death, Orloff’s many close friends came to her aid. She published a book of wood engravings with eleven portraits meant to honor friends who had helped her through that difficult period. Ten of these engraving were of women, and one was of her son.

While Blackbird found multiple mentions of Orloff’s Bois Gravés , trying to find the definitive lists of images was more elusive. Our discovery of the 1919 “Table des Planches” at an Australian auction site allowed us to search for digital captures of all eleven images—which, to the best of our knowledge, do not appear collected anywhere as a single collection online. (We found no ready access to a print copy of the work.)

Seven of the group of woodcuts were retrieved from chana-orloff.org, which is operated by Orloff’s grandchildren. The remaining were scouted from art auction sites. The image of Portrait de Mlle Ch. Dallies , unlabeled and at a low resolution, was found nearly by chance on a Pinterest site and completed the set.

Bois Gravés

Table des Planches Cet Album a été tiré a 100 Examplaires numérotés. Achevé d’imprimer sur les presses de Frazier-Soye le 31 Mai 1919 EXEMPLAIRE N° 59

Portrait de l'Auteur — Portrait de l’Auteur

art grief war

Chana Orloff

Chana Orloff (1888–1968) was a figurative sculptor whose career spanned more than five decades. Born in Ukraine, Orloff moved to Paris in her early twenties and studied sculpture at the Académie Vassilieff. In 1916 she married Polish poet Ary Justman, and together they published Réflexions Poétiques in 1917: a collection of his poems and her illustrations, woodcuts, and photographs of sculptures. Justman contracted influenza during the 1918 influenza pandemic and died in January 1919; in May 1919 Orloff published Bois Gravés , an album of portraits in response to Justman’s death. In addition, Orloff is known for her sculpted portraits of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, among others. Her works are featured in collections across Europe, the United States, and Israel.