Zahara Schatz - Biography

Biography

Zahara Schatz (later Sandow) was born in Jerusalem in 1916. After studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des arts Décoratifs / National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, Schatz rose to prominence in Israel and overseas. She exhibited and won prestigious prizes in the U.S. and Europe, including at the Milan Triennale, where she won a special award, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was recognized for a 1951 lamp design. The lamp by Heifetz Manufacturing Company, U.S., features a metal conical shade that projects light upward onto a metal disk for deflected illumination. It is one of a number of examples of her work that followed her father's dualism: the pursuit of both fine art and crafts (or design). The base of another more craft-oriented lamp is a sculptural form of a winding snake-like brass tube and bent PMMA with imbedded metal minutiae.

She also participated in the Venice Biennale of 1959 and designed the gate, built at the Bezalel Academy, of the President's House, Jerusalem.

Schatz lived in Israel, New York, and Northern California where she was part of the Big Sur artists'/writers' colony that included San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano, author Henry Miller, and her brother Bezalel Schatz. She also lived in Berkeley, California, where she was close with Courtroom Sketch Artist Rosalie Ritz, her husband Erwin Ritz and their daughter, Publisher and Managing Editor of The Environmentalist, Janet Ritz.

Zahara and Bezalel rejected their father's predilection for Romantic Classicism and his dogged development of a Jewish Eretz Israel style in favor of a European-American modernism.

She worked as an adviser on industrial design at the Israeli Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Schatz died in Jerusalem in 1999.