Vorobeichic arrived in Palestine for the first time in 1932, as a photographer of the Paris-based Photoglobe agency. He visited Jerusalem and Safed, and presented Palestine as the biblical land.

In Palestine, the artist worked as a photographer and graphic artist for the Histadrut trade union, the main organiser of Jewish economic—and at times political—life. On its commission, he took hundreds of reportage photographs showing the construction of Tel Aviv and the port, as well as documenting the life of settlers in kibbutzim. He designed posters, information expositions and illustrated publications using his own photo-montages created in the style of the European avant-garde. In all his activities, he drew from the skills he had acquired in Dessau and in Paris, thus imparting a truly modern character to his artworks.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

Hakhshara, Hebrew for ‘preparation’, is a common name for the places where European Jewish youth prepared to emigrate to Palestine. The development of hakhsharot is connected to the intensity of Jewish colonisation of Palestine in the interwar period and to the growth of the Eretz Israel emigratory and kibbutz movement. In 1937 Vorobeichic was commissioned by He-halutz [Hebrew for ‘settler’, ‘pioneer’], the largest Zionist youth organisation, to produce a photographic documentation of the hakhsharot. He visited almost twenty of them and took over 500 pictures, thus creating the largest and the only professional material documenting their operations.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

Even though from 1927 Moshe Vorobeichic resided mainly in the Weimar Republic, France and Palestine, he visited Poland regularly. The substantial amount of time spent here he devoted to taking photographs. He was interested in the Polish countryside, its folklore and residents—Poles and Jews, and the relations between them. Vorobeichic repeatedly photographed marketplaces in towns and cities such as Kazimierz on the Vistula, Kraków, Warsaw, Lublin. The scenes and portraits he captured with his 135mm format Leica constitute the best examples of 1930s documentary and social photography.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

Moshe Vorobeichic was eleven when his family moved to Vilnius from the countryside. Here he grew up and launched his artistic activity. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania which fell to the Russian Empire for the years 1795-1915 and to the Republic of Poland in the years 1922-1939, was dubbed ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

Vorobeichic’s design of photographic books titled Paris (1931) and Ci-Contre (1931) are amongst the biggest achievements of avant-garde photography. For Vorobeichic, photography was a source of livelihood—he joined the Photoglobe agency and published in both the French and Polish illustrated press. This section of the exhibition demonstrates how very modern and rich Vorobeichic’s photographic language is.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

In October 1927, 23-year-old Moshe Vorobeichic began his studies in Dessau, Germany, at the most progressive school of architecture and design in Europe known as the Bauhaus. By then, he had completed two years at the Fine Arts Department of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, but it was to be in Dessau that he became acquainted with the most novel methods of designing architecture and the new trends in painting, sculpture and photography.

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.
Find out more: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/

An exhibition of a genius of avant-garde photography discovered after many years.

The exhibition devoted to the life and work of Moshe Vorobeichic - a photographer, graphic artist and painter who belonged to the forefront of the 1920s European avant-garde - has arrived in Warsaw straight from Centre Pompidou in Paris. A graduate of the Bauhaus School, Vorobeichic was active in Paris where he adopted the pseudonym Moi Ver. He returned to his native Vilnius and Poland many times. During these visits, he photographed the Jewish world which would soon cease to exist.

In the Moi Ver exhibition, we present a total of 300 photographs, posters, publications, design projects of books, paintings and documents. Thanks to years of research in the artist’s archive, Polish audience will have an opportunity to admire for the first time the rich and versatile oeuvre of Moshe Vorobeichic who is considered one of the most distinguished avant-garde photographers in France.

Find out more about the exhibition: https://muzeumwarszawy.pl/en/wystawa/moi-ver/