Yehezkel Streichman

Yehezkel Streichman was born in 1906 in Kovno (Kaunas), then part of the Russian Empire and now Lithuania. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1924 and began his art training that year at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, studying there through roughly 1926. He went on to study architecture in Paris in 1927 and then spent several years at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, from 1928 to 1931, before returning to Palestine.

In the postwar period Streichman became a central figure in the New Horizons (Ofakim Hadashim) group, the collective most closely associated with the shift toward abstraction in Israeli painting. He represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and again in 1966, and his work was included in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1955. He taught at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv, first in 1944 and later from 1954 to 1979, shaping successive generations of Israeli painters. Over his career he received the Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture four times (1941, 1944, 1954, and 1969), the Ramat Gan Prize (1956), the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art from the Israel Museum (1974), the Histadrut Prize (1986), and the Israel Prize for painting (1990). He died in Tel Aviv on January 12, 1993, at the age of 86.

Gallery biographies, museum exhibition histories, and auction catalogues consistently describe Streichman as a pioneer of Israeli modernist painting and one of the leading figures behind the New Horizons group's turn toward abstraction after 1948. His work moved over the decades from figurative and still-life subjects toward the freer, color-driven handling that later dealers have labeled lyrical abstraction. The Israel Museum mounted two dedicated monographic exhibitions of his paintings, in 1974 and 1987, and later retrospectives, including a 2012 show at the Ashdod Art Museum, have continued to treat him as a central figure in the national art historical narrative. No exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be verified for this profile.

Streichman's market runs mainly through Israeli auction houses, including Tiroche, Montefiore, and Bidspirit/Hammersite, where recent estimates for individual paintings and watercolors have ranged roughly from USD 800 to USD 20,000. A Ynetnews report on a New York sale of Israeli art, exact publication date not confirmed, noted that a Streichman work sold for USD 110,000 alongside pieces by Marc Chagall and Reuven Rubin, but the report did not name the work, the auction house, or the exact sale date, so this figure cannot be treated as a confirmed all-time record. No later result exceeding that figure has been identified. Collectors should expect a market defined by modest, Israel-centered turnover rather than a deep, internationally benchmarked price history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Streichman, and Hezi Cohen Gallery in Tel Aviv actively handles his work and is a useful point of contact for provenance questions, though no source confirms formal estate representation. His secondary market is thin and concentrated in Israel, with estimates that vary widely by work and venue, and the one widely cited six-figure sale lacks the lot detail needed to treat it as a settled benchmark. Given his institutional standing, well-documented museum exhibition history, and awards record, the strongest case for Streichman rests on his historical importance to Israeli modernism rather than on a deep or internationally liquid auction record.