Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Final Strokes of the Brush

Crossposted from Haaretz

Image by Ruth Schloss

A Beethoven symphony plays in the background as light rain falls. Artist Ruth Schloss, wrapped in a blanket, reclines in a lounge chair. Now at the age of 90, she drifts in and out of sleep during the course of the day. She is living her life in the present continuous with few memories and no tasks left to accomplish.

“At the moment there is nothing I have to do,” she says quietly and with acceptance. For several years now she has not been painting at all: The German-born artist whose hands never rested over a period of 70 years was forced into retirement by poor health. Schloss’s hands — “my tools,” she calls them — gradually lost their control and strength. The artist fought the degeneration as well as she could and even invented new techniques for drawing and painting until she became too tired to press on. Thus, there will be no more new art by Ruth Schloss. Indeed, this is also why her current solo show at the Zaritsky Artists House in Tel Aviv has been called “First and Last Works.”

The small but impressive exhibition consists of about 30 drawings and paintings on canvas as well as one film, a documentary about Schloss’s life, made by Peter Dudzig in 2008. The show is curated by Irit Levin, an independent curator who since 2001 has been accompanying Schloss and her family, helping with exhibitions and connections in the art world.

Read more at Haaretz.com

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.