Collection: Moreh Mordecai
Biography
Mordecai Moreh, born November 15, 1937 in Baghdad, is a Franco-Israeli engraver and painter of Iraqi origin. Mordecai Moreh was born into a wealthy Jewish family. After an adolescence in Iraq interrupted by the farhoud during the Second World War, he emigrated to Israel at the age of 14. He studied at the Bezalel School of Fine Arts and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before settling permanently in Paris in 1962.
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A drypoint engraver, his favorite theme is a bestiary of imaginary animals, most often depicted wounded, crucified, to denounce the cruelty and injustice of Man. He also uses mixed techniques and paints in tempera with several layers of oil paint, in the manner of the Old Masters. His life and work are also marked by an incessant spiritual search. Childhood
Son of Abraham and Signora Moreh, Mordecai Moreh was born in Baghdad on November 15, 1937, the youngest of four boys and two girls. His father was a chief accountant in an import-export company and his family was a comfortable family of the Jewish middle class of Baghdad, with a lifestyle more Western than Eastern, like many of them. Religion was very present and strict in the home, and, at that time, the plastic arts were not very developed in Iraq.
From the age of four, Mordecai was constantly drawing. He immersed himself in stories from the Bible and the Midrash as well as the Fables of La Fontaine, which his mother told him at bedtime or while she was cooking; this is how he developed a growing interest in stories and collections of tales, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and later The Thousand and One Nights. He later became interested in Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, learned Arabic, Hebrew and English and read widely.
World War II breaks out and his family is confined to their home for fear of the farhoud (pogrom). A deep rift develops between Jews and Arabs in Baghdad, and Moreh no longer wants to stay in the country: he knows that he will leave for Israel, which he considers paradise, which provokes the envy of his classmates.
