Joseph Constant

Constant was born in Jaffa on 14 July 1892 to Russian Jewish parents. He spent his early years in Odessa. When still quite young, he took part alongside his father in the anti-Tsarist revolutionary activities of 1905. In 1914, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Odessa, and during the Communist Revolution of 1917 he was named an inspector of fine arts.

In 1919, his father and his brother were killed in an anti-Jewish pogrom. That same year, Constant and his wife decided to quit Russia. They travelled to Palestine aboard the ship Ruslan which carried a number of other Jewish artists. In Tel Aviv, they formed an artists' cooperative called HaTomer that included the painter Yitzhak Frenkel. He and Frenkel both taught art in the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium. A year later, the ailing Constant travelled to Egypt. He arrived in Paris in 1923 after further travels in Turkey and Romania. He and Isaac Frenkel both resisted the hegemony of the Bezalel art school, both believing in modern art and influenced by the art of the École de Paris.