
Poetry of Canaan, I
1963 · Mixed mediums on canvas
64 x 51 3/8" (162.4 x 130.4 cm)
Museum of Modern Art

Moshe Elazar Castel was an Israeli painter and muralist whose work synthesized abstraction with Hebrew calligraphy and Jewish mystical symbolism. Active from the 1930s onward, he developed a distinctive visual language that merged modernist geometric forms with religious and textual imagery, treating letterforms and numeric sequences as both linguistic and abstract compositional elements. His large-scale murals and paintings engaged directly with questions of Jewish identity and spiritual renewal in the postwar period.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago