Yosif Zisman was born in 1914 in Kiev, in a Jewish family. His parents perished in a pogrom when he was five years old. Yosif and his elder sister grew up in an orphanage. From childhood, he had an affinity for the artistic world. The teachers at the Jewish orphanage in Kiev where he was brought up introduced him to the world's best paintings and literary works, and they often arranged meetings with poets, writers, and artists. Yosif Zisman made his first steps in the world of art at a very early age. In 1930, he finished the Jewish Art and Industrial School in Kiev. In 1931, having moved to Moscow, he began to work as a designer at the “Diaphoto” factory.
Having become fascinated with the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan, Yosif left Moscow for the Russian Far East. Zisman's painting A Meeting in Birobidzhan depicts a "train-caravan" – a symbol of the arrival of Jews in the "land of dreams." In 1933-1934, Yosif taught drawing at a school in Birobidzhan, and his first solo exhibition was held there in 1934. In the early 1930s, many other Jewish artists from Moscow (Mendl Gorshman, Lev Zevin, Mikhail Shveitser, Boris Rozenblit, etc.), having been fired up with the same ideals, traveled to Birobidzhan in search of new subject matter. The works of thirteen Jewish artists from this group – landscape sketches, depictions of industry, and scenes from the life of the settlers – were exhibited in Moscow in February 1936. The exhibition was titled The Jewish Autonomous Region and Jewish National Districts in Painting and Graphics. The Moscow-based Yiddish newspaper Der Emes covered the exhibition, and Zisman would keep a copy of the relevant issue of the newspaper for the rest of his life, treasuring it as a relic.
In 1934, Yosif returned to Moscow and enrolled in the Institute of Advanced Training for Artists. In 1937, he was drafted into the Red Army, and remained a military man until 1953. He took part in the Soviet-German War from its very beginning in June 1941, commanding a camouflage platoon of an engineering company. In 1941, he was seriously wounded. After being discharged from hospital, he returned to active duty. In 1943-1945, he served in the Siberian Military District in Novosibirsk, as head of the camouflage service of a reserve aviation battalion, and as the commander of the local air garrison. In Novosibirsk, he met his future wife.
After the end of the war, the family moved to Leningrad. Zisman fell in love with this city, depicting it in many of his landscape paintings. In 1947, he was admitted into the Union of Artists of the USSR. He went on to take part in major exhibitions. Joseph Zisman's first serious solo exhibition was held in Leningrad in 1962, at the Blue Living Room gallery of the Union of Artists. Nevertheless, for many years he struggled to win the recognition of his conservative colleagues from the Leningrad Union of Artists, who found his work too avant-garde for their tastes.
The artist Anatoly Zaslavsky, a close friend of Zisman's and a major painter in his own right, wrote:
“Thanks to his deep and abiding comprehension of the laws of constructing a pictorial image, Yosif acquired a powerful ethical and intellectual core, around which all the real space surrounding him was built…”
Anatoly Zaslavsky. The Artist Must Have a Long Life// Folio Verso.
From 1969, reproductions of Zisman’s works were published in the Yiddish-language journal Sovetish Heymland (“Soviet Homeland”).
Only in 1984 was a large solo exhibition of Zisman’s art held in Leningrad. Ten years later, in 1994, an exhibition of the artist's works took place at the Central Exhibition Hall of the city (which was now named St. Petersburg). His last major personal exhibitions were held at the "Tsarskoye Selo Collection" Museum in the town of Pushkin (1997) and at the Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg (2002).
Yosif Zisman died in St. Petersburg in 2004, at the age of ninety-one, and was buried at the city's Jewish Cemetery. His works are currently held at museums and private collections in Russia, the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Israel, and other countries.
