Jane (Yana) Schacherl-Hillman (b. 1913), a Jerusalem-based artist was known mainly for her sculptural work. She was born in Vienna, where she attended the Vienna Academy of Arts and Crafts and subsequently studied with Émile-Antoine Bourdelle in Paris, whose influence she blended with that of the German sculptor, Georg Kolbe. In the 1930s she exhibited her work in Paris and Venice, and in 1936, immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem, where she joined the Israeli Painters and Sculptors Association and participated in its exhibitions, presenting mainly somewhat archaic sculptures.
Schacherl-Hillman won various awards for her sculptures and had numerous solo exhibitions of sculptures and paintings in Israel and abroad. Since 1975 she began engaging exclusively in painting, focusing on landscapes of the Judean Mountains and the desert: the Sinai Desert and the Judean Desert.
The open panorama of the Judean mountains was a subject she held dear, and she depicted them in the spirit of paintings by German and Austrian Jews who immigrated to Palestine. Schacherl-Hillman’s work in the Levin Collection, owned by the financial strategist of GTI, Ofer Levin, represents the early stage of her paintings and adds to numerous works in the collection depicting Jerusalem and its surroundings.
A full version of the commentary was originally written by Gideon Ofrat and published in 2017 in Beyond the Horizon by Levin Press.
