Chaim Kiewe was born in the villageDlottowen in 1912. His parents Luis Kiewe and Johanna Toller, the only Jewish family in the village, owned an inn and a horse ranch. As a teenager he moved to Berlin, where he graduated high school and joined the Zionist youth movement HaHalutz. In 1934 he immigrated to Israel and joined Kibbutz Na’an. He painted as an autodidact in his free time. His first works are portraits of Kibbutz members, and Kibbutz landscapes. In the 1940s he was a member of the "Hagana" organisation and in the year 1947 he was arrested in wake of "Operation Agatha". He was sent to Rafa Prison, where he sketched the life of the prisoners. In 1948, he was a company commander in the Givati Brigade, during the Israeli War of Independence. In the late 1940s he designed sets and costumes for plays, staged by the Na’an studio. In 1950 he had his first one-man exhibition in the Katz Gallery in Tel Aviv, and in 1951 he made his first trip to Paris, there he worked in the "Grande Chaumiere" academy and exhibited at "La Galerie" on Rue de Seine. After a couple of months he came back to Israel and in 1953 he grounded with J. Zaritzky and A. Steimazky the painting seminar of the kibbutz movement. In the next years he ran the seminar by himself. Between 1954 and 1959 he was a member of the "Ofakim Hadashim" group and participated in exhibitions of the group. Between 1959-69 he lived alternately in Paris and in Bat Yam. Part of that time, he was also the Director of the Bat Yam Municipal Museum. In those years he presented his works in one-man and group exhibitions in: Antwerp, Paris, Stuttgart, Strasbourg,Brussels,New York,Bremen,Luxembourg and Düsseldorf. In 1968-9 he took part in the "Salon des Réalités Nouvelles" and in the International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-mer. Until 1970 he participated continually in the exhibitions of "Ofakim Hadashim" in Israel. In 1969 settled Kiewe in Bat Yam and became a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, in the Avni Institute of Art, and in the Bat Yam Institute of Art. In 1974 he was honored with a retrospective exhibition in the Tel Aviv Museum, and in 1982 had a one-man exhibition in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Chaim Kiewe died in 1983 in Bat Yam.
Prizes
First prize in the "Salon d’Art Moderne" in Paris.
First prize for an Israeli artist in school of Paris Exhibition in the Charpentier Gallery in Paris.
First prize for an Israeli artist in the international Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-mer.
