Rubin Zelicovici (later Reuven Rubin) was born in Galati to a poor Romanian Jewish Hasidic family. He was the eighth of 13 children. In 1912, he left for Ottoman-ruled Palestine to study art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Finding himself at odds with the artistic views of the Academy's teachers, he left for Paris, France in 1913 to pursue his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. At the outbreak of World War I, he was returned to Romania, where he spent the war years.

Although born in Romania and trained in art in Paris and Romania, Reuven Rubin in many ways is a distinctly and distinctively Israeli artist. He studied briefly at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and he exhibited in the fi...