Joseph (Yossef) Zaritsky (Hebrew: יוסף זריצקי; September 1, 1891 – November 30, 1985) was one of the early promoters of modern art in the Land of Israel both during the period of the Yishuv (the body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel before the establishment of the State of Israel) and after the establishment of the State. Regarded as one of the most influential Israeli painters, Zaritsky is known for cofounding the "Ofakim Hadashim" group. In his works, he created a uniquely Israeli style of abstract art. For this work he was awarded the Israel Prize for painting in 1959.

Joseph Zaritsky was born in 1891 in Boryspil, in the Poltava Oblast (province), in the Southwestern portion of the Russian Empire (today the Kyiv Oblast of Ukraine), to a large, traditional Jewish family. His parents, Golda and Joseph Ben Ya'acov, were farmers with National-Zionist leanings. One of the main expressions of this was their devoting of two rooms in their home to the study of Hebrew and reading. When he was 7 or 8 Zaritsky was sent away from home for a long period of time (it's not known to where). From 1910 to 1914 he studied art at the Academy of Arts in the city of Kiev. Among the artists that influenced Zaritsky was the Russian Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel. In 1915, during World War I, Zaritsky was conscripted into the Russian Army, where he served until 1917. Zaritsky, in an interview, talked about his being sent to the front as an officer during the First World War, but then, when he got there, being sent back because the peace agreement between Russia and Germany had been signed. In 1918 he married Sarah (Sonia), a graduate of the Faculty of Dentistry in Kiev, and the daughter of Rabbi Israel Dov Zabin. A year later their daughter Etia was born.

Because of the pogrom of 1919, the family escaped to Kalarash, Bessarabia, leaving behind all his works and art up to that point. In Kalarash he stayed in his father-in-law's home, where he painted small-scale watercolors, of which only five have survived: three portraits of his wife and two rural landscapes. These small works are done in small dark colored dots, and they reflect the influence of Russian modernism.

In his painting "Artist’s Wife Looking out at the Street" (1920), Zaritsky divided the painting into two: the background, in which he describes the town, and the foreground, in which his figure sits. The angle of description of the figure – from behind – emphasizes this division. In spite of the division, Zaritsky cancelled the illusion of spaciousness by using identical materials and coloring for both parts. In his landscapes of this period as well, Zaritsky divided the format into a sort of mosaic on small canvases that blur the illusion of perspective.

In 1923 Zaritsky immigrated to the Land of Israel alone and settled in Jerusalem; a year later his family followed. In the city Zaritsky painted a number of watercolor landscapes in light colors. Gradually his artistic works became freer. In "Jerusalem: Abyssinian Gate” (1923), a precise rendering of nature is still apparent, but in later works there is a pronounced expressionistic tendency in the composition of his works. Examples of this can be seen in “Haifa, the Technion” (1924), and in the works called "Jerusalem: Nachalat Shiva" (1924), in which Zaritsky uses an expressionistic technique for dividing the format into separate spaces. The use of lines in his work as a means of expression can be seen also in his depictions of houses in Jerusalem and Safad from this period.

In 1924 Zaritsky mounted his first solo exhibition in the club "Menorah" in Jerusalem. Another exhibition was opened in the Technion in Haifa. The journalistic criticism emphasized the lyricism in his works, and the fact that "the forms [in his paintings] turn into dots of abstract color, the subject of which is an allegory of color and light, and not the plot of a story." In addition, Zaritsky and the sculptor Abraham Melnikov, were the initiators of the first of the exhibitions of Israeli artists in the Tower of David. Also, from 1927 he served as the Chairman of the Israel Painters and Sculptors Association.

In the middle of the 1920s Zaritsky moved to Tel Aviv and continued to paint the series of landscapes that he had started in Jerusalem. The landscapes and portraits of that he painted during these years show his effort to create an artistic language appropriate to description.

In 1927 Zaritsky left his family behind and went to Paris for a stay of several months. There he was exposed to the western modernist art that was flourishing in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later Zaritsky remarked on how impressed he was by the exhibits at the Guimet Museum of Asian Art.