Isidor Grigoryevich Frikh-Har was born into the family of a businessman in Kutaisi on April 5 (17), 1894. Drafted to the army during World War I, he was wounded near Brest and was sent for treatment to Samara. In 1918–1921 he was at war in the Red Army at the Volzhsk and Turkestani front lines.
Isidor Frikh-Har developed his artistic skills independently; when in Samara in 1918 he was already into molding clay figurines. The artist lived in Tomilino near Moscow from 1921 and then in Moscow.
Isidor Frikh-Har was the founder and principal of the art laboratory of M. I. Kalinin Faience Plant in Konakovo (1934).
His early works were made as free improvisings for his friends: Poet of the Desert (Uzbek) (wood, copper and other materials, 1921–1923, the Tretyakov Gallery). When making his career, Isidor Frikh-Har created quite a big number of boring semi-official things. However, he gained true authority as the master of bright and colourful decorative sculpture, which was folk type in its way and sort of a seamy side of Socialist Realism.
His naïve art deco was most organically embodied in his ceramic plastics, which Frikh-Har took up creating from the late 1920s. His works enjoyed wide popularity at exhibitions and their copies were well sold. Among the typical samples of such creativity (in porcelain or faience) are the Poultry-maids (1934), the Georgian Shashlychnik (1934; seen by many as an allegorical image of Joseph Stalin), numerous "pigeons" (1937–1938), the Pencil (actor M. N. Rumyantsev) (1945), the Accordion Player (1947). Most of these sculptures can be seen in the Ceramics Museum of the Kuskovo Estate). He created lots of models for ware, as well as large objects for interior decor (the majolica fountain The Source in the former Palace of Culture and Sciences in Warsaw, 1955).
Isidor Frikh-Har resorted to various materials. Impressed by the sensational Czech Glass Exhibition of 1958 he got actively engaged art glass, cooperating with the art glass plant in Gus-Khrustalny in the 1960s.
Isidor Frikh-Har died in Moscow on April 19, 1978.