Azure No. 3
Winter 5758 / 1998
Israeli Art On Its Way to Somewhere Else
Avraham Levitt
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape ... he has his truth
and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries
that cannot belong to him.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization1
So accustomed are we by now to hearing Israeli painters and sculptors pouring
ire and brimstone on their country, that one could almost imagine that the
Jewish state and the plastic arts were somehow inherently inimical to one
another. Yet things were not always this way: At the same time Zionism’s
political founding fathers were preparing the diplomatic and physical soil
for a Jewish state, Jewish nationalist artists in Europe and Palestine were
already working towards what they believed was to be a Jewish national renaissance
in art, and even created Israel’s first academy for national art in
the days of Theodor Herzl. At first, it seemed as though these great Zionist
artists would succeed in fulfilling their vision, and such a renewal did indeed
get under way. But the effort withered after only a few years, and Jewish
art in the land of Israel plunged into a seemingly inexorable process of decay,
passing through five distinct stages: From (i) the national, historic and
religious consciousness of the early Zionist immigrant artists; to (ii) a
preoccupation with the Jewish land itself; to (iii) an obsession with the
material of the land, stripped of any connection with a people; to (iv) an
overt campaign to destroy any traces of Jewish nationalist sentiment; the
final stage, the calm after the battle to destroy the Zionist heritage had
largely been won, produced artwork distinguished by (v) a powerful sense of
human rootlessness, wandering and the preparation for departure from the land.
Thus less than a century after its inception, the art of Israel had carried
out a complete about-face: At first a celebration of the reentry of the Jews
into history in their ancient homeland, Israeli art has now become a celebration
of their exit. The story of how this reversal came about is the tragedy of
a culture. And in some ways, it is the story of the Jewish state itself.
The history of Israeli art begins with a Bulgarian-Jewish sculptor named
Boris Schatz, whose life and work were transfigured by the revival of Jewish
national strength at the turn of the twentieth century, as dramatically represented
by the Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine and Herzl’s Zionist
Congresses. As Jewish nationalism gained momentum, Schatz became a devout
Zionist, friend to Herzl and Ahad Ha’am; his work, too, came to be dominated
by images of Jewish national power, as reflected in sculptures such as Mattathias
(1894), in which the Hasmonean warrior-priest is depicted crushing the body
of a fallen Greek soldier underfoot. While his later work focused increasingly
upon more religious subjects, these continued to express his admiration for
the strong and vital in the history of the Jews; his Moses with the Ten Commandments
(1918), for example, portrayed the prophet as muscular and spirited, gripping
mightily the two tablets of the law.
Following the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 (which had been devoted in
part to a debate over the issue of Jewish cultural activities), Schatz approached
Herzl privately with the idea of a school of Jewish art in Palestine. According
to Schatz’s account, Herzl responded enthusiastically, and together
they agreed on the name for the school: “Betzalel,” said Schatz,
“after the first master craftsman who built us the sanctuary in the
wilderness.” Herzl responded: “Yes, a sanctuary in the wilderness.”2
Schatz set to work building interest in his new art school, publishing articles
and giving interviews in the Jewish papers. Schatz’s fundraising efforts
carried him across Europe and to America, and as a result the Betzalel Academy
of Art and Craft formally opened in Jerusalem on March 1, 1906. Its faculty
was handpicked by Schatz from among his associates in the Zionist movement,
and the school was founded explicitly on the principle that “nationalist
art is art which comes from the heart and works in harmony with the heart
of the nation.”3 Accordingly, the curriculum featured instruction in
the production of Jewish ritual objects, and both its faculty and students
often served as illustrators for Zionist literature and propaganda.
Among the school’s leading instructors from its first years was Ephraim
Moshe Lilien, whose works had already been featured at the Fifth Congress,
and who had designed the memorial postcard issued by the Congress that year.
Lilien’s drawing on the card shows a broken old Jewish man, collapsed
in despair behind thorns and barbed wire. His attention is directed by a tall
prophetic figure pointing to the sun—which rises beyond a pair of oxen
being driven by a religious Jew. This image of exile and redemption is accompanied
by an inscription taken from the traditional daily prayers: “And our
eyes will behold your return to Zion with mercy.” Other illustrations
by Lilien carefully undergirded the ongoing national efforts with images of
the glorious Jewish past, employing Herzl’s likeness, for example, in
illustrating biblical figures such as Moses and various redeeming angels (Fig.
1).4 Zev Raban, who arrived at Betzalel in 1912 and headed its illustration
department beginning in 1914, produced a formidable body of Zionist works
as well, including some of the original posters aimed at attracting Jewish
tourism and business to Palestine.5 In Raban’s illustration for the
cover to Schatz’ novel Jerusalem Rebuilt, Schatz can be seen sitting
on the roof of the Betzalel building—in front of its famous menora,
itself designed by Raban—in conversation with a biblical prophet. Artists
at Betzalel also worked to create Bible illustrations based on what they saw
around them, drawing upon their daily experience to depict the characters
and landmarks of the biblical narrative. The great Bible illustrator Abel
Pann was a Betzalel student who worked almost exclusively from the likenesses
of local Jews in their surroundings in Jerusalem.
The first two decades of Jewish artwork in Palestine were virtually without
a trace of criticism against Jewish efforts to build a national home. Artists
of darker temperament turned their attention instead to the exile; most important
among these was Samuel Hirschenberg, a Polish painter who came to study at
Betzalel in the last year of his life. His painting The Wandering Jew (1899),
completed while he was still in Poland, occupied the most prominent position
in the Betzalel museum. It portrays a bearded figure running terrified, his
arms outstretched, through a forest of looming crosses beneath a stormy sky.
At his feet lie the emaciated bodies of his fellow Jews, lying in pools of
their own blood—a horrifyingly prophetic glimpse into the fate of European
Jewry within a generation. Aside from its impressive technical accomplishments,
the painting was so well-regarded at Betzalel because it so powerfully drove
home the idea that national reconstruction in Israel was the only solution
to the bitterness of life in the dispersion; Schatz frequently brought guests
to be photographed in front of it.
The artistic pioneers who first built Betzalel devoted all their energies
to finding the voice and technique with which to express their hopes and aspirations
for the redemption of the Jewish nation. As a result, the artists of this
period exuded an idealism and romanticism of Jewish identity which would not
be seen again. They approached every subject with the desire to create and
express a uniquely Jewish perspective—an effort which Schatz expressed
in his personal life by becoming increasingly observant as the years went
on. And while the Zionism of Betzalel’s students seemed hardly to decline
over the two decades of Schatz’s stewardship, these students gradually
came to espouse a national vision which differed substantially from that which
had been championed at the establishment of the school.
In the years that followed what became known as the “Betzalel Revolt”
in 1927, the academy’s students led, by Menahem Shemi, shrugged off
their keen awareness of Jewish history, faith and nationhood in favor of works
more sympathetic to a new and local Jewish identity. This identity was connected
less with the Jewish tradition, which was felt to be a part of the exile,
than with the immediate physical locale and terrain—an increasingly
materialistic view which closely paralleled the rise of Labor Zionism and
the idea that agricultural labor on the land was itself the Jewish redemption.
The foremost local Jewish painter of the 1920s and 1930s, Nachum Gutman, reflected
many years later that the students of Betzalel were united by only one thing:
“Love of the landscape.”6 As a result, the years after World War
I saw a Jewish national art that came to be dominated by sweeping landscapes,
such as Aryeh Lubin’s Landscape (1924; Fig. 2), and by depictions of
heroic workers whose physical labor was the one human element that could transform
the earth into a reclaimed Jewish land. Paintings such as Moshe Matus’
Building Tel Aviv (1931) showed beautiful, muscular men literally dragging
the city out of the ground, while the idyllic life of country and kibbutz
was portrayed by others such as Shemi and Gutman. These decades also witnessed
the birth of massive memorial sculptures such as Abraham Melnikov’s
Tel Hai Memorial (1926), a roaring lion in memory of the legendary Jewish
fighter and settler Joseph Trumpeldor, who had fallen defending the farming
settlement against Arab attack six years earlier.
The new sensitivity to the land and its human redeemers brought with it
an increased appreciation for the local cultural flavor. Orientalism and stylized
depiction of Arabs and Arab themes began to invade the Jewish artistic consciousness.
The artists attempted to assimilate the new influence in much the same way
that many local pioneers began to adopt Arab habits and dress. While the artists
continued to depict Jewish biblical heroes, they now preferred to employ the
local Bedouin in their portrayal of the Jews of ancient Israel, the observable
present reshaping the image of the Jewish past. Simultaneously, local Arabs
began to figure prominently in their own right in works such as Nachum Gutman’s
The Shepherd and Israel Paldi’s Jaffa Boatmen, both of 1926. The orientalism
of the late 1920s and early 1930s constituted more of an attempt to harness
local culture than an actual desire to merge with it, but it nevertheless
marked the first time that non-Jewish elements began to invade what had once
been an effort to create an entirely Jewish artistic consciousness. The deterioration
of Betzalel’s founding ideology was already well under way when financial
difficulties forced the school’s closure in 1929. Boris Schatz died
in America three years later, while trying to find the resources to reopen
his beloved school.
The tendency of Betzalel’s second generation to exalt a Jewishness
which inclined toward the local and physical could well have been a constructive
moment in the development of a vital Jewish national art, had it not been
for two great forces emanating from outside Palestine. These two forces were,
on the one hand, the immigration in the 1930s of large numbers of highly educated
German Jews with only mixed sympathies for the earlier Jewish national effort;
and on the other, the “export” of an increasing number of Palestinian
Jewish artists to France, where they became exposed to a much larger art world
with an agenda very different from their own—an agenda which they brought
back with them to Palestine. Each of these influences was to have a permanent
effect on the tiny community of artists in Palestine, at first radicalizing
the already extant tendencies towards the local and material world, and eventually
obliterating the Jewish nationalism from which these tendencies had originally
grown.
In Jerusalem, where Schatz’s Betzalel had been founded, it was the
rise of Hitler in 1933 which proved decisive. Central Europe’s descent
into barbarism brought a flood of German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine, among
them a large number of accomplished intellectuals and artists. But many of
these came as refugees, and their relationship with any form of Judaism—let
alone with the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement—was often
questionable. Leaving their beloved Germany for fear of their lives, many
of these Jews found in Palestine not the land of their dreams, but rather
an uncultured backwater whose Jewish inhabitants, dominated by the often strident
nationalist workers from Eastern Europe, they found to be untutored chauvinists.
While the Germans found integration difficult in most areas of life in Palestine,
their unquestioned credentials in the arts and sciences allowed them to attain
hegemony in many of Jerusalem’s cultural institutions, including the
Hebrew University and the reopened Betzalel.7
German artists arriving in Palestine at this time made Jerusalem their center,
establishing galleries there and congregating in the city’s caf?s. The
graphic artist Anna Ticho, who had lived in Jerusalem since 1919 in relative
obscurity, began to host regular meetings of Jerusalem’s German elite
in her home. In these cultural strongholds, the few German Jews who had arrived
earlier gained sudden prominence, their biting criticisms of the Zionist Organization,
the local Russian-Jewish leadership, and the very idea of Jewish nationalism
reinforced by the eager agreement of the newcomers. It was in this atmosphere
that the Betzalel academy was reopened in 1935 under the tutelage of a German
Jew, Joseph Budko. The new Betzalel had an overwhelmingly German faculty,
the vast majority of its students were German,8 and German was the primary
language of social and academic intercourse.
Upon Budko’s death in 1940, the German painter Mordechai Ardon became
head of Betzalel. Ardon exemplified the universalism and impatience with Jewish
nationalism which was the most enduring legacy of the German presence in Israeli
art. Although he was enchanted by the idea of a Jewish cultural reawakening,
Ardon never fully reconciled himself with the implications of Jewish statehood.
The two Jewish elements which Ardon did employ were the symbolism of Jewish
mysticism and prophecies regarding the eternal brotherhood of man. Typical
of the utopian anti-nationalism of his work are the enormous stained-glass
windows which he prepared for the National Library at Givat Ram in Jerusalem
(completed 1983), which illustrate a historic process beginning with images
of war between nations and destruction; progressing through an abstract Jerusalem
to which many roads wind, each inscribed in a different language; and ending
with a field on which the weapons of war are seen broken, symbolizing the
ultimate eradication of national differences.
Yet the dominant feeling introduced by German Jewry was not the hope of
a mystical redemption, but the darkness and cynicism of individuals fleeing
a great country they had loved and arriving in a small one which offered little
consolation. The German painter Meron Sima, who frequently painted refugees
and refugee camps, said that he “came to a bright, joyous land, building
in full force, people danced in the streets.... I was the only one who did
not smile. My heart was heavy with recent events in Germany.”9 Anna
Ticho and Mordechai Ardon produced bleak Jerusalem landscapes, with either
very little color or else jarring and cacophonous colors. Leopold Krakauer
drew thistles and writhing olive trees bearing an unsettling resemblance to
human figures. In these works—described by Martin Buber as depicting
“the anguish of solitude”10—the inspiring land of Zionist
redemption simply disappears, replaced by a land of desolation, without meaning
for the Jewish nation, or any nation.
In addition to the shift in emphasis to a land without Jewish meaning, the
Germans also brought with them the shift of emphasis from a Jewish orientalism
to an outright preoccupation with the Arabs themselves. A leading example
is the work of Jakob Steinhardt, probably the most important German artist
in Palestine of the 1930s, who opened a studio adjoining Betzalel and became
one of the academy’s most popular and influential instructors. Although
Steinhardt came to Palestine out of idealistic motives and devoted much of
his work to biblical images, these images were mustered not for the exploration
of national Jewish themes, but rather to express his anguished desire for
reconciliation with the Arabs. Steinhardt’s biblical woodcuts thus included
numerous representations of Jacob embracing his brother-turned-enemy, Esau;
and these were outnumbered only by his treatments of the story of Hagar, mother
of Ishmael and of the Arabs, banished to the wilderness by the Jewish patriarch
Abraham.11 Throughout his life Steinhardt continued to use his art to agonize
over the Jewish exercise of national power in the establishment of the state
of Israel, executing portraits of biblical heroes gripped by remorse and regret.
Of these, the most important are Saul (1956), who covers one eye—a probable
reference to army chief-of-staff Moshe Dayan—to escape the sight of
the enormities taking place at his behest, and the ensuing loss of his kingdom,
and Moses on Mount Nebo (1965), depicting an ancient, distressed and exhausted
Moses surveying the Promised Land he will never enter. Over his lengthy career,
Steinhardt continued to express himself through the medium of the woodcut,
working his ideas into dark, brooding reverse-prints filled with sorrow and
angst over the results of Jewish settlement in Israel.
But the most powerful and enduring trend to emerge from the efforts of the
German immigrants to connect themselves with their new location was the artistic
movement known as “Canaanism.” Canaanite art was an effort to
create a direct relationship with the land, bypassing historic Jewish connotations—hence
the suppression of the name “Israel” in favor of the land’s
primordial name. The major pioneers of the Canaanite esthetic were Yitzchak
Dantziger, the son of German immigrants, and the husband-and-wife team of
Rudi Lehmann and Hedwig Grossman, who arrived from Germany in 1933 and settled
in Jerusalem a few years later. Lehmann himself was not Jewish, and he never
mastered Hebrew,12 yet he and Dantziger were almost exclusively responsible
for the training of Israeli sculptors until they both died in 1977. Among
the students of Rudi Lehmann are such leading artists as Igael Tumarkin and
Menashe Kadishman, while Dantziger boasts Yechiel Shemi and Binyamin Tamuz
as pupils.
Canaanite works bear a deliberate resemblance to the sculpture and ritual
art of early civilizations of the Middle East prior to Judaism, emphasizing
austerity in form, both in terms of shape and the use of color, and always
with an eye to the fusion of man and the land itself. In a plaster mold cast
in the 1950s Rudi Lehmann inscribed, backwards, the quotation from Tchernichovsky:
“Man is nothing but the shape of his native landscape.” Dantziger
described his epoch-making sculpture Nimrod (1939; Fig. 3) as “a human
animal joined with a hawk, a fusion in sandstone of a particular myth with
a particular place, people and desert rock”—that is, a biblical
ruler, but a decidedly non-Jewish one, whose essence is the stone and the
earth of the land itself.13 Dantziger, who dedicated his life to the molding
of figures which emulated the form of his native landscape,14 ultimately gave
up sculpture entirely for a kind of landscape design involving the “rehabilitation”
of “wounded places” such as quarries. One of Lehmann’s students
describes his devotion to precise, geometric forms: “These are the archetype
of sculpture,” he would say, “and anybody who does not know how
to use them together properly does not know what sculpture is.”15 The
impact of the technical aspects of Canaanism can still be felt in contemporary
Israeli sculpture, where the interaction of simple shapes continues to be
a mainstay of large-scale public displays.16
Canaanism did not begin as a consciously anti-nationalist movement. For
Dantziger, returning to ancient middle-eastern themes was rather the opposite:
An attempt to break away from western European and German influences and return
to his local identity. For the non-Jewish Lehmann, who could not truly feel
a part of the Jewish rebirth in Palestine, Canaanism was a means of establishing
new roots while divorcing himself from his German heritage.17 While their
works were in many ways a logical continuation of the land affinity of the
previous generation of Zionist art, their creation of a new, non-Jewish identity
built upon the soil and stone of Canaan bore an inherent appeal for the anti-Zionist.
In place of Zionism, Canaanism offered communion with the land, stripped entirely
of any Jewish meaning.
While the early years after independence found Dantziger and Lehmann teaching
in Jerusalem and the artists’ village at Ein Hod, a competing community
of artists began to flourish in Tel Aviv, outside the orbit of Jerusalem’s
German influence and the new Betzalel. The Tel Aviv artists, primarily of
Eastern European extraction, had been for the most part insulated from the
German immigration of the 1930s, and operated principally under the influence
of trends imported directly from French expressionist painting. Many of the
local painters had studied in Paris during the 1920s, among them Avigdor Stematsky,
who opened a studio in Tel Aviv in 1931. The following year Yosef Zaritsky
opened his own studio specializing in the reproduction of works by French
masters such as C?zanne, Matisse and Bracque. In 1948, Zaritsky organized
an exhibition which was dominated by Tel Aviv artists and colorful abstract
painting in emulation of French technique. The title of the exhibition, “New
Horizons,” rapidly came to describe the preoccupations of the entire
Tel Aviv artistic community. Characterized by an emphasis upon bright torrents
of color and a predilection for abstract lines and patterns, the paintings
of New Horizons were frequently presented as a sharp contrast to the mostly
drab but highly symbolic figures featured in the sculpture of Jerusalem’s
Canaanites.
In Zaritsky’s own work a parallel can be seen to the wider development
of Israeli art. From colorful and impressionistic depictions of landscapes
and landmarks which he produced in the 1920s, Zaritsky moved into realms of
progressively greater abstraction. Immediately after returning from Paris
in 1956, Zaritsky executed a controversial canvas in a radical new expressive
style. His Cup of Red Wine of 1956 explores the effect of small bits of red—the
wine—moving on a field of vivid blue marked with yellow. The particular
shade of blue mixed in with glimpses of white clearly suggests the bright
summer sky over Israel, with the yellow representing the sun. The work thus
evokes a powerful visual recollection of the landscape, however remote from
figurative representation. The inspiration for Cup of Red Wine was Rembrandt’s
masterpiece of 1636, Rembrandt and Saskia, to which Zaritsky returned more
directly in the later, 1960 version of his painting (Fig. 4). In Cup of Red
Wine of 1960, the immediate effect of the wine within the composition is much
more significant, and the somewhat anomalous yellow is absent. The colors
are more muted and the figures more sharply defined, in a style which owes
a closer affinity to the Rembrandt original than to the local sky.
The technique which Zaritsky pioneered in his 1956 Cup of Red Wine profoundly
influenced the development of abstract painting in Israel, its flirtation
with shades of local sky and sunlight becoming a motif that recurs continuously
into the 1970s. Similar attempts to capture the effect of Mediterranean sunlight
on the Israeli landscape abound in the paintings of the New Horizons group.
As painters trained in predominantly French technique, the artists of Tel
Aviv were concerned with the faithful communication of the effects of lighting
in composition. Yet the artistic challenges presented to them by the overwhelming
effects of the sun on the Israeli landscape were unique, and Tel Aviv’s
artists sought to define themselves with regard to these challenges. By and
large, they did not emulate Zaritsky’s return to classical sources,
concerning themselves almost exclusively for many years with attempting to
capture their radically new visual universe.
Yet despite all the obvious differences between Jerusalem’s Canaanite
figures and the splashy, abstract canvases of New Horizons, the fact is that
the two groups, which together constituted the main impulses in Israeli art
in the first years after statehood, were united by an ideological undercurrent
more important than the differences in technique which met the eye. For much
like the Canaanites, Tel Aviv’s artists had broken with the nationalism
of their predecessors to identify themselves much more closely with their
geographic location. They, too, were deeply involved in attempts to capture
the new visual stimuli of the Israeli landscape, devoid of any national characteristics;
what the Canaanites had found in the soil of the land, New Horizons found
in its light. Both movements devoted great efforts to the manipulation of
simple shapes and forms, constantly reevaluating them in an attempt to find
the materials with which to build a new symbolic language to befit their circumstances,
yet virtually without reference to the most important of these circumstances:
The fact that in the meantime, a Jewish national state had been declared.
Somehow, it almost seems to have escaped notice that the life of the nation
was headed in a direction utterly at odds with the artists’ obsession
with form at the expense of substance, with the material elements which comprised
the land at the expense of the human drama which was taking place upon it.
One clear result of the implicit rejection of Jewish nationalism by both
Canaanism and New Horizons was that Israeli artists coming of age in the early
1960s, whether in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv, developed their worldview and
works entirely outside the ambit of anything that could be called a tradition
of Jewish national painting or sculpture. Through lack of exposure to any
attractive national ideal, these artists naturally saw Zionism as something
which had played itself out long ago, and the continuation of Zionist mythmaking
and sloganeering by the political leadership as something shallow and forced.
After the Sinai campaign of 1956, these trends gradually intensified, and
Jewish nationalism, including even the Jewish state itself, came to be identified
with what seemed to be campaigns of pointless violence, and therefore responsible
for the continuing hardships of living in Israel. The artists of this period
for the first time began speaking of their desire to be “normal”—that
is, to be like all other artists, in all other countries.
The wielding of national power by the state quickly gave rise to unflattering
historical parallels among those artists who refused to view modern Israel
as a legitimate continuation of Jewish history. The most outstanding example
is Igael Tumarkin, a student of Rudi Lehmann’s who throughout the 1950s
produced sculptures recalling the occupation of the land by the Crusaders
and their instruments of power. Based on a first-hand acquaintance with Crusader
ruins Tumarkin gained while serving in the navy off Acre, this series of works
began a career of increasingly explicit criticism of the Jewish presence in
the land—that is, with the entire cause of Zionism in general, and with
Jewish national power in particular. His penchant for incorporating firearms
into his sculptures as a means of protesting against the state appeared in
its full form in Bring Me Under the Shelter of Your Wings (1966). Named after
a well-known verse from the poetry of Zionist poet Haim Nahman Bialik, the
sculpture features a frightening array of weapons huddled beneath a draping
of wrought iron, which suggests a protective shelter of sorts. The irony of
representing the supplicant as an arsenal makes a mockery of the hope of gentle
grace and protection expressed in the poem, brutally accusing Israel of finding
salvation only in its own might.
Tumarkin’s alienation from the Jewish national effort surrounding
him stemmed in part from his own personal crisis of origin. Adopted by his
mother’s husband in Israel, he was never told by his parents that his
biological father was a non-Jewish German actor and that he was born in Germany,
not Israel.18 Yet other leading artists managed to express similar contempt
and alienation from the Jewish state and its cause, despite not sharing Tumarkin’s
unusual background. The painter Arie Aroch, for example, was a leading artist
in the mid-1960s whose works suggested the illegitimacy and irrelevance of
political power. His High Commissioner (1966) features two rudely drawn portraits
of the last governor of the mandatory period, portrayed as two comfortably
seated, mustachioed gentlemen in isolated miniature, figuring insignificantly
on a larger field of gray streaked with black, red and brown, a battlefield
of decay and death. The rejection of power and rule, as well as the reminder
of the transience of those insolent men who would wield it, is likewise invoked
in Aroch’s masterpiece, Agrippa Street (1964; Fig. 5). Aroch’s
installation—one cannot really consider it a sculpture in the traditional
sense—juxtaposes a sign bearing the name of a street with a wooden board,
roughly scrawled upon. Agrippa I was the last king of Judea who, although
educated in Rome, nevertheless struggled to preserve the Jewish character
of the country. His son, Agrippa II, who never formally ascended the throne,
betrayed his father’s ways by attempting to persuade the Jews to surrender
to superior Roman power, in the end fighting for Rome against the remaining
Jewish resistance. Agrippa Street again reminds us of the efforts to wield
political power, this time in the service of the Jewish nation, only to suggest
that the entire enterprise is futile and ugly: The king’s lifetime of
effort on behalf of his people is reduced to a name on a dingy city street.
What is left of Agrippa is random, ugly, culturally ill-defined and—according
to a thermometer which Aroch throws into the image for good measure—uncomfortably
hot. Agrippa Street is the cultural antipode of Dantziger’s Nimrod.
While Nimrod celebrates a powerful hero emerging from the land with which
he is closely bound, defining his culture in terms of his origins, Agrippa
Street depicts the political leader as a foreign-bred intruder, an impotent
symbol of cultural and national atrophy.
The style of Arie Aroch had a significant influence on Rafi Lavie, whose
unrelenting repudiation of the older roots of Israeli art was the trademark
of the “Tel Aviv school” of which he is considered the founder.
An instructor at the Ramat Hasharon Art Academy, which rapidly became the
epicenter of this movement, Lavie was the first important Israeli artist to
declare explicitly that he “never felt the national aspect of being
Jewish.”19 Where carefully constructed geometry and brightly interlaced
colors had been mainstays of Israeli art until the 1960s, Lavie pioneered
a technique of adorning stark boards of plywood with scrapings of pencil and
black ink, scattered strokes of white or gray paint, and newspaper and magazine
clippings often depicting political leaders. Lavie transformed the subtle
if harsh criticisms of contemporaries such as Arie Aroch and Igael Tumarkin
into a snarl of disdain: His near-total avoidance of meaningful symbols, as
well as the contempt he holds for political efforts in particular,20 are among
the fundamental principles of the Tel Aviv school, and form an integral part
of the larger project of emptying the symbolic language of Israeli culture
and its Zionist underpinnings of all constructive meaning. That Lavie’s
art reflects such an effort is far less alarming than the fact that virtually
all of mainstream Israeli art since has been spawned directly by Lavie and
his disciples. Since the 1960s, the dialogue between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
in Israeli art has ended, and the focus has shifted decisively and permanently
to Tel Aviv, where students of Lavie’s Ramat Hasharon Art Academy have
become the dominant force in both the production and criticism of art in Israel.21
The loathing of Jewish national power had already become a trademark of
important artists by the mid-1960s, but it took the Six Day War of 1967 to
turn anti-nationalism into a central fetish of the Israeli art world. It is
after this war—in which much of biblical Israel was for the first time
brought under Jewish control and the state reached the height of its strength
relative to the Arab states—that there began a concerted campaign among
Israel’s leading artists overtly aimed at shattering the myths which
held the state together. Igael Tumarkin stood at the vanguard of this effort
with his landmark He Walked in the Fields (1968; Fig. 6). Sculpted amid the
euphoria of Israeli’s greatest military victory, this work sets out
to destroy forever one of Zionism’s most precious images: That of the
heroic Israeli soldier. The sculpture is a vicious parody of Moshe Shamir’s
classic Zionist novel of the same name, which had become a fixture of Israeli
national culture, inspiring important adaptations in both theater and film.22
Tumarkin’s sculpture rears up against this entire collective memory,
depicting a soldier returning from battle, his body bursting with military
ordinance which emerges from his gaping chest cavity, while his helmet has
been driven into his abdomen. His mouth and throat have been torn open to
expose his trachea and extended tongue, both painted bright red. The figure’s
pants are also wide open, his member hanging out in a manner echoing his lolling
tongue. The impression is immediate and visceral, at once revolting and humiliating—and
it is this revulsion and humiliation against battle which quickly saw victory
in the country’s cultural discourse: Reference to He Walked in the Fields
came to mean Tumarkin’s metal nightmare first, and the old myth weaved
by the novel only second.
The artist Yoram Rosov was the first to depict the toll taken by Israel’s
military campaigns on civilian life; his response to the Six Day War was no
less toxic than Tumarkin’s, and similarly devoted to emptying the symbolic
content out of Israeli myths. In a drawing entitled Ingemisco Tanquam Reus
(1968), he examines how the resort to violence has stripped the Israeliidentity
of its innocence. The work positions a satirized “sabra”—the
heroic native-born Jew of Israeli myth—hanging on a cross. The crucified
figure is a bloated, middle-aged and lazy rendition of the traditional sabra,
complete with floppy worker’s hat. Yet from the hat extends the muzzle
of a tank, and across the sabra’s chest lies a large rifle; the Israeli
is accused and punished for the malicious use of power for self-aggrandizement.
The Latin title literally means “With the bound I groan,” suggesting
that the Israeli perceives himself, like Jesus, as an innocent sympathizer
with the oppressed; but the Latin reus (“the bound”) can also
mean “the accused”—the hypocritical Israeli power-monger
really only sympathizes with the accused and truly guilty. A year later Rosov
followed this image up with The Fall of Goliath (1969), also depicting a sabra,
this time as a repulsively obese giant felled by rocks and sticks, some of
which poke comically from his hat as he comes crashing to the ground.
A more elegant harnessing of the same contempt for Zionism appears in the
works of Yosl Bergner, which systematically strip the first Jewish settlers
on the land of their heroism. In drawings such as Ship of Fools (1963), showing
Jews immigrating to Palestine, and The Funeral (1977), which depicts the result
of their efforts, he portrays the pioneers as a rabble of false idealists
who descended on the land only to corrupt it with their presence. In The Idealists
(1978), he presents a huddled group of faceless, awkward figures gathered
around a leader who represents the artist’s deceased uncle, who was
an early settler; his garb suggests a traditional prayer shawl. In these works
and others like them, the Zionist pioneers are not depicted as monstrosities,
but rather as pale, wide-eyed herd animals, pathetic in their weakness and
folly. Bergner compares them to flowers, “night flowers which live for
a day, water-lilies, swamp flowers, flowers with no name.... And perhaps all
the stories too about the generation of founders are merely the fruit of our
imagination and our longing for romance, poetry, mystery?”23 And indeed,
the effect of his works is to demonstrate that these fruits of the national
imagination are nothing more than that—the false adulation of men and
women who were not heroes, but only weak people lost in the delusion of sacrificing
themselves in order to build a Jewish state. Bergner’s bottom-line message
is perhaps best epitomized in After the Show (1972), a sketch of a herd of
empty chairs ringed around a tall post with a rag nailed towards the top.
The chairs, which feature prominently throughout Bergner’s work as hollow
stand-ins for their human occupants, are gathered around a meaningless rag
on a stick—the national flag, itself also hollowed out of any meaning
worth noticing. The purpose of After the Show is brutally clear: The show
of Zionism has ended, the actors have left the scene and all that is left
is the props—even if these are human props totally unaware that the
show has ended (Fig. 7).24
The empty chair, representing fallen, empty people (and frequently, because
of its associations with the empty Davidic throne, a fallen and empty kingdom),
is a favorite symbol of Israeli artists in their rejection of the Jewish past.
Another artist employing it systematically is Micha Ullman, who often situates
the chair buried underground or lying on its back in a subterranean crypt.
For Ullman, the false national rebirth represented in the empty chair is a
sham, “essentially Jewish, a longing for what can never come true, like
the coming of the Messiah.”25 Indeed, so successful has this symbol
been as a stark critique of the aspirations of traditional Zionism and Judaism
that by 1991 an entire exhibition could be held at the art museum of Tel Aviv
University devoted to the empty chair in Israeli art.26 The depiction and
celebration of a Jewish past rendered as utterly meaningless had become a
fixture of the nation’s artistic culture.
In the same year that Tel Aviv University ran its exhibition dedicated to
the empty chair, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem mounted a massive retrospective
of Israeli art entitled “Routes of Wandering”—whose message
was not the irrelevance of the past, as much as the resultant condition of
rootlessness that the destruction of the Zionist myth implied for the future.
The idea of the exhibition, according to its curator, originated with the
recognition that “the awakening from the Zionist dream has left deep
traces upon Israeli art.” The exhibition was intended to chose works
signifying rootlessness and wanderings away from fixation in any defined territory
or form: Works that formulate the myth of the exodus from Egypt not as a beginning
of the voyage to the Promised Land, but as a text of the desert generation....
The language and syntax of these works emphasize the aspect of expulsion implicit
in the inscription “Get you gone” [Genesis 12:1], rather than
the promise “For unto your seed I will give the land” [Genesis
12:7].27
The attitudes which precipitated this exhibition at Israel’s largest
and wealthiest public museum had become so fully articulated in the 1970s
and 1980s that by 1991 they no longer surprised anyone: Having jettisoned
the Zionist attachment to the land, the Israeli art community constructed
a new myth, one which glorified wandering and devalued place as a matter of
principle. In this, the final stage in the dezionization of Israeli art, they
were abetted by such characters as the French-Jewish existentialist thinker
Edmond Jab?s, to whom Tel Aviv’s artists made frequent pilgrimage during
their sojourns in Paris, and who explicitly advocated the view of the Jew
as essentially a nomad: “[W]e don’t progress.... The place is
always a place in which you are there, but without being, and from there you
have to go on to somewhere else.”28 Tumarkin, too, contributed much
to the articulation of rootlessness as a chronic condition, describing himself
as “a citizen of this country but loathing most of its inhabitants and
yet feeling so utterly attached to every chord of its light and scenery. I
do not feel a Jew, and yet I am from here. Not from there. I feel no bond
with Germany—the country, the landscape, the people. Yet my culture
is mostly from there, not from here. Where have I come from? My Jewish mother?
And where shall I go in exile? To my German father?”29 Exile from the
land, which Zionism had depicted as a terrible aberration from the normal
life of a people, began to assume the dimensions of an unalterable fate, and
perhaps even an ideal.
Among the many Israeli artists who have in recent years embraced nomadism
as a Jewish principle is Michael Sgan-Cohen, who has produced an entire series
of autobiographical drawings exploring his crisis of identity. In one, Wandering
Jew (1983), a bird-like anthropomorphoid stands with a hand pointing to the
back of its head, as if it were holding a gun. Another hand extends from heaven,
suggesting the divine origin of the curse. The message differs little from
early Zionist depictions of the tragedy of exile, but with one salient difference:
The condition of exilic wandering is unmitigated by having settled in Israel.
A related image of unending Jewish nomadism is found in Michael Druks’
folio collection Flexible Geography: My Private Atlas. Among these works is
Uganda-Brazil (1979), which consists of two maps chosen at random from around
the globe. With black ink Druks blots out all of the land surface except for
a coastal strip shaped exactly like the modern state of Israel. The work reminds
the viewer of the time, a century earlier, when the Zionists were desperately
searching for a location for a Jewish place of refuge, and were willing to
consider a whole host of strange locales, most infamously Uganda; in the final
analysis, it suggests, the present-day location of the Israeli is in any case
arbitrary, exchangeable for any other. Similarly, the works of Jennifer Bar-Lev
make frequent use of English words and phrases to imply that the Jew is only
at home when he is on the road. In Wandering (1989), the title stands alone
on a brightly painted board. In The Gypsy Carnival (1990; Fig. 8), strings
of paste-up letters give voice to Bar-Lev’s fantasy of being carried
off by the paradigmatic nomadic people: “The Gypsies have painted their
eyes black,” reads one sequence. “They offer to paint mine too.”
Like their Jewish nationalist predecessors, contemporary artists in Israel
do not hesitate to invoke biblical motifs to get their message across; yet
now the message is that there is no promised land, only dispersion and wandering
in the desert. Among the many examples are the works of Bracha Ettinger-Lichtenberg.
In her Eye of the Compass: Lapsus (1990), she presents numerous photocopied
and inscribed sheets of paper installed in a formation which constantly draws
the attention of the observer away from its center, out to the periphery and
beyond. In the middle appears God’s command to Abraham: Lech l’cha—“Get
you gone.” A more sophisticated exploration of the same theme is Igael
Tumarkin’s Land Without Water (1984), a crude arrangement of iron bars
and cloth suggesting a primitive shelter or an altar, on which is emblazoned
the slogan (in Latin characters) Lekh lekha lamidbar (“Get you gone
to the wilderness”). While the inscription refers to Abraham, the title
is an allusion to the biblical passage in which the Israelites, wandering
in the desert, have lost their only source of water. Faithless and embittered,
they turn against Moses for having led them into the wilderness—but
in the context of Tumarkin’s work, it is the state of Israel itself
which is now understood to be a parched desert, in which the people cry: “Why
did you bring the people of God to this wilderness, that we and our cattle
should die here? And why did you take us out of Egypt to this miserable place,
not a fertile land of figs, grapes and pomegranates, and there is no water
to drink?”30
Over the past twenty years, Israel’s artists have also exhibited a
predilection for “installations” and “projects” which
cross artistic media, in search of ever-more striking ways of depicting the
crisis of the Jew who is settled in Israel, and therefore removed from his
natural environment. In 1974, Pinchas Cohen-Gan mounted his Dead Sea Project
in which freshwater fish were sent out onto the Dead Sea in a semi-permeable
boat filled with fresh water. As the water gradually turned brackish, the
fish died; in his published notes, taken while working on the project, Cohen-Gan
compared the fish to the Jews of various nationalities relocating to Israel.
A similar use of fish, plants, and other acutely mislocated and suffering
objects to represent the situation of the Israeli Jew can be found in one
work after another, including Avital Geva’s Greenhouse Project (1985),
in which the artist and prominent art critic inhabited a greenhouse in order
to sympathize with the artificially transplanted shoots, and Benny Efrat’s
Eclipse of Achievements (1992), in which live plants and fish were brought
to live in claustrophobic drums, which allowed in air and light only through
apertures in the lid. Uri Katzenstein’s Installation for “Postscripts”31
(1992) likewise features a large motor scooter—yet another symbol of
rootlessness and mobility—which has somehow been marooned in the fork
of a tree. By sympathizing with the suffering of transplanted and nonviable
entities, the Israeli artist indentifies himself as just such an entity, a
perennial nomad trapped in an artificially constructed homeland.
Nor does this parade of wandering stop at abstracted expressions of misplacement
or rootlessness; only sixty years after celebrating the arrival of the Jew
on his land, Israeli artists have become chroniclers of his departure. Thus
Pinchas Cohen-Gan’s Green Card series of 1978 is devoted entirely to
reproducing questionnaires, maps and other paraphernalia related to the test
administered to prospective United States residents. Similar themes are explored
by Ido Bar-El’s numerous compositions featuring suitcases (1988-1990),
and Benny Efrat’s Quest for Air, Spring 2037 (1989), which features
a suitcase open on top of a bed, the entire assembly enclosed in a metal cage.
The artist Joshua Borokovsky has produced an impressive body of work dedicated
to the depiction of great ships at full sail and enormous expanses of ocean
with the representation of land driven to the periphery. In such works as
his Triptych (1989-1990), Borokovsky combines both images, heightening the
sensation of participating in a great journey. And Moshe Ninio’s Sea
States series (1978-1984) offers an array of views from the rear of a ship
that has left shore—all that is left is the wake of the boat on a flat
gray background. In one of them, the caption “In case of unexpected
disaster” appears, recalling Nasser’s promise to drive the Jews
into the sea. In another, the word “Exit,” in English and in Hebrew,
is superimposed on one corner of the image.32 The ship is ready to set sail,
says Ninio, and all one has to do is get on board.
And what of the national past? What of the Israeli artist’s identity
as a Jew who has come home to his land? A string of homely English letters
in Jennifer Bar-Lev’s The Gypsy Carnival spells out her answer: “I
am just passing through on my way to someplace else.”
Boris Schatz hoped to build an artistic community in Israel that would provide
the Jewish nation, newly returned to its land, with a “sanctuary in
the wilderness.” Yet only a few generations after the initiation of
this great dream, Israeli art offers the soul of the Jewish nation no place
of rest and no sanctuary. Indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: Israeli
art has itself been consumed by the wilderness. The decades-long campaign
waged by Israel’s artists against every aspect of the Jewish national
home has by now left nothing standing of what the early Zionist artists sought
to create. Far from coming to rest, the Jewish artists of Israel have vomited
out the land of their fathers from their hearts; even where their bodies and
works have yet to emigrate physically, they have departed from the land in
spirit.
Perhaps this constant rehearsal of departure is a harbinger of good, and
the depths of national self-abasement which flow from Israel’s studios
are only preparing the ground for a reaction, a revolution in the culture
of the Jewish state yet to come. But if not, if the show is, as we are told,
indeed over, then all that will be left for future observers is to sweep the
stage, turn off the lights and write one final retrospective, whose conclusion
is clear: Here was born, here developed, here atrophied and died a noble movement
in art.
Avraham Levitt is a Graduate Fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage
Books, 1973), p. 11.
2. Boris Schatz, Betzalel: History, Essence and Future (Jerusalem:
Snunit, 1910), p. 8. [Hebrew]
3. Attributed to Schatz in Binyamin Tamuz, History of Israeli Art (Giv’atayim:
Massada, 1980), p. 14. [Hebrew]
4. Note especially illustrations from Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto
(Berlin: B. Herz, 1902); the illustrated Bible (Braunschweig: G. Westermann,
1908); and the bookplate prepared by Lilien for Boris Schatz (collection of
the Israel Museum). Lilien had also frequently photographed Herzl before his
death; his photograph depicting Herzl standing at a balcony has become one
of the most famous images of the Zionist movement.
5. Raban designed the cover of the World Zionist Organization’s Golden
Book (1913), the doors to Bikur Cholim Hospital in Jerusalem (1920s), and
advertisements for Jaffa Oranges in the 1930s.
6. Nachum Gutman, Two Stones Which Make One, cited in Tamuz, History,
p. 46.
7. Cf. especially Gideon Stachel, The Jewish Immigration from Germany
to Israel 1933-39, Hebrew University doctoral dissertation, Jerusalem,
1995, passim.
8. Stachel, Jewish Immigration, p. 155. The figure cited is 70 percent.
9. Cited in Tamuz, History, p. 103.
10. Buber, a friend of Krakauer’s and himself a refugee from Germany,
described these works as depicting not national achievement, but individual
loneliness and alienation: “The solitude within Krakauer met with the
solitude of this landscape.... Only as the artist of the solitude and isolation
that is in Jerusalem’s landscape, did Krakauer become all that he was.”
Martin Buber, “The Anguish of Solitude: The Art of Leopold Krakauer,”
Ariel: A Review of Arts and Letters in Israel 9 (Winter 1965), p. 5.
11. Notable among these are Jacob and Esau of 1950 and 1965, Hagar (1951),
two entitled Hagar and Ishmael (1957), and especially Abraham Banishes Hagar
and Ishmael (1965-66).
12. Indeed, Lehmann spoke German in his classes and workshops. “He knew
that one of the distinguishing marks of belonging to a culture is the language,
but he never became fluent in Hebrew.... In the lessons he gave there was
always an ‘interpreter.’” Annie Goldenberg, Man is Nothing
but the Shape of His Native Landscape, exhibition catalogue (Tefen: Open Museum,
1994), p. 145. See also Igael Tumarkin, “My Teacher and Master, Rudi
Lehmann” in Tziyur Ufisul 4 (Summer 1973), p. 27: “He
said to me, ‘...Ja.’ I attempted to speak several sentences in
German, and he said, ‘Gut ... at least you speak German.’”
13. Yitzchak Dantziger, interview conducted by Ben-Ami Sharfstein, “Conversations
with the Artist,” in Mordechai Omer, ed., Makom (Tel Aviv: United
Kibbutz, 1982).
14. See especially, Negev Sheep (1951-64), the series of Sheep-folds executed
through the 1960s, and the Shepherd King (1964-66).
15. Tumarkin, “My Teacher,” p. 27.
16. See especially Shemi’s Memorial at Ben Gurion Airport (1972), Tumarkin’s
Arad Panorama (1962-68), and Tamuz’s Pilots’ Memorial (1949).
17. Lehmann did not return to Germany in his lifetime, and often refused offers
to exhibit there.
18. Tumarkin’s father did not serve in the SS as is commonly and mistakenly
believed, although Tumarkin’s uncle did.
19. Rafi Lavie, quoted in Ruth Debel, “What Does it Mean to Be an Israeli
Artist,” Art News 77:5 (May 1978), p. 55.
20. When asked for his opinions on the cultural symbols employed in his works,
and on “leaders in general,” Lavie replied, “They’re
all schmucks!” Cited in Sara Breitberg-Semel, The Want of Matter:
A Quality in Israeli Art, exhibition catalogue (Tel Aviv: The Tel Aviv
Museum, 1986).
21. According to the artist Oded Feingersh, in private conversation with the
author, November 18, 1996.
22. The novel in its original form was also turned into an extremely popular
play. In 1967 a movie was produced based on the play, directed by Joseph Millo
and starring a youthful Asi Dayan. A scene was added to the film in which
the hero’s son serves heroically in the Six Day War.
23. Yosl Bergner, cited in Shlomo Shvah, Pioneers and Flowers, exhibition
catalogue (New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1980).
24. Compare Bergner’s elaboration on The Idealists: “The pioneers
are actors taking part in a play... the audience, watching, sees the new scenery,
but not one of them dares tell the actors that they are acting in the wrong
play.” Bergner, cited in Shvah, Pioneers. A similar point is hammered
home with especial poignancy in Bergner’s Destination X (1974), which
depicts an endless procession of the same empty chairs stretched across a
desert landscape recalling Sinai. The chairs cannot know that their weary
march leads nowhere.
25. Yigal Zalmona, “Micha Ullman: Root and Metamorphosis,” in
Micha Ullman: 1980-1988, exhibition catalogue (Jerusalem: The Israel
Museum, 1988), p. 10. Ullman is best known for his digging of holes. The digging
of holes and the subsequent removal or displacement of earth redefines nature
while at the same time emptying it of its content. By emptying spaces of their
content Ullman leaves them open to be reconsidered, to be refilled with new
meanings and significance. In 1972 Ullman switched the dirt from holes which
he had dug in Kibbutz Metzer and a neighboring Arab village (Messer) “as
an act of political and existential unity.” The dirt and the documented
reactions of the inhabitants of the respective villages were displayed at
a later exhibition. Zalmona, “Micha Ullman,” p. 6.
26. The Presence of the Absent: The Empty Chair in Israeli Art, The Genia
Schreiber University Gallery, May-August 1991, exhibition catalogue (Tel
Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1991).
27. Sarit Shapira, “Waymarks: Local Moves,” in Routes of Wandering:
Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art, exhibition
catalogue (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1991), pp. 235, 241.
28. Edmond Jabès in an interview with the artist Bracha Ettinger-Lichtenberg,
“This is the Desert. Nothing Strikes Root Here.” Routes of
Wandering, p. 246.
29. Igael Tumarkin, “Identity,” Tumarkin 1981-1982, Neve
Tzedek Theatrical Center, 1982 exhibition catalogue (Tel Aviv: Arieli Press,
1982). Translation is Tumarkin’s and can be found in Tumarkin Sculptures
1957-1992 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1992).
30. Numbers 20:4-5.
31. “Postscripts: ‘End’—Representations in Contemporary
Israeli Art,” another fascinating exercise in nihilism and despair in
modern Israeli art, was a 1992 exhibition at the The Genia Schreiber University
Gallery of Tel Aviv University.
32. Shapira, “Waymarks,” pp. 203-204.