Books: Along Weishoff’s way

Eliezer Weishoff has created some of the most iconic artworks in Israeli history

By BARRY DAVIS
A BRONZE sculpture of a dog by Eliezer Weishoff (photo credit: Courtesy)
A BRONZE sculpture of a dog by Eliezer Weishoff
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Eliezer Weishoff is one of this country’s most successful artists, if not the most successful, at least in marketing terms. The now 79-year-old multidisciplinary creator has had copies of his works distributed around the world in the hundreds of thousands.
And you don’t have to hop on a plane to see his art. Whenever you drive past, or walk or cycle through, a Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund forest, for example, you are more than likely to come across an outsized figure of a green and blue bird, the KKL symbol that Weishoff created.
He is also responsible for the design of the old purple NIS 50 note, featuring Nobel Prize for Literature laureate S.Y. Agnon. Now, after over a half a century of creative endeavor, Weishoff has finally committed some of his expansive oeuvre to book form, with the publication of Works Along the Way.
The coffee table-size tome, published by Yediot Aharonot, opens with a neat introduction courtesy of octogenarian Israeli history professor Mordechai Naor, half a dozen pages of biographical narrative and 10 pages that shed light on the enormous breadth of Weishoff’s works.
The aforementioned Hebrew text is followed by almost 100 pages of reproductions. It is clear from the outset that Weishoff has eclectic tastes and is perfectly happy and willing to create as the muse takes him or as the commission necessitates.
His offerings include postage stamps, posters, paintings, sculptures from various materials, medals, installations in various public spaces and in the Knesset, and even exhibition pavilion design. There doesn’t seem to be much that is aesthetically attractive that Weishoff has not produced over the decades.
Perusing the vastness of his artistic reach, and all the official items he has created to order, one is tempted to attach a heavyweight epithet to Weishoff. Perhaps, I venture, we should call him “the national artist.” While admitting that he has been there and done that in artistic and design terms, Weishoff parries any suggestion that he may have sold his soul to keep the wolves at bay.
“I have engaged in numerous things, but it has all been genuine,” he notes in a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, adding that his professional bent, and his steadfastness to get on with things, may have been to his cost. “You get down to your work, and you are immersed in your creative pursuit, you are less given to public relations. There is the public, but no relations,” he laughs wryly. “That’s something that I have always missed out on.”
Weishoff says he was so involved in getting on with what he does best that he eschewed the requisite community mingling and socializing of many of his peers. Long leisurely afternoons at Tel Aviv’s Café Kassit, hobnobbing with the likes of Israel Prize-winning poet and playwright Natan Alterman, poet-painter-filmmaker David Avidan, or actor Chaim Topol were simply not for him. While they were enjoying tea, coffee or a scone or two, Weishoff was just holding down his day job – full-time artist.
Mind you, this is not the first time Weishoff’s work has been committed to book form. There is his iconic Zikit (“The Chameleon”), a perennial favorite of kids and, it must be said, their parents. “There’s a park based on the book,” says Weishoff with more than a hint of pride, commissioned by the Holon Municipality in 2011, which features all sorts of phantasmagorical creatures.
IT ALL began for Weishoff, a longtime resident of Tel Aviv, with a studio on Jaffa Road in the capital. “I was born in the Mahaneh Yehuda neighborhood,” he recalls. “I was the only Ashkenazi kid in my area, but I got on with everyone.
I was just as mischievous as everybody else,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. His natural gifts also brought him early popularity. “At elementary school I was considered the class artist,” he chuckles.
The youngster got plenty of requisite encouragement both from home and from an illustrious educator of the day. “My father was a hardworking metalworker,” he says. “He came from a sophisticated Polish family and he took me to museums.
“And there was [iconic historian and geographer] Zev Vilnay; he took me on lots of field trips around Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside.” It was a formative time for the young Weishoff. “Before the War of Independence he took me to all sorts of places and to synagogues.”
That was augmented by some paternal guidance. “You could say my father was anti-religious, but he inculcated that [religious] culture in me too. And, every Shabbat, he’d take me to Bezalel, which was then called the Bezalel National Museum.”
It wouldn’t be too long before the talented youngster found himself right in the educational thick of things. “No one really knew what to do with me at school, and I kept moving from high school to high school,” Weishoff says, “but I always intended to get into Bezalel.”
Not only did he achieve that goal, he did so at a ridiculously early age. “They couldn’t accept me to the school when I was only 14, although I was more than ready for it.” Still, he didn’t have to wait too long to enter the hallowed art school’s portal.
“They took me when I was 16, on a full stipend,” he recalls. “That was my big break. If they hadn’t taken me in I would have been a sad character for the rest of my life.”
Long before the IDF officially recognized talented teenagers, in the late 1950s the army waited for Weishoff to complete his studies at Bezalel and eventually placed him somewhere where he could make use of his artistic abilities.
“I was in the paratroopers to begin with, because I was very fit. That was why it was so difficult for me to get myself transferred to the Bemahaneh Gadna newspaper. Everyone who went to Bezalel wanted to serve at Bemahaneh Gadna.
That’s why it was so difficult to get in.” Weishoff put in umpteen requests and ultimately got his wish, becoming an illustrator and art editor at the military publication.
It might have been a hard grind getting there, but Weishoff is eternally grateful for the stint he put in. “Ostensibly I was a jobnik [desk jockey] but I worked very hard. Without all the experience I got there – going to printing presses, and learning about the whole publishing process – I don’t think I would have gotten to be where I am today. I also wrote for the paper and was the graphics editor.”
Looking around Weishoff’s spacious working facilities, you get some sense of how his career has panned out in the intervening five decades plus. There are replicas, and the actual works themselves, of bronze sculptures, posters advertising the Bahamas as a tourist destination, a bronze bust of Yitzhak Rabin, a poster produced for Israel’s 40th Independence Day and various zoological figures.
He has also done his bit for our national exporting efforts by designing pavilions and stands for some of our trade exhibitors in foreign climes, as well as the instantly recognizable Hebrew logo of the Coca-Cola company, not to mention jewelry items and Judaica.
Weishoff also clearly has at least one finger on the pulse of the common man or woman. Works Along the Way includes some delightful portraits of familiar salt-of-the-earth characters from the neighborhood grocery or café. You can really sense their characters from the portraits.
At the end of the day, possibly, Weishoff is more a Jerusalemite than anything. There is a delectable painted tribute to the artisans who populated the Mahaneh Yehuda of his childhood. You might be able to take the Jerusalemite and relocate him down to the other end of Route 1, but you can’t take Jerusalem out of Weishoff.


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