Born to Paint

Growing up in working-class Haifa, being a painter was not in the cards. So Shmuel Groberman became an architect before finally returning to his first love.

By CARL HOFFMAN
shmuel groberman 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
shmuel groberman 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
At the ripe age of 58, Shmuel Groberman has finally realized that his life was planned and neatly mapped out for him before he was even born. Groberman was born to be a painter, whether he likes it or not. Fortunately for him, and for us, he does.
“I have always known that I was named Shmuel after my mother’s brother, who died in the Holocaust, and that he had been a painter,” Groberman recalls. “In recent years I realized that, for my parents, I was him.
“As I got older, I realized that for all our families, all the members of my generation are like living gravestones for those who died. In my case, I got my uncle’s name, and I understand that from the minute I was born, they gave me a pencil and told me that I would be a painter. I had no other choice.”
It was only recently however, while preparing the catalog for his current and first solo exhibition of paintings, that Groberman discovered that his name and artistic identity had even deeper roots.
“I was at my parents’ house, looking at photographs from my childhood. I discovered that my dead uncle Shmuel was also named after an uncle of his named Shmuel, and that Shmuel had been a painter as well. So maybe my being a painter is due to genetics. I don’t know.”
WHAT GROBERMAN does know is that he was carefully groomed to be a painter from the beginning of his life.
“It was in the early 1950s, the time of the tzena (austerity),” he says. “We had no money. My father worked, my mother was a housewife. My parents gave me pencils, but they couldn’t buy me drawing paper – so they allowed me to draw on the walls.
“So around half a meter of wall in my house was always covered with my drawings. Every month, my father would paint it over, giving me new ‘drawing paper.’ I grew up to be the class painter in kindergarten, in elementary school, always.
“I participated in an exhibition of paintings. My friends from childhood remember me as ‘Shmuel the Painter.’” So Groberman grew up, became a painter, and lived happily ever after, right? Wrong. Being a painter was simply not an option for a boy growing up in the 1950s in a tough working-class part of Haifa, where “painter” and “parasite” were considered to be roughly equivalent terms.
“The workers in heavy industry of Haifa did not believe that a man should be an artist. Maybe an engineer, but not an artist. And these were the people I grew up with, all working- class. And from where I grew up, you could always see the Technion on Mount Carmel.
“So for me, the solution was architecture, the right combination of art and a ‘real’ job.” Groberman has thus been an architect for his entire adult life.
In the beginning, Groberman did not see much difference between painting and architecture – between “fine” and“applied” art. He, in fact, approached his job as an architect with the sensibility of an artist.
“My approach to architecture, back then and today, is to think first of all of the image, and then the experience of space,” he says. “I try most of all to actualize a vision. A client’s needs, the building’s function, the project budget and so on are crucial considerations when planning a structure, but without a vision you end up with nothing.
“I’m talking primarily about an artistic vision, but this goes along with a human vision, a social vision. You can’t separate the artistic vision from this. They go together.”
Groberman even anticipated his later return to painting by the way he worked as an architect – drawing freehand, without a ruler, to “establish the vision.”
His most famous work as a young architect was the Spiral Apartment House in Ramat Gan – sometimes referred to by locals as the “Crazy House” – in collaboration with architect Zvi Hecker in the mid-1980s. For those who have seen this beautifully bizarre, now iconic building, no description is necessary.
For those who have not, no description is possible.
Success followed success and, in time, Groberman not only established his own company but also began to teach architecture at Tel Aviv University and the Holon Institute of Technology. Slowly but surely, however, the worm of dissatisfaction began to gnaw.
“In the past few years, I have reached certain understandings about my life, my family, and the history of my family,” he says. “I have come to understand, in a more mature way, the essential and significant differences between architecture and art.
“Architecture involves a lot of time spent on trivial stuff like bureaucracy, registration, laws, rules about construction and making endless compromises. If I could invest the time I spend with this on art, I could go far.
In architecture, the time you invest in being creative is small, maybe no more than five percent of the time you actually work on a project. With art, it’s 100%.”
After 30 years of being an architect, Groberman found himself in an almost classic “midlife crisis” dilemma, having to choose between the comfortable, well-worn path he was on and the more enticing road not taken.
He says, “On the one hand, I love architecture.
I have the ability to make a real impact on people’s lives, by planning the environment in which they live and interact.
Architecture gives you a bigger influence on society and culture than art.
“Many people experience architecture, whether they want to or not. You build a building, it’s big, it’s there, and it’s there for many years. Your effect is phenomenal, whether it’s good or bad. But it carries a lot of responsibilities. These responsibilities severely limit what you can do.
“I like doing architecture because it has a lot of power, and it’s very important. On the other hand, I need another field of creativity where I can feel free and work without limits.”
THUS DID Groberman manage to remain an architect while becoming, once again, Shmuel the Painter.
“For the last six years,” he says, “I’ve been doing both, and I feel great about it. It’s like living with two women. One is very sexy and the other is very clever.”
Before he goes to the office of his architecture firm every day, Groberman gets up early in the morning to paint.
How early? “Sometimes around 3 a.m.,” he says.
He shows up at his office around 10, puts in a day’s work, and resumes painting when he comes home at night. He and his wife live in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa; the office is not far from their home.
Groberman is now, at long last, in the midst of his first exhibition, enigmatically entitled “Them.” A figurative artist, he describes his paintings as being one degree away from photographic realism. Yet while his paintings are visually accessible and easy to understand, they are conceptually very puzzling, and often disturbing.
“When I began to paint extensively around six years ago, I felt that I wanted to say something about my life and the people I live with – not only my family but also my clients, the people I was working for, the contractors, the clerks, the people who buy apartments.
“Because as an architect, I felt the truth about them – behind their masks, behind their external behavior. I understood them as human beings and became curious about their social behavior as a group.
“What was moving them, driving them? What were their interests, and why? I decided that this mystery could be very good fodder for art.
So I began to paint these people.
“I collected them and took them to the beach or to the forest. We would make a fire, and I would bring them wine. I asked them to dress as through they were going to the concert hall. They didn’t know where they were going. They had no idea.
“I told them, ‘Trust me. It will be okay.’ AndI gave them rakes and shovels. Their body language fascinated me. And I photographed them in these situations, which were very weird. I used cameras to freeze the moment, and had a very good basis for art.”
THE RESULTING paintings are mesmerizing, largely because the scenes they depict do not draw the viewer in. As opposed to paintings that make the viewer wish he could enter the picture and be part of the scene, Groberman’s paintings of the bonfires in the forest and the gatherings on the beach leave us quite content to be voyeurs, watching from a comfortable distance; sometimes amused, and sometimes aghast.
The beach scenes are amusing. Looking at one picture, Hatikva, in particular, one is almost reminded of the famous 1909 photograph of the founding of Tel Aviv, in which a group of seriously overdressed people stand amidst the sand dunes on which the new city is expected to rise.
Asked what he told his friends and clients they would be doing when he gathered them together, Groberman replies, “Nothing. I told them to dress in evening clothes. Then I took them to the beach, gave them shovels and told them to start working.
“At first they were embarrassed. They started joking about it. But after a few minutes, they started to get into the role. They got it.
They started being ‘them.’ “One started giving orders to the others; another tried to not do anything and just rest; a third started talking on his cell phone.”
Groberman dodges the question of whether this painting is a kind of revenge for years of aggravation people gave him as an architect. He says simply: “When I’m painting, I don’t have the limitations of an architect in front of his clients. I don’t have to behave. I don’t have to understand them, or give them what they want.
I use them. I can show them exactly as they are.
This is freedom for me, a kind of release.”
The bonfire scenes are not amusing. A series of paintings show well-dressed women around a fire, ranging from watching the fire while drinking wine to finally being on fire themselves. An intermediate scene shows an elegantly dressed young woman lifting her evening dress far above the knee in a gesture of potential eroticism, only to kill the effect by wiping her nose with her dress.
“The paintings seem to be referencing everything from witches dancing in an enchanted forest to an old-fashioned youthmovement kumzitz.
What are these paintings about? Groberman says, “Women around a bonfire can arouse many different associations in different people. I’m sure that behind these pictures are all of my psychological problems – about women, about fire, about society, about me. It’s obviously about the darkness of the forest in the night.
“You can think about the prostitutes in Fellini’s Roma and other films, or you can think about the Shoah. You can think about sacrificing. And because these people around the fire are dressed very well, maybe it’s a requiem. Maybe it’s a youth-movement activity.
Everything is there. You can think whatever you want.”
The exhibition includes a series of family paintings depicting Groberman’s wife and two daughters, as well as a series of paintings called “Cyber.” These are scenes taken more or less directly from images posted on sexually oriented social network Internet sites.
Far from being erotic, the paintings are unmistakably sad.
Says Groberman, “I think it’s kind of a ritual.
I’m looking for human rituals. The pictures of fire or the beach are, for me, kinds of rituals.
The people in these cyber pictures feel safe in their homes, free to be who they are, but it’s in front of all the world. It’s total exposure.
“This is why the situation is so interesting.
Each frame tells a story of its own. A full story, even if it doesn’t include sex.
“Here you see a face. It’s a man alone, or a woman alone, hungering for warmth and intimacy.
You can see on the screen six, seven, eight women, from all places in the world, from Korea to Chile, behaving more or less the same, with the same sadness in the eyes.”
Groberman copies verbatim the words these people have used to advertise themselves. He says, “What’s interesting to see is the contrast between what we see on the computer screen and what they write about themselves below their pictures. There’s no connection whatsoever.”
Interestingly enough, Groberman almost always signs his work on the back of the painting, so as not to detract from the image.
“I don’t think that a signature contributes to a painting,” he explains, “and I’m old enough to restrain my ego.”
Our last question to Groberman is about “Them,” the title of his current exhibition.
“Who is them?” we ask.
“Them is us,” he replies.
“Them” is showing until March 4 at the Bernard Gallery, Rehov Ben-Yehuda 170, Tel Aviv. Monday-Thursday 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., 4 to 7 p.m., Friday 10 a.m. to 1 p.m..
http://www.bernard-gallery.com. Tel. (03) 527-0547.


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