Tripartite Highlights

Three exhibitions at Tel Aviv Museum portray much about Israel and its art history.

By ANNE SASSOON
art (photo credit: courtesy Larry Abramson)
art
(photo credit: courtesy Larry Abramson)
THREE SIGNIFICANT and very different Israeli painters have recently been shown concurrently at the Tel Aviv Museum: realist Avigdor Arikha, who died this year in Paris aged 81; politically aware postmodernist Larry Abramson; and kibbutz-based colorist Yadid Rubin.
The exhibitions were separately curated and the artists are unconnected, but seen together they portray much about Israel and its art history, each highlighting a different aspect. Arikha’s work continues the European tradition of painting in his own personal and idiosyncratic way; Abramson responds to the political environment and Zionist history; and Rubin more or less isolates himself from the world as an artist, and reinvents landscape painting to suit himself.
The harsh light of the Middle East may not have been the only reason that Avigdor Arikha finally withdrew from Jerusalem and made his home in Paris, but several years ago he told me in a telephone conversation that in his view the light in Israel was “impossible” for painting.
Natural light is no longer the essential issue it used to be for painters – these days they are more likely to work from photographs or the imagination than from nature. But light was essential to Arikha’s traditional European sensibility. He is a reminder that the generations of artists who have come to Israel from Russia and Europe have been challenged not only by a new country and language but an entirely different way of seeing.
Arikha had gravitas. As an art historian as well as serious painter and master draftsman, he had a solid background knowledge of every aspect of art. In addition to his fame as an artist – his work is in collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery in London – he wrote about art, curated exhibitions for the Louvre, lectured at the Prado, and was named a knight in France’s Legion of Honor in 2005.
Yet, despite his international renown and the broad success of his career, his work retains a nervous, hesitant, searching quality that gives it freshness and veracity – and an underlying uneasiness, which is often the real power of the work.
This modest homage to Arikha – it fills only two galleries – is made up of two parts: one devoted to graphic portraits and illustrations to S.Y. Agnon’s novel, “A Stray Dog,” from the 1950s, an exhibition Arikha helped to plan; the other is an exhibition of self-portraits from 1948 to 2001, hastily assembled, so it seems, out of what was readily available.
Born in Romania, Arikha was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp at the age of 13, where his natural ability to draw helped him to survive – his drawings of deportation scenes brought him to the attention of the International Red Cross. He came to Palestine, where he fought – and was badly injured – in the War of Independence.
An early self-portrait shows him asleep on the ground in his army uniform: one of a few young, romantic views that lead, after an attempt at abstraction (soon abandoned), to more rigorous self-examination as he grew older. Arikha stretched across his own canvas, his paintbrush touching the edge as though questioning where the painting begins and reality ends; or in colored underpants, seen from behind; and finally, elderly but still wide-eyed, he seems to be trying to catch himself in the act of painting and observing.
LARRY ABRAMSON PAINTS AS IF he were steering a canoe through a rocky gorge. His art twists and turns its way through challenges posed by postmodernist art theory, political ideas and feelings, and his own sense of history – and because he has a passion for painting it is a lively journey. But it is intellectual issues that fuel the work and determine its direction, rather than the painting itself.
Abramson, 56, was born in South Africa and moved to Israel with his family in 1961. One year at Chelsea School of Art in London in 1973 seems to have been enough to turn him away from studying art in a formal institution, yet he started teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1984, became chairman of its Fine Arts department in 1992, and since 2002 has been professor of Art at Shenkar College, located in Ramat Gan, a city adjacent to Tel Aviv.
This large exhibition of his work since 1975 shows an artist on an unpredictable adventure. He works in series, creating a different visual language to embody each new theme. To someone unfamiliar with his work, this could be a group show. His versatility is almost unnerving as he moves skillfully and with apparent ease from expressionist landscape painting to trompe-l’oeil still life, silhouette portraits, comic drawings and elegant hard-edge abstractions. But his work is shown and written about extensively in Israel, so that drastic changes in style are expected by his many admirers.
With expressive painting standing next to deadpan conceptualism, the viewer may feel a little teased: you may want to get caught up emotionally in the work but first have to read the small print, the curator’s explanation that hangs nearby, in order to discover what it is really about. In an exhibition that covers all the various phases of Abramson’s work, this means a lot of reading. But an enjoyment of creative play connects the different works, and for viewers who rebel against reading pedantic texts there is the pleasure of just looking.
For those who do read them, there is the discovery that a sense of tragedy lurks behind the intellectualism and artistry – something perhaps more personal than political. Either way, it adds a powerful underlying force to the work.
In 1995 Abramson painted “Tsooba,” a series of small square paintings based on photographs of the ruins of an Arab village near Jerusalem, abandoned by its residents, who fled in the 1948 War of Independence.
Kibbutz Tzuba was founded nearby soon after the war. Between 1970 and 1985, the veteran abstractionist Joseph Zaritsky often visited the kibbutz and painted this view, but while Zaritsky saw it simply as a beautiful Israeli landscape, Abramson’s paintings underline the other hidden side of the Zionist idyll. He adopts Zaritsky’s expressionist style in his own painting, blotting the images onto Israeli newsprint, so that you ‘read’ the painting through different layers.
Another series, “Pile,” is a large set of big gestural charcoal drawings that relate to collapsed buildings.
They suggest – if you are looking for it – the wider aspect of the collapse of ideals and political dilapidation, but stand on their own as exciting, explorative drawings.
In his most recent series, Abramson returns to color and meticulous hard-edge painting. Without reading the text, I guess these brightly colored compositions with geometric shapes, silhouettes of plants and lone, hovering insects are about disruption of the environment and feelings of alienation. You can be sure that nothing you see is the whole story, everything has layers of meaning.
Abramson paints while questioning the politics of painting, in terms of the do’s and don’ts of postmodernist art theory – and the politics of painting in Israel, in terms of its continuing problems and its historical background. His feat is to turn these questions of the mind into tangible, creative subject matter, and to make extraordinary connections between them. It is the vigor of his painting that grabs the attention but perhaps the rigor of his intellectualism that holds it.
ENTERING YADID RUBIN’S exhibition, vibrant color comes like a delicious shock to the eye – and yet he tells me that until 10 or 15 years ago he believes such color was considered by the art establishment to be unacceptable and “not of Israel.” Rubin, 73, was born on Kibbutz Givat Haim Ichud, which is where he grew up and still lives. His mother was director of the Cultural Committee of one of the kibbutz movements, and so dealt directly with artists on kibbutzim all over Israel. When Rubin was 18, his parents were Israeli emissaries in Vienna and he attended the Academy of Fine Arts for eight months. Returning to Israel, Rubin completed his army service, studied at the Avni School in Tel Aviv, and in 1967-8 at the Royal College of Art in London.
But although Rubin tells me that he always lived with a strong inner sense of color, he received no encouragement from teachers, theorists or fellow artists. It was only in 1985, after much searching and experimentation, that he finally managed to emerge as the natural colorist that he is.
Living on a kibbutz could be a mixed blessing for an artist: The isolation from an art community and dependency on the goodwill of a committee with the power to grant or refuse studio space and painting time could be problematic. But Rubin says that it has suited him from the start. As a young artist living on the kibbutz, he would work for half the year in the fields, and for the other half he was allowed to paint, with a studio and art materials provided for him – free of the usual financial worries of a young artist. And today, as a successful artist, it still suits him to live on the kibbutz.
The experience of spending long hours in the fields fed into Rubin’s work and became his subject matter. For an artist who says he prefers to go into himself and not be bothered by the outside world, isolation from an art community that, in any case, he found unsympathetic, has been an advantage.
As a viewer, there is a vicarious pleasure in seeing the early monochromatic work give way to the rich, expressionist landscapes; and then go further into an exuberance of pure color that looks as if it has been squeezed straight out of the tube. You can almost feel the painter’s rising confidence.
Isolation can lead to a certain eccentricity, not necessarily a bad thing for a painter. These last paintings are better enjoyed from a distance: simple, reductive compositions that look as if they have been embroidered with dots and stripes of thick paint, they are all about the excitement of color, leaving behind the painterly surfaces and layers of movement from before as irrelevancies.
The three exhibitions touch on different facets of Israel: the cultural connection to Europe; the self-interrogation of one who experienced the Holocaust; current problems and the layers of history that lie behind them; the particularity of the kibbutz experience of life, where there is culture and society, combined with a kind of isolation but also a lack of privacy. 

“Homage to Avigdor Arikha,” curated by Prof. Mordechai Omer, until November 27; Yadid Rubin: “Plowed Color,” curated by Dr. Galia Bar Or and Yaniv Shapira, until December 18; “Larry Abramson: Paintings 1975-2010,” curated by Ellen Ginton, closed November 9.