In 2008, Bilhah, the widow of noted Israeli artist Moshe Castel acquiesced to move both her home and the adjacent museum dedicated to her husband’s art from the Old City of Safed to the Jerusalem suburb of Ma’ale Adumim.
While Castel’s murals hang in the Knesset, the Binyanei Hauma Convention Center, the Rockefeller Center in New York, and the official residence of the president of Israel in Jerusalem, the Castel Museum hosts nearly all the other important works by the acclaimed artist.
Castel was described after his death in 1991 by art historian Gideon Ofrat as a member of the “heroic period of Israeli modernism.” Ofrat added that Castel was a victim of “violence by art critics and a withdrawal by the cultural establishment.”
“He remained singular,” Ofrat told art writer Ruthi Regev, “without pupils.”
The basalt artwork at the President’s Residence, Glory Kotel for Jerusalem, is familiar to anyone following the news. This is because it has been shown in the background of every government inauguration press photo since Menachem Begin.
Like "using a time machine"
“When visitors come,” Moshe Castel Museum curator Alek D. Epstein told The Jerusalem Post, “they can go back and watch works of art shown at famous exhibitions as if they were using a time machine.”
“What we have here,” he pointed out, “doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. In one spot we have 65 years of accumulated artistic labor.”
“There will always be script,” former Moshe Castel Museum CEO Eli Raz explained about Castel’s mature paintings, “because everything in them comes from the written word.”
Castel used Arabic, ancient Hebrew, Cuneiform, and other regional writing systems to reach a highly personal aesthetic. The textual density in his work is awe-inspiring. Most viewers, except perhaps biblical archeology professors, will not be able to read them.
It is only after a while that the eye begins to notice plants, a priest, human figures, and women. The heavy paintings, usually made with crushed minerals, transmit a unique energy. They might resemble the masculine drip action paintings of Jackson Pollock, but unlike those, these are highly structural. The movement in Castel’s paintings is divided into sections and is restrained.
The rich hues Castel labored over, grinding mineral samples with meticulous precision, are reminiscent of how Anish Kapoor lavishes pigments on his sculptures to offer a taste of the sublime, even while Kapoor’s outlook differs from Castel’s.
For example, Kapoor purchased the exclusive rights to use Vantablack pigment. Said to be the blackest black ever produced, Vantablack is used to prevent light from entering telescopes in space. In contrast, Castel ground his pigments by hand and took them from the very earth of the land he felt connected to.
“His understanding of Jacob’s Ladder,” said Raz, “was not like the Western one. Christian tradition depicted a ladder on which angels ascend and descend. Castel followed a unique, Jewish understanding, according to which man himself is the ladder connecting heaven and earth.”
The collection offers a deeply satisfying journey that begins with Castel’s paintings from the Bezalel Art Academy of 1920s Jerusalem, continues with works created in France, moves on to his involvement with the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) art group in the 1940s, and depicts his role in the foundation of the Safed Artists’ Quarter after the 1948 War of Independence.
According to Raz, French friends of Castel teased the artist by saying that even when he paints French models he is unable to restrain himself from painting Jerusalem-like buildings in the background.
While Bilhah Castel’s home is not usually open to the public, Castel Museum CEO Haggai Sasson opened it up for our tour. Castel’s widow oversaw the work carried out to build the museum and lived alongside it. The charming residence is furnished with elegant French furniture and offers an intimate look into the life of the artist. “It is possible to visit the home upon special request,” Sasson explained.
Thanks to the generosity of art collector Zohar Bernard Cohen, the museum now exhibits showing never-seen-before works by Pinchas Shaar. Born in Poland and of the same generation as Castel, Shaar was a brilliant Jewish artist who survived the Lodz Ghetto, lived in Tel Aviv, painted in New York, and is now sadly known only to a handful of art lovers.
Shaar’s first painting after his liberation was created with paint and canvas given to him by the UN International Refugee Organization and is now in the Yad Vashem collection. It depicts a Jewish refugee sitting on whatever meager possessions he was able to save.
In Israel, Shaar befriended Naftali Bezem. Bezem, sent to Israel from Poland the age of 14 by his parents before the Holocaust, designed the Palmach symbol as well as the ceiling of Beit HaNassi.
He worked as a theater set designer and was one of the first artists to open a studio in Jaffa. The paintings on display at the Castel Museum are vivid and imaginative. Created in New York during the 1970s and 1980s, they express a deeply rooted sense of Jewish visual imagination.
One unusual work, a large diptych depicting a golden chariot pulled by a flaming horse as the painter behind it soars, is breathtaking. Its sheer delight in the creative act, the painterly genius that delivers in an instant a powerful emotion, is worth the trip.
In a country where the city of Bat Yam destroyed paintings by Issachar Ber Ryback after it had kept them in a water tower for decades; and Ashdod made no effort to hold on to the Kenda and Jacob Bar-Gera collection of art made by persecuted artists, Ma’ale Adumim has risen to the task of creating and maintaining a museum which honors an original Israeli painter and his generation of Jewish artists.
‘The Art of Pinchas Shaar – from the Biblical World to the New World and Back,’ will be shown until the end of the month. Museum opening hours are Sunday to Thursday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Free admission. Call (02) 535-7000 to learn more. Guided tours are offered in a variety of languages, such as English, Russian, Italian, and Arabic. (Beit Castel, where Moshe and Bilha once lived, is still an art gallery.)
Alek D. Epstein and Sofia Birina published an English language book on the Bar-Gera collection in 2022 titled ‘Kenda and Jacob Bar Gera and their Unique Collection.’