Dan Livni has dedicated his life to Israeli society and culture: as a fighter who participated in five wars, as an educator who has nurtured generations of young artists and teachers, and as one of our country’s foremost painters. We are therefore very proud to exhibit his works at the Castel Museum.
Livni, a highly gifted painter, was born on January 25, 1936. His parents were natives of Ukraine and Poland and moved to Germany in 1921. In 1933, they immigrated to Eretz Israel. The artist’s mother was an activist in the Jewish underground paramilitary organization Hagana, while his father was involved in the construction of a phosphate factory on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 1934.
From the age of three, Livni lived on Kibbutz Maoz Haim. In 1954, he went on to serve in the IDF. While in the army, he took part in the 1956 Suez–Sinai War. He spent most of his military service in the Negev Desert, being enthralled by the mountains and canyons where no human being had ever set foot, and by the steep slopes and sheer cliffs, which reminded him of the lunar craters but which occasionally sheltered verdant oases strewn with flowers. Later, while on reserve duty, he fought on the front lines from the Six-Day War (1967) until the First Lebanon War (1982).
Even during military service, he continued sketching. A catalogue of 12 of his sketches executed in 1967 was published later (and is now a sought-after rarity). Since 2008, they have been on display at the Ammunition Hill Memorial Museum, which commemorates the 182 Israeli soldiers and officers who fell in the battle for Jerusalem during the Six Day War. After the Yom Kippur War, and then after the First Lebanon War, new catalogues were published, featuring the sketches Livni had produced during lulls in the fighting.
An eternal city
In 1958, Livni moved to Jerusalem and entered the Bezalel Art Academy. He lived on Kibbutz Ramat Rachel and was often so strapped for cash that he had to walk home. However, his passion for art gave him the strength to overcome all obstacles. He fell in love with Jerusalem, and the austere beauty of the Holy City became his main inspiration. While his paintings of the streets and houses of Haifa feature cars, ships, and people in the streets, his vistas of Jerusalem are utterly different. Devoid of any motion, they present a city where time has stood still, so there are passersby, vehicles, or vessels depicted.
After graduating from the Bezalel Art Academy and receiving first prize at a young artists competition held in Tel Aviv, Livni moved to Beersheba, where he began to work as a middle-school art teacher. Still living in Jerusalem, he married Ora Ben-Herut. A year later, they had twin daughters, Tali and Dafna (their third child, a son named Yonatan, would be born 16 years later, in 1979). That same year, the Beersheba municipal museum hosted Livni’s first exhibition, and in 1965 he was awarded first prize in the Beersheba and the South Art Exhibition.
In 1965, the Livnis moved to Haifa. For more than 38 years, he worked as an art teacher at a local high school. In addition to his paintings and drawings, Livni created a number of murals in public buildings all over Israel. He was also a book illustrator and theater designer. In 1967, he designed the stage set for a production of Fiddler on the Roof by Sholem Aleichem and L’Avare, ou l’École du mensonge, by Molière at the Haifa Youth Theater. Apart from that, he was an organizer and curator of art exhibitions and festive events.
Livni honed his artistic skills at the St. Martin School of Art in London; at the summer courses of the Reichenau Center, Austria; and at the Museum of Fine Arts’ School in Boston. Wherever he went, he met fellow artists and visited museums and exhibitions. But, above all, he was a passionate admirer of the local nature and a keen observer of its beauty, seeking to recreate it later in his works.
He had the same passion for nature back home in Israel. With his easel, Livni traveled to the Golan Heights and the Galilee, the Negev Desert, and the Sinai Peninsula. His painting is purely figurative, although it has nothing to do with photographic realism. Whenever he gets inspired by a natural or urban site, he not only pictures it the way it really is but also thinks of the way it used to look in the past and will look in the future; he then combines his ideas in an image that is conceived like a journey through time.
He confesses that he has always been concerned about the future and the survival of the Jewish state, and his reasons for this go far beyond the five wars that he has witnessed. In his own words, he has never forgotten the terrible pogroms that once forced his ancestors to leave Ukraine and Poland, or the Holocaust, which his parents escaped, but which claimed the lives of six million Jews. Most of his mother’s family, including four brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and children, were killed by the Nazis and their accomplices.
‘Broken Earth’
The Holocaust and the wars fought by the State of Israel radically intensified the feeling of existential instability and impermanence, which had accompanied the artist from adolescence. His painting Broken Earth is a metaphor for the Jewish state, a large part of which is situated in the Negev, where modern cities have sprung up. Livni’s painting shows none of that – only a crooked tree with vigorous roots growing on the edge of an empty crater and stretching its branches to the sky in a desperate attempt to reach it.
‘In Memory of the Dead’
The huge candles one can see in his painting titled In Memory of the Dead rise from the sand in the middle of a mountainous desert covered with cracked soil, like huge trees, with no trace of human presence; hence, there is no telling if anyone is left to keep alive the memory of a nation that has almost died.
Livni’s work has been exhibited in major Israeli cities and internationally. In total, dozens of his exhibitions have been held in Israel, and 11 others have taken place abroad.
Livni has certainly earned well-deserved acclaim and attention; he has been the recipient of a number of prizes awarded by the Haifa Municipality, for example. In 2011, he received a prize for his lifetime achievements from the Israel Painters and Sculptors Association (Haifa and the Northern District).
Taking all this into account, we decided to award Livni the Moshe Castel Prize for his outstanding contribution to Israeli art, which was presented to him on December 4, 2024. At the same time, we began preparing a representative exhibition of the artist and a catalog. Now that the exhibition is open and the catalogue has been published, we invite everyone to visit the Castel Museum in Ma’ale Adumim.
Livni is one of the few artists who draw on Israeli history, nature, and contemporary spirit for inspiration, while also displaying tremendous professional ability. His meticulous technique and vibrant colors define his style. He has found his own unique path, carrying on the traditions started by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and the Surrealist artists, although his visual language is different from those used by painters like Samuel Bak or Zeev Kun, whose style goes back to the same roots.
Livni gives a new meaning to every place captured on his canvas, transforming it into a microcosm that has a historical, philosophical, and even a futuristic dimension, so that every location, no matter how familiar, appears completely new to the viewer. His personal philosophical and artistic reflections result in the symbolic coexistence of different temporal perspectives on the same canvas. But, most importantly, Dan Livni’s paintings enable us to view the life that goes on around us through the prism of eternity.■