Today’s newspaper, tomorrow’s art

How a child immigrant grew up to become an artist and an Israeli, combining the country’s news with its flowers.

By BARRY DAVIS
The ‘Jerusalem Post’ series at the Israel Museum feeds off an adolescent epiphany (photo credit: ELIE POSNER AND OFRIT ROSENBERG)
The ‘Jerusalem Post’ series at the Israel Museum feeds off an adolescent epiphany
(photo credit: ELIE POSNER AND OFRIT ROSENBERG)
Even though Larry Abramson, a former Jerusalemite and now Tel Avivian, made aliya at the tender age of seven and 55 years on is clearly very much an Israeli, it seems there has always been a part of him that really wants to be a sabra, to turn the clock back – as it were – almost to the point of reinventing his origins, or at least, bonding with this country as symbiotically as possible. Witness, for example, the artist’s fetching series of botanical items, called “Botany,” the subjects of which are black silhouettes of every species of flora which Abramson, no doubt, came across on childhood treks around the Israeli countryside.
The flower shapes are imprints laid over sky-toned oil paint applied to pages from the Israel HaYom newspaper, which ran reports about the 2014 Protective Edge military campaign in Gaza. The silhouettes were screenprinted at the Jerusalem Print Workshop, where Abramson learned much of his print-oriented craft during a nine-year stint there, following his return from a disappointing one-year study sojourn in London at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, in the mid-1970s. Abramson describes that period in Jerusalem as “a formative time,” in which he learned a lot “by helping other artists to bring their work to fruition.”
We met at his spacious Tel Aviv studio, primarily to discuss a series of 24 works which now belong to the permanent Israeli art collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The creations share a thematic physical infrastructure – they are all painted on original front pages of The Jerusalem Post. All the said frontispieces date from around the time of the Six Day War, collected back then by Abramson’s now 92-year-old father, a retired doctor.
“I also experienced the war; I was 13,” says the artist. “The newspapers were accumulating, and it doesn’t always happen, but sometimes you feel that something is collecting something extra.”
Larry Abramson (photo credit: ELIE POSNER AND OFRIT ROSENBERG)
Larry Abramson (photo credit: ELIE POSNER AND OFRIT ROSENBERG)
In fact, Abramson has “previous,” as per the term used in American detective TV series of yore to describe repeat offenders, having done a 52-piece series of works painted on top of pages from editions of the Haaretz newspaper.
“Being South African, my father read The Jerusalem Post, but he also had a subscription for Haaretz,” Abramson explains. “He collected all sorts of newspapers from before the Six Day War, during the tense buildup, during the war, and a little after – including Maariv and a couple of others.”
Dr. Abramson’s attic contained quite a pile of dailies. “In those days, if something big happened during the day, they would bring out a new edition of the paper – sometimes there’d be three editions on the same day,” Abramson notes. “But my father had told me he was clearing the stuff out, so I felt okay about taking all the papers and ‘destroying’ them,” he laughs. “It’s sort of artistic recycling.”
It is well-nigh impossible to do anything in this country, even of minor note, without it being construed – or misconstrued – as having some political subtext. Abramson’s Six Day War series is certainly imbued with some of that. In fact, you could say that his political viewpoint is genetic.
“My parents came on aliya as an anti- apartheid act,” he explains. Like fellow South African-born artist, 84-yearold painter and jazz clarinetist Harold Rubin, Abramson’s parents had to get out quickly after falling foul of the racist regime there. “They were involved in establishing health centers in black townships, and they established a department of public health in Durban at a university for black students. They were very avant-garde, and also very motivated in terms of the medicine they thought should be used.”
The Abramsons were not alone.
There was a group of like-minded humanitarians, but the increasingly draconian measures of the nationalist government eventually got to them, and by 1961, many of them had fled the country. It was high time the Abramsons followed suit. “I have a vague recollection of the Sharpeville riots,” says Abramson, referring to the March 21, 1960, massacre at the police station of the eponymous black township.
Police opened fire on a demonstration by several thousand black South Africans protesting against the government’s pass laws, designed to segregate and restrict the movement of non-whites around the country.
Once here, and ensconced in Jerusalem, the Abramsons carried on where they left off. “They established a department of public health at the Hebrew University,” says the artist. “They also set up what was known as ‘Hadassah haketana’ (small Hadassah Hospital) in Kiryat Hayovel, which was a clinic that dealt in preventive medicine. That was very revolutionary in those days.”
The Abramsons were not just relieved to be far from the clutches of the apartheid regime, they were pretty happy to be here. “There were two parallel stories going on for me then,” Abramson recalls. “One was this kind of 1960s thing, you know, with the Beatles and all that, and the other was being an Israeli, which was so important for me as an immigrant child, to develop a new identity.”
Until the 1980s, give or take, there was a prevailing official Zionist line that immigrants should become as Israeli as possible, and shed their former cultural baggage. You would not find, for example, a TV reporter called, say, Fred Bloggs. The said Anglo would have adapted his moniker to the ideological locale, probably to something like Pinhas Binyamini.
While the incipient artist certainly did his best to fit in here, he was not going revamp his bio, à la Dahn Ben-Amotz – born in Poland as Moshe Tehilimzeigger – and become a born-again sabra.
“I wasn’t that extreme,” says Abramson. “For instance, I refused to change my name. Every teacher, every madrich in the Tzofim [Scouts], tried to talk me into taking an Israeli name.
It seemed too strange to me. Larry Abramson is my name. That feels natural.
What can you do?” But making aliya in infancy meant that he had a largely Israeli upbringing and education.
The young immigrant’s creative tendencies soon became apparent.
“I was the type of kid who was always drawing, from a very young age,” he says, adding that he also began getting messages – artistic and otherwise – out there. “At school I drew cartoons, political cartoons, I had my comic strip on the wall. I was political from an early age. In 1970 I signed the Michtav Shministim (12th-Graders’ Letter), although I was only in 10th grade at the time.”
The letter was a protest by left-wing high school students declaring they would not serve in the IDF. “I was completely blown away by [prime minister] Golda [Meir]’s refusal to [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s invitation to conduct peace talks, through [World Jewish Congress president] Nahum Goldmann. Goldmann asked for Golda’s permission to go to Egypt, and she said ‘nyet.’ She said ‘if the Arabs want to talk to us, we will choose our own representative.’ I was shocked because, for me, that was like a wake-up call, disillusionment. That was my political awakening.”
The Jerusalem Post series at the Israel Museum, says Abramson, feeds off that adolescent epiphany. “I did that work in 2012, so it’s a kind of reflection on the 1960s, through the newspapers of the Six Day War which my father kept.” There are wider implications.
“In a way, it spans those years, from a kind of Israeli utopia, which I came to and felt part of – ‘little Israel’ – to the Six Day War and a sense of, I don’t know, salvation from a big threat, and the euphoria of victory.
And then, within a few years, by 1970, there was a sense of disillusionment.”
Now a granddad, Abramson finds himself drawn to those halcyon days of youthful innocence. The flora shapes are an important symbol of that ethos-shaping passage of time. “I did another series, also on newspapers [from the time of the Six Day War] of botanical images,” he explains.
“These are Haaretz newspaper from ’67. I painted a sky over them trying to recollect the feeling of the sky in my childhood in Jerusalem. I took this book, which came out in Tel Aviv in 1949,” he says, holding a delightfully aged tome, Flora of the Land of Israel in Drawings. “The illustrator was Ruth Koppel. I took every one of her drawings and turned them into silhouettes, and screenprinted them on top of the newspapers.”
As is his wont, Abramson was looking to convey a political message through the flower shapes, too. “This had all these botanical shapes, but it also dealt with the subject of the war and the ideological mechanism of identity building, because, for me as a kid, one of the central modes of becoming an Israeli was going out into the fields and picking wildflowers.”
That wholesome cultural-bonding activity was later modified. “The flower became protected so we stopped picking them, but we’d go out with a magdir tzemahim [glossary of plants] to identify the species and all that. That’s about the ideology of botany.”
Abramson reprised that theme with his 2014 botanical series.
There are other political items in his oeuvre, most notably his Tsooba series, from the 1990s, in which he revisited a 1980s work by Israel Prize laureate artist Yossef Zaritsky, who produced an abstract impression of the area around Kibbutz Tzova – or Tsooba – in the Jerusalem Hills. In his voluminous rendition – which comprises 38 landscape oil paintings, the same number of impressions of those paintings applied to newspapers, and a bunch of still-life paintings based on samples of local flora – Abramson chose to reference the ruins of a Palestinian village whose inhabitants either fled are were expelled during the War of Independence, in 1948. “It’s about taking a pastoral scene and exposing the underlying ideologies,” he says. “That was one of my first works with newspaper.”
When he’s not following his own muse, Abramson can be found teaching at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan.
He previously established the Department of Fine Arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, a place he was cautioned against attending, as a budding artist, many years earlier. There are also lecturing stints in San Francisco and Hamburg in Abramson’s CV.
Over half a century after arriving on these shores, and slipping largely seamlessly into the sabra flow, Abramson now has works that form part of the permanent corpus of Israeli art of the country’s national repository.
Anglo name notwithstanding, he is definitely an integral and important component of the local creative fabric.
The works on display at the Israel Museum represent only part of the full series, due to preservation considerations, and the items are rotated. So the returning visitor to the museum is likely to see different slots of the full work each time. “I have my work at the Israel Museum,” says Abramson with a smile. “That’s really something.”