Bezalel Schatz – Retrospective 2006

The First Exhibition in the Schatz House Series, celebrating 100 Years of Israeli Art

This exhibition provides a wide overview of the unique and varied artistic oeuvre of Bezalel Shatz (1912-1978) an artist who excelled in figurative and abstract painting, copper work, and the decorative arts. Filling most of the Artists House exhibition spaces, the exhibition will display around 200 pieces of his work. Bezalel Schatz attained fame in the United States during the 1940s, and afterwards, made an important contribution to the development of the Israeli ornament.

From Gideon Ofrat’s monograph: Bezalel Schatz was a man of action, an artist and artisan; his practice, “techne” as the Greeks called it, eliminated the troubles of contradiction between “free” art and “applied” art, and he was content with it. As long as he was invited to design works in various institutions, he felt like a full-fledged artist. He probably believed that decorative art in the service of society was the highest rank an artist could reach. In order to establish and support this idea he could have harnessed the greatest masters of Renaissance and Baroque art, let alone the artists of primitive tribes with whom he was so enchanted.
One may say that in his activity as a decorative designer Bezalel Schatz completed his assimilation into the local culture from which he dissociated himself during his long stay in Europe and the US.

The exhibition will be held in the main exhibition spaces in the Artists House and will be accompanied by a catalogue.

The Artist House Jerusalem is located in the historic building of “Bezalel”, the only compound in the Bezalel complex that is open for all, free of charge.

The Question of Cultural Memory

Twenty-eight years have passed since Bezalel Schatz’s death. Artistically, it seems as though he died much earlier. Unlike his great success in California during the 1940s, in Israel this warm, affable man was not considered an outstanding artist, certainly not in the leading circles of the Israeli avant-garde from the abstract days to the days of post-conceptualism. Tel Aviv never recognized the man and his legacy. But he was not even a rejected artist, like the artists of the national symbol in the tradition of Ardon-Bezem. He was not a “go-getter” and did not fight his war. On the contrary, he found his relative happiness in the warm family nest, which was shut off from the world and withdrawn in itself at 3 Bezalel Street, as well as in a social-artistic affinity with Ein Hod (whose artistic status as an artists’ village has gradually diminished) and in warm personal-social relations he fostered via letters, hosting, etc. between Jerusalem, California, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Bezalel Schatz, it would seem, created for himself an “autarchic system” of an autonomous artistic and social world, thus freeing himself from the exhausting (hopeless) struggles for artistic recognition and respect.

Like many of his contemporary artists, Bezalel Schatz avoided making intellectual statements, whether in writing or speech. He never published nor did he leave behind any ideological text; a fact which only proves that he felt no need to justify or reaffirm his work for (this or that) public. He was a man of action, an artist and artisan in the most basic sense of the bricoleur, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term.1 His practice, “techne” as the Greeks called it, eliminated the troubles of contradiction between “free” art and “applied” art, and he was content with it. As long as he was invited to design works in various institutions – he felt like a full-fledged artist. He probably believed that decorative art in the service of society was the highest rank an artist could reach. In order to establish and support this idea he could have harnessed the greatest masters of Renaissance and Baroque art, let alone the artists of primitive tribes with whom he was so enchanted. It is equally likely that he considered his “Zionism” as a practical-aesthetic contribution to the habitat being constructed in the Land of Israel. Many an artist at the time harnessed themselves to this enterprise.

The question of Bezalel Schatz’s cultural status and his place in Israeli cultural memory is, thus, not of Bezalel Schatz himself, but our question, us who remember, namely forget, namely erase. Should his work be remembered in the pantheon of Israeli art? The author of this monograph is certain that Bezalel Schatz’s paintings were not of lesser importance than the majority of works created in the Israeli abstract circle, the circle which gathered around the frontrunners of New Horizons. Despite all the possible criticism, not only were Bezalel Schatz’s paintings not inferior to many of the abstract paintings by Wexler, Simon, Abramovic, Luisada, Naton, etc., but they surpassed them in quality. Their “burial” indicates an injustice and stupidity on the part of a culture inflicted with a self-destructive instinct (It should be said: The “cemetery” of Israeli culture is replete with the graves of many worthy artists, some devoid of gravestones). Let us hope that this monograph and the accompanying retrospective exhibition will be a step in the direction of pulling this oeuvre out of its grave.

Historical processes naturally sift, select, refine, and reorganize power systems. Cultural “Darwinism” is (fortunately) responsible for the removal of weak artists from our platforms, for the recognition of good artists – even if they had been vanquished in the power struggles in their lifetime, and for disposing of artists reputed mainly for the accumulation of power from the center of consciousness. Such historical Darwinism, even if its range is long and its horizons yet invisible, would benefit Bezalel Schatz’s painting, even if it does not put it at the apex of Israeli art. Surely, it will do cultural-historical justice with Bezalel Schatz’s decorative enterprise: for he will be remembered as one of the most conspicuous figures in the attempt to formulate an “Israeli” decoration, an original environmental aesthetics, which is an eclectic combination of local history, native cultures, and indigenous nature. Artificial as this endeavor may be, it deserves our full appreciation.

One may say that in his activity as a decorative designer Bezalel Schatz completed his assimilation into the local culture from which he dissociated himself. While the bulk of his abstract painting drew on primitivist sources free of local anthropology, his “Mediterranean” endeavors in his 1960s paintings were but a step toward “Israeliness”, which he strove to affirm loud and clear in his commissioned decorative works. It is as though he made a distinction between the personal and the collective, leaving personal art not owing to the surrounding culture, yet adopted the latter in his public work. Such a distinction, as crucial as it may have been, was congruent with the spirit of modernity (the notion of avant-garde as the enemy of enlisted art2), on the one hand, and with the traditions of Arts & Crafts internalized by Bezalel Schatz, on the other, between Jerusalem (“The Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts”), Santa Fe, and Ein Hod. Bezalel Schatz traversed these two channels concurrently, but never combined them. This duality in itself is historically and culturally fascinating, but its qualities in each of its poles are binding as far as Israeli cultural memory is concerned.

Bezalel Schatz is gone; his work lives on, albeit overshadowed. It dwells in his estate, in museums and private collections (mainly in Israel and the United States), as well as on the walls of public institutions, on their gates, etc. Standing in one line with the paintings of Moshe Propes, Avraham Ofek, Zvi Gali, Moshe Tamir, and others, this body of work awaits the “archaeologists” of Israeli culture and the “restorers” after them. This text and exhibition are but a “rescue excavation”.

G.O.