Louise Schatz – A Retrospective 2006

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

Although distanced from the art world, Louise Schatz was warmly embraced by the critics and the museum establishment alike ever since her first solo exhibition in 1957 through her last shows. Despite the recurring words of praise in the press, however, she remained a little known artist to the general public. To a great extent, she was and remained a painter of painters and poets, who were drawn to the refined and dreamy qualities of her intimate, highly poetical and lyrical paintings. As the famous American author Henry Miller (her sister, Eve’s, husband), defined her:
Transparent, evanescent, vaporous, dreamy, nostalgic, clear as a bell and distinct as a glittering spider’s web…She has her own language…her own very special way of looking at the world.

Referring to her paintings, Miller further added that:
Her medium is the reality which evades the senses and dupes the mind.

Louise Schatz felt no commitment to the often-changing spirits of the time in the Israeli art world scene, even though lyricism and light brought her closer to it. From the very outset, her abstract was not bound with “New Horizons,” and if, somewhat belatedly one ought to admit, manifestations of Pop Art entered her paintings, she nevertheless remained faithful to her regular artistic language, changed very little, and certainly turned her back on the race for avant-garde innovation. Her artistic development obeyed the basic rules of her artistic game. Thus, for example, her 1970s paintings display a tendency to “air out” open areas and a proclivity for larger forms. Louise Schatz’s art remained “a free play of the cognitive powers,” to quote Immanuel Kant’s definition of beauty (1790). Accordingly, one may and should say that she was a full-fledged modernist, but not an avant-gardist. Even her adherence to the “vernal” – the bright, optimistic, gay tones, the soft color strokes – placed her outside the modern circles, which focus on pain, despair, and disaster (as described by Elisheva Cohen in 1969: “Tiny poems of color, Louise Schatz’s paintings are tantamount to symbols of tranquility and hope in a turbulent world.”3).

Even when it assimilated “crude” materials, this Jerusalem painter’s work was distinguished by refinement within an art world that, for the most part, displayed a tendency toward aggressive and assertive expressions at the time. Her constant quest for the harmonious went beyond the art world’s attraction with the disharmonious. Indeed, her fidelity to watercolor in an era that attributed only marginal status to this medium (in comparison to oil or acrylic, let alone multi-materiality or non-materiality), attested to otherness, and the latter granted her the designation “nobility” (a title which was repeated in various reviews).

To simplify Louise Schatz’s secret language, one may say that her painting seeks the constant beyond the ephemeral. A sensory penchant for a vernal (greening in becoming) nature and a mystical “third eye” come together on the painting’s mystical leval.
G.O.