Traces I: Drawing In Israel Today

Curator’s Text

Since the 1970s there have been a number of attempts to characterize the field of drawing in Israel. Even though important veteran artists such as Leopold Krakauer and Anna Ticho were already working primarily in this field in the 1930s, it is apparent that the creative breakthrough was only in the 1970s when its conceptual characteristics brought about its recognition as an independent field. A combination of local influences – especially Itzhak Danziger, Arie Aroch, and Aviva Uri – and the influence of American and European conceptual artists, caused many Israeli artists to turn to working on and with paper products. The investigative characteristic of conceptual art encouraged artists to relate to paper not only as a material for drawing on but also as a substance and a body with its own face, back, and contents. The means of drawing also received new attention, whether through expansion (Moshe Gershuni’s fat stains) or through reduction (the tearing and folding of paper by Benny Efrat, Joshua Neustein, and Pinchas Cohen Gan).

The first attempt to characterize and exhibit independent works on paper as a new phenomenon was made by The Israel Museum, Jerusalem in the show Beyond Drawing which exhibited young artists* who had rather belatedly adopted the international conceptual trends. These artists (Benny Efrat, Moshe Gershuni, Joshua Neustein, Pinchas Cohen Gan and others) internalized and updated these trends to form an original Israeli art form. Next to these artists were exhibited a slightly older generation of artists whose works are characterized by their abstract styles (Arie Aroch and Aviva Uri. Moshe Kupferman created a fascinating synthesis through the application of conceptual inquisitiveness on the abstract drawing). The Israel Museum, who had supported and encouraged conceptual artists during the period of the late 60s and early 70s, reacted relatively quickly by already trying in 1974 to define and classify the different ways in which the ideas of conceptual art had been assimilated in Israel.

Since then other attempts have been made by the Israel Museum, the most recent being the 1994 exhibition, Along New Lines. The exhibition tried to examine what had happened to the group of conceptual artists who were active during the 70s and who participated in the exhibition Beyond Drawing (most of the artists who took part in this exhibition showed new works in the later exhibition). Alternately, the exhibition also aspired to characterize Israeli drawing at the start of the 1990s, twenty years after the first exhibition, via the display of the young generation of artists with artists from the 70s.

* The term “young artists” is a relative one, for the youngest amongst them were in their thirties, and others in their forties. In contrast with them, the founders of the 1960s conceptual movement in the United States were in their twenties and thirties. It is on this age difference that I peg one of the explanations for the dead end that the American idealistic conceptual movement, which aspired for “pure” art, reached after a number of years, while the conceptual artists in Israel, older and more mature, found a way to continue developing their ideas. (See also: Yigal Zalmona, Milestones in Israel Art, cat., p. 34,The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1985).
In addition to the activity at the Israel Museum, a number of modest efforts were carried out by private galleries, and recently a slightly different, but no less interesting, endeavor was carried out by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where the Benno Kalev Collection of Israeli Art, which is almost exclusively made up of works on paper, was exhibited (A Wall of My Own, 2000). At the time of writing, it seems to me that this was the most extensive and varied exhibition of Israeli drawing that can be classified as modernistic and contemporary.

Different from exhibitions held in the past, some of which are mentioned above, this exhibition is more of a condition report of the state of drawing in Israel today. It focuses on works from the past three years, with no other common factor. It strives to lay out and reveal the wide range of drawing in Israel with the inclusion of representatives from different generations and schools, for whom drawing is a central or meaningful part of their oeuvre.

A rough breakdown of the participants reveals that approximately half of the artists produce works on paper with traditional foundations, and the other half produce works that can be designated “contemporary” in terms of style, guidelines and medium. Some of the artists avoid accepted definitions, and they can be found in either of the two groups mentioned above. A closer look identifies less than a quarter of the artists working in an academic-traditional, realistic, or photographic-like style. All the others, the overwhelming majority, deal with drawing that is considered contemporary, whether its sources are in traditional drawing, or drawn from other visual fields (comics and animation, illustration and caricature, graphic design and advertising). A special place is reserved for children’s painting, as an inspiration for Israeli artists, as shown by Yigal Zalmona in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Good Kids, Bad Kids: Childliness in Israeli Art (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1998).

There is no doubt that an excellent realistic drawing has an enchanting potential to which few are immune. There are very few works that can create awe in both the average art consumer and in the more sophisticated art professional in the way that, for example, a pencil line drawing of dried thorns by Israel Hershberg does. This tendency of ours to represent reality “as it is” is inherent within us, apparently there since the days of cave dwellers, and it is this that assures, in my opinion, the survival of this Phoenix called figurative painting. Even so, few artists are occupied with this kind of painting or drawing, whose roots reach back to da Vinci and Michelangelo, whether because of the commitment and forbearing it demands of the artist, or because of the anachronistic image that has cleaved to it in our times.

In my opinion, the person who expanded the boundaries of traditional drawing and opened the doors to opportunities enjoyed by contemporary drawing is a different, later master. Indeed, a possible route leads from Rembrandt in the 17th century to Piranesi in the 18th, Daumier and Manet in the 19th, van Gogh and Matisse at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and from then onwards to the Dadaists and Surrealists, Klee and late Picasso, Pollock and de Kooning, Dubuffet and Hartung, on to Johns, Rauschenberg and Beuys. In Israel, the last members of this list left their mark on artists such as Danziger, Aroch, Kupferman, Gershuni, Aviva Uri, and Raffi Lavie.

If this is the case, how can contemporary Israeli drawing be classified? As that which relates to Rembrandt as the start of the chain described above? If so, does non-contemporary drawing skip over the chain and relate directly to da Vinci and Michelangelo? The word “contemporary” has its roots in the Latin word “contemporaneus” – something that is of our time, or tells of phenomena that occurred at the same time. This exhibition adopts both options and includes them in the term “contemporary” that is in the subtitle of the exhibition. Participating are artists that today create in a style and with tools developed and improved hundreds of years ago, alongside a larger group whose language, style, and new techniques are challenging and avant-garde.

Although it is easy to identify the traditional, figurative, and realistic components that find expression in the exhibition through the works of, for example, Yemima Ergas, Sylvia Bar-Am or Hanna Shvily, and to thus define them, it is much harder to define a contemporary style or attitude. More than anything else, they can be categorized by their avoidance of categorization, by the difficulty to sort and classify them, by their openness and courage, by their ongoing search. An attempt to define in a few words the work of Tamar Getter or Moshe Gershuni, for example, or of Hilla Lulu Lin or Ohad Meromi, is destined to fail. However it is possible to state that these artists, like many others in the exhibition, create in the spirit of the time, and draw inspiration from all the cultural sources available to them. To be thus done with the definition is of course, not enough.

In this exhibition we refrain from defining in a clear and comprehensive way what is contemporary drawing and what is not. Instead, we will try to analyze and characterize the various directions of creativity and consequently answer these questions in a non-direct and partial manner. I have already stated that contemporary art avoids definition. Many of the artists in the show are each an individual case, each with their own form of expression, different from the others. Therefore, the analysis made here is a generalization, defining this exhibition alone.

The exhibition is comprised of five main groups: two groups dealing with the above mentioned traditional-academic drawing, the difference between them being those that aim to represent in their works reality in a traditional style and with traditional tools (Leonid Balaklav, Yaacov Shrekinger, Yitzhak Greenfield), and those that strive to do it in a realistic or photo-realistic way (Yemima Ergas, Sylvia Bar-Am, Orit Livne, Heddy Breuer Abramowitz, Hanna Shvily). Contrary to these are two groups that make no attempt to represent apparent reality in their works. Their images are invented, abstract, and if they are identifiable, they appear in unusual or unreal contexts. In one group there are artists such as Irit Hemmo, Gilead Keydar, Eti Abergil, Hilla Lulu Lin, Assaf Romano, Uriel Miron, and others. In the other group, united in an archetypal-childlike style or handwriting, are amongst others, Zvi Tolkovsky, Yoav Efrati, Adam Rabinowitz, Gary Goldstein, as well as Ido Bar-El, Assaf Ben Zvi, Tamar Getter, and Ohad Meromi. The fifth group makes use of traditional media but is occupied with the contemporary. The subjects are on the whole taken from reality, but the treatment is selective, manipulative, and critical. In this group can be found Anne Sassoon, Sidon Rothenberg, Arik Vanounou, Jordan Wolfson, Judy Orstav, Naomi Gafni, Orna Millo, and others.

In general, it can be said that Israeli artists are particularly partial to drawing, a statement in total opposition to the conventional wisdom that there is not enough occupation with drawing in this country. It is my belief that this opinion points to the fact that the changes and growth that have occurred in this field during the 20th century have not yet been sufficiently internalized. This exhibition, even if it isn’t complete and doesn’t represent all the high quality draughtsmanship in Israel, still proves that the occupation with drawing is both wide and of high quality. It seems that drawing suffers less from the gap that has been forced on Jewish art, and to a lesser extent on Israeli art, that springs from that early commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” The more the Jew was distanced from the canvas and from the marble, the closer he was to parchment and paper. The distance between writing on paper and drawing on paper is negligible, as can be read in the words of Joshua Neustein (some of them in the name of Edmond Jabès) in the text appended to the catalogue for the exhibition Along New Lines mentioned above.

A final few words regarding Traces – Contemporary Drawing in Israel: the exhibition focuses on the Israeli experience, therefore important Israeli artists who work abroad have not been included. For various reasons, a number of good artists working in Israel and who should be in the show are not. The exhibition disconnects itself, for one long moment, from the artistic discourse and from theoretical analysis to present, as previously stated, a condition report. It takes a position that neutralizes the accepted hierarchy by exhibiting side by side established artists, widely accepted by the establishment, and lesser, or un-known artists. It deals with drawing as an independent medium, not as a preparatory sketch for a painting, nor as a tool for the formulation of ideas, but as drawing in its own right. In this exhibition the cards are on the table, with no arrangement or grouping. Therefore, there are no winning cards – the winner, perhaps, is the game.

Ilan Wizgan