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PDF FormatBut the most powerful and enduring trend to emerge from the efforts of the German immigrants to connect themselves with their new location was the artistic movement known as “Canaanism.” Canaanite art was an effort to create a direct relationship with the land, bypassing historic Jewish connotations—hence the suppression of the name “Israel” in favor of the land’s primordial name. The major pioneers of the Canaanite esthetic were Yitzchak Dantziger, the son of German immigrants, and the husband-and-wife team of Rudi Lehmann and Hedwig Grossman, who arrived from Germany in 1933 and settled in Jerusalem a few years later. Lehmann himself was not Jewish, and he never mastered Hebrew,12 yet he and Dantziger were almost exclusively responsible for the training of Israeli sculptors until they both died in 1977. Among the students of Rudi Lehmann are such leading artists as Igael Tumarkin and Menashe Kadishman, while Dantziger boasts Yechiel Shemi and Binyamin Tamuz as pupils.
Canaanite works bear a deliberate resemblance to the sculpture and ritual art of early civilizations of the Middle East prior to Judaism, emphasizing austerity in form, both in terms of shape and the use of color, and always with an eye to the fusion of man and the land itself. In a plaster mold cast in the 1950s Rudi Lehmann inscribed, backwards, the quotation from Tchernichovsky: “Man is nothing but the shape of his native landscape.” Dantziger described his epoch-making sculpture Nimrod (1939; Fig. 3) as “a human animal joined with a hawk, a fusion in sandstone of a particular myth with a particular place, people and desert rock”—that is, a biblical ruler, but a decidedly non-Jewish one, whose essence is the stone and the earth of the land itself.13 Dantziger, who dedicated his life to the molding of figures which emulated the form of his native landscape,14 ultimately gave up sculpture entirely for a kind of landscape design involving the “rehabilitation” of “wounded places” such as quarries. One of Lehmann’s students describes his devotion to precise, geometric forms: “These are the archetype of sculpture,” he would say, “and anybody who does not know how to use them together properly does not know what sculpture is.”15 The impact of the technical aspects of Canaanism can still be felt in contemporary Israeli sculpture, where the interaction of simple shapes continues to be a mainstay of large-scale public displays.16
Fig. 3. Yitzchak Dantziger, Nimrod, 1939.
Courtesy: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Canaanism did not begin as a consciously anti-nationalist movement. For Dantziger, returning to ancient middle-eastern themes was rather the opposite: An attempt to break away from western European and German influences and return to his local identity. For the non-Jewish Lehmann, who could not truly feel a part of the Jewish rebirth in Palestine, Canaanism was a means of establishing new roots while divorcing himself from his German heritage.17 While their works were in many ways a logical continuation of the land affinity of the previous generation of Zionist art, their creation of a new, non-Jewish identity built upon the soil and stone of Canaan bore an inherent appeal for the anti-Zionist. In place of Zionism, Canaanism offered communion with the land, stripped entirely of any Jewish meaning.
While the early years after independence found Dantziger and Lehmann teaching in Jerusalem and the artists’ village at Ein Hod, a competing community of artists began to flourish in Tel Aviv, outside the orbit of Jerusalem’s German influence and the new Betzalel. The Tel Aviv artists, primarily of Eastern European extraction, had been for the most part insulated from the German immigration of the 1930s, and operated principally under the influence of trends imported directly from French expressionist painting. Many of the local painters had studied in Paris during the 1920s, among them Avigdor Stematsky, who opened a studio in Tel Aviv in 1931. The following year Yosef Zaritsky opened his own studio specializing in the reproduction of works by French masters such as Cיzanne, Matisse and Bracque. In 1948, Zaritsky organized an exhibition which was dominated by Tel Aviv artists and colorful abstract painting in emulation of French technique. The title of the exhibition, “New Horizons,” rapidly came to describe the preoccupations of the entire Tel Aviv artistic community. Characterized by an emphasis upon bright torrents of color and a predilection for abstract lines and patterns, the paintings of New Horizons were frequently presented as a sharp contrast to the mostly drab but highly symbolic figures featured in the sculpture of Jerusalem’s Canaanites.
In Zaritsky’s own work a parallel can be seen to the wider development of Israeli art. From colorful and impressionistic depictions of landscapes and landmarks which he produced in the 1920s, Zaritsky moved into realms of progressively greater abstraction. Immediately after returning from Paris in 1956, Zaritsky executed a controversial canvas in a radical new expressive style. His Cup of Red Wine of 1956 explores the effect of small bits of red—the wine—moving on a field of vivid blue marked with yellow. The particular shade of blue mixed in with glimpses of white clearly suggests the bright summer sky over Israel, with the yellow representing the sun. The work thus evokes a powerful visual recollection of the landscape, however remote from figurative representation. The inspiration for Cup of Red Wine was Rembrandt’s masterpiece of 1636, Rembrandt and Saskia, to which Zaritsky returned more directly in the later, 1960 version of his painting (Fig. 4). In Cup of Red Wine of 1960, the immediate effect of the wine within the composition is much more significant, and the somewhat anomalous yellow is absent. The colors are more muted and the figures more sharply defined, in a style which owes a closer affinity to the Rembrandt original than to the local sky.
Fig. 4. Yosef Zaritsky, Cup of Red Wine, 1960.
The technique which Zaritsky pioneered in his 1956 Cup of Red Wine profoundly influenced the development of abstract painting in Israel, its flirtation with shades of local sky and sunlight becoming a motif that recurs continuously into the 1970s. Similar attempts to capture the effect of Mediterranean sunlight on the Israeli landscape abound in the paintings of the New Horizons group. As painters trained in predominantly French technique, the artists of Tel Aviv were concerned with the faithful communication of the effects of lighting in composition. Yet the artistic challenges presented to them by the overwhelming effects of the sun on the Israeli landscape were unique, and Tel Aviv’s artists sought to define themselves with regard to these challenges. By and large, they did not emulate Zaritsky’s return to classical sources, concerning themselves almost exclusively for many years with attempting to capture their radically new visual universe.
Yet despite all the obvious differences between Jerusalem’s Canaanite figures and the splashy, abstract canvases of New Horizons, the fact is that the two groups, which together constituted the main impulses in Israeli art in the first years after statehood, were united by an ideological undercurrent more important than the differences in technique which met the eye. For much like the Canaanites, Tel Aviv’s artists had broken with the nationalism of their predecessors to identify themselves much more closely with their geographic location. They, too, were deeply involved in attempts to capture the new visual stimuli of the Israeli landscape, devoid of any national characteristics; what the Canaanites had found in the soil of the land, New Horizons found in its light. Both movements devoted great efforts to the manipulation of simple shapes and forms, constantly reevaluating them in an attempt to find the materials with which to build a new symbolic language to befit their circumstances, yet virtually without reference to the most important of these circumstances: The fact that in the meantime, a Jewish national state had been declared. Somehow, it almost seems to have escaped notice that the life of the nation was headed in a direction utterly at odds with the artists’ obsession with form at the expense of substance, with the material elements which comprised the land at the expense of the human drama which was taking place upon it.
