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PDF FormatOne clear result of the implicit rejection of Jewish nationalism by both Canaanism and New Horizons was that Israeli artists coming of age in the early 1960s, whether in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv, developed their worldview and works entirely outside the ambit of anything that could be called a tradition of Jewish national painting or sculpture. Through lack of exposure to any attractive national ideal, these artists naturally saw Zionism as something which had played itself out long ago, and the continuation of Zionist mythmaking and sloganeering by the political leadership as something shallow and forced. After the Sinai campaign of 1956, these trends gradually intensified, and Jewish nationalism, including even the Jewish state itself, came to be identified with what seemed to be campaigns of pointless violence, and therefore responsible for the continuing hardships of living in Israel. The artists of this period for the first time began speaking of their desire to be “normal”—that is, to be like all other artists, in all other countries.
The wielding of national power by the state quickly gave rise to unflattering historical parallels among those artists who refused to view modern Israel as a legitimate continuation of Jewish history. The most outstanding example is Igael Tumarkin, a student of Rudi Lehmann’s who throughout the 1950s produced sculptures recalling the occupation of the land by the Crusaders and their instruments of power. Based on a first-hand acquaintance with Crusader ruins Tumarkin gained while serving in the navy off Acre, this series of works began a career of increasingly explicit criticism of the Jewish presence in the land—that is, with the entire cause of Zionism in general, and with Jewish national power in particular. His penchant for incorporating firearms into his sculptures as a means of protesting against the state appeared in its full form in Bring Me Under the Shelter of Your Wings (1966). Named after a well-known verse from the poetry of Zionist poet Haim Nahman Bialik, the sculpture features a frightening array of weapons huddled beneath a draping of wrought iron, which suggests a protective shelter of sorts. The irony of representing the supplicant as an arsenal makes a mockery of the hope of gentle grace and protection expressed in the poem, brutally accusing Israel of finding salvation only in its own might.
Tumarkin’s alienation from the Jewish national effort surrounding him stemmed in part from his own personal crisis of origin. Adopted by his mother’s husband in Israel, he was never told by his parents that his biological father was a non-Jewish German actor and that he was born in Germany, not Israel.18 Yet other leading artists managed to express similar contempt and alienation from the Jewish state and its cause, despite not sharing Tumarkin’s unusual background. The painter Arie Aroch, for example, was a leading artist in the mid-1960s whose works suggested the illegitimacy and irrelevance of political power. His High Commissioner (1966) features two rudely drawn portraits of the last governor of the mandatory period, portrayed as two comfortably seated, mustachioed gentlemen in isolated miniature, figuring insignificantly on a larger field of gray streaked with black, red and brown, a battlefield of decay and death. The rejection of power and rule, as well as the reminder of the transience of those insolent men who would wield it, is likewise invoked in Aroch’s masterpiece, Agrippa Street (1964; Fig. 5). Aroch’s installation—one cannot really consider it a sculpture in the traditional sense—juxtaposes a sign bearing the name of a street with a wooden board, roughly scrawled upon. Agrippa I was the last king of Judea who, although educated in Rome, nevertheless struggled to preserve the Jewish character of the country. His son, Agrippa II, who never formally ascended the throne, betrayed his father’s ways by attempting to persuade the Jews to surrender to superior Roman power, in the end fighting for Rome against the remaining Jewish resistance. Agrippa Street again reminds us of the efforts to wield political power, this time in the service of the Jewish nation, only to suggest that the entire enterprise is futile and ugly: The king’s lifetime of effort on behalf of his people is reduced to a name on a dingy city street. What is left of Agrippa is random, ugly, culturally ill-defined and—according to a thermometer which Aroch throws into the image for good measure—uncomfortably hot. Agrippa Street is the cultural antipode of Dantziger’s Nimrod. While Nimrod celebrates a powerful hero emerging from the land with which he is closely bound, defining his culture in terms of his origins, Agrippa Street depicts the political leader as a foreign-bred intruder, an impotent symbol of cultural and national atrophy.
Fig. 5. Arie Aroch, Agrippa Street, 1964.
Courtesy: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The style of Arie Aroch had a significant influence on Rafi Lavie, whose unrelenting repudiation of the older roots of Israeli art was the trademark of the “Tel Aviv school” of which he is considered the founder. An instructor at the Ramat Hasharon Art Academy, which rapidly became the epicenter of this movement, Lavie was the first important Israeli artist to declare explicitly that he “never felt the national aspect of being Jewish.”19 Where carefully constructed geometry and brightly interlaced colors had been mainstays of Israeli art until the 1960s, Lavie pioneered a technique of adorning stark boards of plywood with scrapings of pencil and black ink, scattered strokes of white or gray paint, and newspaper and magazine clippings often depicting political leaders. Lavie transformed the subtle if harsh criticisms of contemporaries such as Arie Aroch and Igael Tumarkin into a snarl of disdain: His near-total avoidance of meaningful symbols, as well as the contempt he holds for political efforts in particular,20 are among the fundamental principles of the Tel Aviv school, and form an integral part of the larger project of emptying the symbolic language of Israeli culture and its Zionist underpinnings of all constructive meaning. That Lavie’s art reflects such an effort is far less alarming than the fact that virtually all of mainstream Israeli art since has been spawned directly by Lavie and his disciples. Since the 1960s, the dialogue between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in Israeli art has ended, and the focus has shifted decisively and permanently to Tel Aviv, where students of Lavie’s Ramat Hasharon Art Academy have become the dominant force in both the production and criticism of art in Israel.21
The loathing of Jewish national power had already become a trademark of important artists by the mid-1960s, but it took the Six Day War of 1967 to turn anti-nationalism into a central fetish of the Israeli art world. It is after this war—in which much of biblical Israel was for the first time brought under Jewish control and the state reached the height of its strength relative to the Arab states—that there began a concerted campaign among Israel’s leading artists overtly aimed at shattering the myths which held the state together. Igael Tumarkin stood at the vanguard of this effort with his landmark He Walked in the Fields (1968; Fig. 6). Sculpted amid the euphoria of Israeli’s greatest military victory, this work sets out to destroy forever one of Zionism’s most precious images: That of the heroic Israeli soldier. The sculpture is a vicious parody of Moshe Shamir’s classic Zionist novel of the same name, which had become a fixture of Israeli national culture, inspiring important adaptations in both theater and film.22 Tumarkin’s sculpture rears up against this entire collective memory, depicting a soldier returning from battle, his body bursting with military ordinance which emerges from his gaping chest cavity, while his helmet has been driven into his abdomen. His mouth and throat have been torn open to expose his trachea and extended tongue, both painted bright red. The figure’s pants are also wide open, his member hanging out in a manner echoing his lolling tongue. The impression is immediate and visceral, at once revolting and humiliating—and it is this revulsion and humiliation against battle which quickly saw victory in the country’s cultural discourse: Reference to He Walked in the Fields came to mean Tumarkin’s metal nightmare first, and the old myth weaved by the novel only second.
Fig. 6. Igael Tumarkin, He Walked in the Fields, 1968.
Courtesy: Tel Aviv Museum of Art
The artist Yoram Rosov was the first to depict the toll taken by Israel’s military campaigns on civilian life; his response to the Six Day War was no less toxic than Tumarkin’s, and similarly devoted to emptying the symbolic content out of Israeli myths. In a drawing entitled Ingemisco Tanquam Reus (1968), he examines how the resort to violence has stripped the Israeli identity of its innocence. The work positions a satirized “sabra”—the heroic native-born Jew of Israeli myth—hanging on a cross. The crucified figure is a bloated, middle-aged and lazy rendition of the traditional sabra, complete with floppy worker’s hat. Yet from the hat extends the muzzle of a tank, and across the sabra’s chest lies a large rifle; the Israeli is accused and punished for the malicious use of power for self-aggrandizement. The Latin title literally means “With the bound I groan,” suggesting that the Israeli perceives himself, like Jesus, as an innocent sympathizer with the oppressed; but the Latin reus (“the bound”) can also mean “the accused”—the hypocritical Israeli power-monger really only sympathizes with the accused and truly guilty. A year later Rosov followed this image up with The Fall of Goliath (1969), also depicting a sabra, this time as a repulsively obese giant felled by rocks and sticks, some of which poke comically from his hat as he comes crashing to the ground.
