Discovering the Holy Land's Historic Landscapes

Alek D. Epstein ALEK D. EPSTEIN Discovering The Holy Land’s Historic Center for Research Landscapes through Art: in Contemporary Art Peter Gluzberg, a Graduate of the Kharkiv (Jerusalem – Moscow – Paris) Institute of Art and Design, in Israel [email protected] Roots and Routes: From Kharkiv to the Holy Land The eminent Israeli artist Peter Gluzberg was born in Moldova, but spent seven years in Ukraine, which were of great importance for him. “For me, Ukraine and particularly Kharkiv always bring back lots of memories,” says Gluzberg: It all began in 1972 when I was serving in the still Soviet army and our garrison was sta- tioned on Kholodna Hora. I still remember my first visit to the city on military leave. It was in the summer, and I took a tram headed to the downtown Kharkiv that was pass- ing along Sverdlov Street. As it was crossing a bridge over a river I saw the beautiful em- bankment and a stairway leading up to the Transfiguration cathedral upon a hill. And all those wide streets and green parks… I can still see those bright images flashing by behind the tram window. The very same day I splurged all of my scarce savings on sweets at a candy store named Oriental delights... I really loved the city, and I came to love it even more when I became a student. I entered the Kharkiv Institute of Arts and Industry in 1975. The building itself looked like a fairy house, and I really enjoyed studying there. Though I had to work a lot, I still managed to squeeze in some leisure, such as good movies and theater. I viv- idly remember interactive conversation-like lectures on the theory of color by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Shaposhnikov as well as art history lessons by Elena Aleksandrovna Vo- loshina. She was the one who introduced me to a lot of extraordinary people in Kharkiv. Among them was a doctor, who put together a spectacular collection of 1920s–1930s paintings; in addition, he had a unique painting by a 15th century Italian artist. Another was Adolf Iosifovich Strakhov (Braslavskii), a painter, who passed away in 1979. And, of course, there were friends, who are still with me. And I owe it all to Kharkiv. After grad- uating from the institute in 1980, I was assigned a workplace in Chisinau, where I spent the following ten years before immigrating to Israel. 170 Judaica Ukrainica 3 (2014) doi: 10.14653/ju.2014.09 Discovering The Holy Land’s Historic Landscapes through Art... Filling a Lacuna: Creating Impressionist Landscapes of the Land of Israel Gluzberg has an outstanding place among emigrant artists as well as among contemporary Israeli painters. As a matter of fact, Russian and Soviet art never truly embraced the ideas and traditions of impressionism that had taken over French and all of Western European art in the late 1870s. Russian artists skipped straight from the obsolete Salon academism to realism, then to symbolism and finally to post-impressionism. Thus, Cézanne’s late works came to be a major influence on Russian art, and his Russian followers such as Pyotr Konchalovsky and Ilya Mashkov now top the most prestigious auction listings. Still, the vibrant universe of subtle shades and nuances blending into a wild mixture of brightly beaming colors, invented by Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and their contemporaries that have been enthralling viewers for a whole century and a half, never actually made their way into Russian art. As pointed out by Vyacheslav Filippov in his book Impressionism in Russian Art, “all throughout its history Russian impressionism seemed incomplete; it never actually made its appearance as a distinct movement but rather got entangled with other artistic styles.” The only impressionist in Russia and in Russian emigrant art turned out to be Konstantin Korovin (1861–1939), who often visited Paris in the 1900s and 1910s and who spent the last sixteen years of his life there. Korovin, who was born to a Moscow- based religious merchant family, came to be the one and only “ambassador” of French impressionism in Russian art. All the other Russian painters who were inspired by impressionist ideas, such as Valentin Serov, Vladimir Borisov-Musatov, Nikolay Meshe- rin and Igor Grabar, were never actually impressionists. Some of them still stuck to realism, both personally and artistically, some were deeply involved in social themes, while others were more attracted to symbolism or even religious art that had nothing to do with the core life philosophy of impressionism. As for Israeli art, it never shared the impressionist experience. Contrary to what one would imagine, despite its huge importance for the world’s spiritual history, Je- rusalem was a rare source of inspiration for painters up until the 1920s, as were other Palestine locations. Numerous landscapes by the Scottish artist David Roberts (1796–1864) created during his visit to Palestine in 1838–1839 happen to be the only extensive series of paintings dedicated to 19th century Jerusalem and its suburbs. How- ever, these works appeared when impressionism was yet to arrive, both as an artistic movement and a creative method, and Roberts was hardly aware of the Barbizon school that had just emerged in those years. In Erets Israel, there was no actual art until the arrival of the so-called “second aliya,” which goes back the first decade of the 20th century. The first art school in Israel, called Betsalel, was founded by Boris Schatz (1867– 1932) in 1906. While the Impressionists organized their exhibitions (there were eight of them: the first one took place in 1874 and the last one in 1886), there was barely any art 171 Alek D. Epstein in Erets Israel. The first artist who painted most Jerusalem landscapes in the first half of the 20th century was Ludwig Blum (1891–1975), who studied in Vienna and Prague and moved to Erets Israel in 1923. However, by 1923 European art had already left impressionism far behind, and while Blum was never a member of the avant-garde, his works still have very little in common with paintings by Alfred Sisley, Armand Guillaumin, and Camille Pissarro. As for pastoral art in Israel – a predominately rural country during the 1920s and 1940s – it was mostly developed by Blum’s contemporary Reuven Rubin (born Zeli- covici, 1893–1974), who studied in Paris in 1913–1914 and moved to Palestine in 1922. Rubin was neither a proponent of avant-garde nor an abstractionist, though his art was clearly more heavily influenced by the European modernism of the 1910s rather than by impressionism. Over the years both Blum, who became an honorable citizen of Jeru- salem in 1967, and Rubin, who received the Israel Prize in 1973, created a considerable number of works that are obviously marked by an impressionist influence, though, just like Serov, Borisov-Musatov, and Grabar, they could not be viewed as impressionists. As time went by, art in Russia and in the emigrant circles as well as in Israel followed their own paths, still heavily influenced by European and American art trends as well as political tendencies imposed by highly ideological societies striving to create “the new Soviet man” (Russia), “the new Jew” as opposed to the Jews in the Diaspora (Israel) or to preserve “the genuine Russian spirituality free of Bolshevik contamination” (Russian emigration). And with time, art was more and more dominated by abstractionism, then it switched to conceptualism, and as society demanded socially unequivocal art, it did not favor the impressionist celebration of the beauty of an ever-changing landscape. In the second half of the 20th and in the beginning of the 21st century, artists were supposed to be ideological, either by introducing new art paradigms or by promoting certain ideas. In a world like that, there was no place for reflections of light and gentle whiffs of airy breezes, the very core objects of impressionistic contemplation. Thus, Peter Gluzberg not only draws upon both Russian and Israeli artistic traditions, but also fills a lacuna in the culture of both countries. With his works he in- troduces a new style that could be described as Mediterranean or even Erets Israeli impressionism, a rare example of en plein air painting celebrating the uniqueness of nature’s every mood instead of man and his deeds. In recent decades Israeli art has clearly switched to ideological concerns: the political reality of the Arab-Israeli con- flict has invaded Israeli art and has become the central theme of most works by contemporary artists. The renowned art researcher Ronald Fuhrer chose a very suitable title for his English monograph Israeli Painting: From Post-Impressionism to Post-Zi- onism, stressing the shift from artistic dexterity, individual style and school traditions to political ideas. Yet Peter Gluzberg rejects politics in favor of his own world where a swift moment blends into eternity. In his paintings, rivers flow peacefully and leaves fall down with a rustle, trees rock from the gusts of the wind and waves crash on the shore, but those everlasting changes of the landscape stay unchanged, whatev- er the political circumstances. One would say that Gluzberg develops the impression- 172 Discovering The Holy Land’s Historic Landscapes through Art... ist traditions of both Russia and Is- rael, but the point is there has been no impressionist tradition in either country. Without any such ambi- tion in mind, Gluzberg becomes one of those who recreate the open air impressionist painting tradition in a place where it did not emerge earlier due to certain historical rea- sons.

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