La Musée L’Apres Midi
I spent my last afternoon in Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They had Retrospectives of works by Liliane Klapisch and the late Ari Aroch. The catalogue for the latter wins the prize for best one-sentence biography:
“Born the son of a Zionist Jew in 1908 in the city of Kharkhov in the Ukraine, he spent his life half in Jerusalem, half in the world’s capitals, and half in art, half in diplomacy, and died a modern legend at the age of sixty-six.”
Why go on, eh?
Klapisch, who lived and received her artistic training in Paris, immigrating to Jerusalem in 1969, was, in an odd way, more interesting. Aroch is, arguably, much more original. But she brings to bear a more profound technical vocabulary (with influences from Cézanne, through the cubists, through the post-war French abstractionists) on the visual landscape of her adopted land. And I can’t help but have been influenced by the fact that her exhibition was much better-staged.
Anyway, the permanent collection of modern art is also worth a look. It contains, among other gems, a healthy sampling of the delightful post-cubist constructions of Alexander Archipenko.
Posted by distler at June 15, 2003 5:57 AM