Litvinovsky [antikvár]

Pinchas Litvinovsky ranks among the leading Israeli artists whose vision and creativity were to form the foundations of Israeli culture. Litvinovsky's image is to a certain extent based upon the erroneous assumption that he was primarily a portrait painter. While he did in fact paint portraits in order to eam a living, the main thrust of his art is of an entirely different nature, and for this reason, no portraits have been included in the present show. Litvinovsky was, above all, a painter of the erotic and the sensual, for whom the canvas and the paper became a lovers' palette." As Dórit Shafir suggests in her introduction, this state of impassioned desire, the sense that "the skin cannot contain the flesh," was, in fact, a step towards the shedding of corporeality, towards spirituality. For Litvinovsky, erotic and artistic energy combined to form spiritual ecstasy, a heightened emotional state of a different order. Litvinovsky - a strikingly physical, athletic type, an amateur boxer, a long-distance runner, who was nicknamed in his early years in Eretz Israel "Muzhik" - abhorred old age, the decline of the body, and death. But this very man alsó spent his life in quest of spirituality, though the route he took was via the body: his was a Tolstoyan way of life, that of a vegan who partook of the "root of life" and studied such works as The Occult Anatomy of Man. Under the brush of Pinchas Litvinovsky, the world became one of color and form. Women, men, children, and animals were transformed into bright splashes of color and surprising, energetic forms. Litvinovsky was a painter who invented, rather than observed; his images were drawn from his inner world. The people and animals who constituted the focal points of his works were not depicted as parts of a realistic environment, such as nature or any defined space; rather, they became signs, formai motifs painted as concepts across a neutral, abstract background. They were not rendered in their fullness, volume, and three-dimensionality but generally as lines and fiat forms, symbolized, flowing from the power of the vision and the emotion. Litvinovsky gave form not to appearances, but to the intensity and excitement of experience, to humán energy, eroticism as an emotion. He thus employed bold tones - sometimes distorting the image of the man or beast out of the fervor of his emotion - swiftly, with tremendous enthusiasm and spontaneity. The developments in Litvinovsky's art over the years run parallel in many ways to the history of Israeli art in generál: studies at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem; intentionally naive paintings in the 1920s, with an emphasis on Eastern motifs and depictions of the Arab as a natural being of unrestrained passions, as in the paintings of Reuven Rubin, Nahum Gutman, Arié Lubin and others. Yet in this period, Litvinovsky, more so than his colleagues, made dramatic use of modernist styles, especially Cubism as reflected in Russian painting of the 1920s. This boldness of