About Aharon Bezalel
Aharon Bezalel was born in 1926 in the city of Harath, Afghanistan. Those of his generation born in Israel are often described as having been “born of the sea”, their backs to the Diaspora, facing a ‘new world' whose culture, still hesitant, had just begun to take shape. Aharon Bezalel was not “born of the sea”. Son of Mula Reuven, kabbalist and rabbi in Harath and later in Eretz Israel, he spent his childhood embraced by a large family where tradition dictated and determined all realms of life, and where family and community defined the space in which everything took place. Jewish tradition with its multitude of images, symbols and tales, and the life circles of family and community, all echo in the various facets of his work. They are ever-present, like the family portraits on the wall, above the dining table at his home.
The city of Harath, like the rest of Afghanistan – thus Aharon will recount years after having left it – is drab and colorless. There was never any art, but the pant legs just visible under the hems of women's embroidered skirts, the head kerchiefs, tablecloths, carpets and rugs in the Sukkah – all of these shimmered in myriad colors. And there were the stories, countless tales that the father and uncles brought back with them from their travels as fur traders. Stories of long, perilous voyages, high mountain ranges and deep valleys, of people haunted by ghosts, of horses ridden and spurred on by demons, of bizarre strangers met along the way. Through these stories,told around the stove in long winter nights, an enchanted, colorful existence was reflected time and again.
Aharon is deeply rooted in this past, despite his wishes to leave it behind when he came to Eretz Israel. The roots of his family tree, which many years later he painstakingly drew, painted, framed and hung up by his family portraits, reach back to the city of Mash'had, Iran, in the first half of the eighteenth century. Years after taking off his skullcap, having abandoned the stricter religious way of life and wholeheartedly embracing Israeli culture, he never misses a chance to gather the family at his secular home and celebrate the holidays in Afghan-Jewish tradition. That is when the old songbooks are taken out, and songs that his father had translated from Hebrew into Persian and set to music, are loudly and merrily sung by the whole family, down to the third and fourth generations.
In 1938 the family arrived in Jerusalem. The journey lasted about half a year. A new, strange world opened up to the curious boy who had been dreaming nights of a ‘celestial Jerusalem', bathed in glimmering golden light. Worldly Jerusalem, the city they had reached by bus was nothing like the dream. Cold, muddy and dark was the road to the Beth-Israel neighborhood where the family settled into the Jewish-Afghan community, and where Aharon's younger brothers and his parents' grandchildren were eventually born. With time, Aharon would come to love the city and leave it only for short periods of time, always returning to the stalls and restaurants of the Mahane Yehuda marketplace, to the Iraqi flat-bread bakery in Beth-Israel, to the ultra-orthodox quarter of Meah-Shearim where he knows every nook and cranny. Even as his hometown would eventually become more of a burden to him, and other cities enticed him – in their open, modern, livelier ways –the images and characters of Jerusalem would persist in his work.
In the 1940's the young Aharon was already looking far beyond the confines of his religious school, for different horizons. In secondhand book shops he found tomes of geography, archeology, history and world literature as well as practical sciences that taught him chemistry, electricity etc. But most of all he was drawn to art books, and although he could not read them – art books in Hebrew were very rare in those days – he purchased them, thirstily looking for the pictures. The Rockefeller Museum, within walking distance, was a regular target for Saturday strolls with friends. And he went there time and again, enchanted by the archeological finds, the Greek 11 and Roman sculptures, the Egyptian and Assyrian figurines, the representations of ancient history and the sights of ancient cultures that had not been part of his home world nor his studies at school.
In the early forties, Aharon and some friends from his community founded the Afghan young people's association, whose goal was to familiarize the youth of this community with Israeli culture. His older sisters learned to read and write in the evening classes set up by the association. In those days he took several courses at the Bezalel Academy of Art, where he would return for a while in the early fifties.
Seeking employment, Aharon met Martin and Helga Rost, a German-Jewish couple who taught him wood-carving and some words in German. He worked for them until his conscription as the ‘War of Independence' (1948) broke out. Some of the miniatures he carved in their studio are displayed in a glass case at his home – characteristic Jerusalem figures carved in European technique and style: Kurdish, Libyan, Moroccan and Bukharan Jews in their colorful ethnic costumes, kibbutzniks, rabbis and Ashkenazi Hassids alongside Arabs, men and women, in traditional garb and embroidered dresses.
Martin Rost was killed in the war. Upon his widow's recommendation, Aharon was approached after the war by the Alice Seligsberg Vocational School for Girls at Jerusalem's Ha'Nevi'im Street that had purchased the Rost's equipment, and together they founded the school's handicraft department. Mrs. Rost taught painting and ornamentation, and Aharon would teach wood-carving for eighteen years.
In 1952 he married Bath-Sheba and set up a small workshop by their home, where he carved miniatures after school hours. But these were no longer the folklore objects that had characterized his earlier work. New motifs had emerged: larger Biblical images, originating in the stories of his childhood and youth, now took on the shapes of Canaanite and Nabatean figures.
Aharon Bezalel's Biblical figures are neither symbols nor metaphors; they constitute a narrative, a seemingly simple story of Biblical scenes: Samson grappling with the lion, Eve offering Adam an apple, Jacob wrestling with the angel, King Solomon's Trial and many others. But this apparently simple, naïve figurativeness actually bears the interpretation of one who is very much at home with these stories, yet observes them from the outside as well: Eve in her seduction dance with the snake – who is the real seducer here, and who the seduced? Moses, a small man whose outstretched hands are really the Tablets of the Law; Jacob and Rachel united into one body; Samson and the lion in a sparring dance for male domination. The narrative-mythological level and the interpretation intermingle with motifs of ancient local art in these sculptures, especially with the figurines that show up repeatedly in his work to this day.
In the fifties, as Israeli art explored paths to its Biblical roots on the one hand, and to Mediterranean indigenous modes on the other, Aharon's small sculptures became very successful. They were literally grabbed, and galleries just could not show enough of them.
The traditions and stories upon which Aharon had grown up seemed to compete over Aharon's soul with Israeli culture – to whose quest for its own unique voice he was intensely drawn. Apparently this combination established his place in Israeli art at the time. Many years later, when the Israeli cultural arena would resound with stormy discussions over the repression of various cultural ethnicities in the name of ‘melting pot' ideology, Aharon Bezalel would not be able to fathom the conflict. He would not see any contradiction between the 19 quest for ‘Israeliness' and the conservation of long lost traditions.
1954 saw the birth of his eldest daughter, Butzit, his second daughter, Tali, was born in 1956, and his youngest, Yael, in 1963.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Aharon broke out of his earlier formats. Now he was drawn to the dimensions, volume and possibilities offered by techniques of casting. These, as well as the discovery of new materials, led him to search for essence and forego detail.
For a while he abandoned wood – to which he would return in the eighties – and went on to create in aluminium and bronze. This transition also involved a shift in themes. These became more universal: women and men, the couple, the family, the group. Aharon was establishing himself as a known artist with his own unique style. Exhibitions in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv brought on further commissions and shows. After an exhibition at Boston's Pecker-Safrai Gallery, which helped to open more doors in the United States, he left his teaching job at the school and began to devote all of his time to his studio work.
In spite of his activity in the Jerusalem Artists Association – chairing it in 1974-1975 – and his close friendship with many Jerusalem artists (David Polombo, Avraham Ofek, Avraham Mandel and others), he avoided being identified with any specific group or school.
In 1971 Aharon spent half a year as a guest artist at the Cité – ‘the artists' city' – in Paris. Due to technical constraints, he began to cast his sculptures in segments in order to assemble them later. Here, as if by mere chance, he discovered the principle that would characterize his work from then on: the whole body is split into two figures like the Platonic Androgynus along each of their outlines. Often these are a man and a woman. Each of them is a whole entity in itself, but their movement towards each other indicates their desire to reunite and be as one. Upon discovering this divided sculpture form, he began to create modular works. Figures are placed in differing relations to one another, and the viewer is invited to participate and play with the possibilities. Interrelation is always preserved, however, maintained in the form and movement of the figures.
The Talmud had this to say of Aharon of the Bible: “Moses would say let justice be done though the heavens fall, whereas Aharon was peace-loving, pursuing peace, and making peace among men.” Of Bezalel it was said that “he knew how to combine the letters of which heaven and earth were created.”
Indeed, Aharon Bezalel admits that in his work he has always aspired towards harmony, beauty revealed to the eye of the beholder. He is a stranger to the trends of deconstruction, dismissing the object, deconstructing the subject, etc. – which have taken over culture and art. He is also a stranger to conceptual art, although he has learned to respect it, and continues to familiarize himself with it in his visits to museums and galleries. He himself has remained loyal to form, artistic object and traditional aesthetics.
In the seventies, Aharon's work was exhibited more often and many of his sculptures were installed in public places. Alongside his well-known ones – the Nursing Woman at the Hadassah Hospital, the wooden totem-like sculpture at Tel Aviv University, the three gates at the Eye Institute in New York's Columbia University, the athlete at Zinman College, Wingate Institute and many others – new works emerge: “Man and His City” at Lansing, Michigan, “Man and his Deeds”, a relief of nine wooden panels at the Jerusalem School of Medicine, and others.
A commission for a Holocaust memorial sculpture drove him to visit Dachau concentration camp. The site struck him deeply. The sculptures and reliefs which this visit yielded constitute a return to the simplest, most direct forms and symbols: “A Last Kaddish”, “Minyan”, the globe torn asunder by a swastika. His work “Holocaust Menorah”, presented to the Vatican by the Jewish-American Asssociation for Inter-religious Understanding – replicas of this Menorah were later placed in numerous American churches – is a typical expression of this trend: an immediate, simple rendition of the inexpressible.
Aharon and his family spent the years 1975-76 in New York. This city charmed him and became his second home. He would return there in future years, explore and discover its secrets. In his sculptures, New York's skyline and local color would often make themselves felt.
In the eighties Aharon resumed his wood carving. But, unlike his previous years, here wood is no longer raw material but rather a partner to be contended with in dialogue, not an object for imposing foreign forms. Aharon cuts into the wood, trying to expose that which it contains, discover its inner shapes and colors. Many of his wooden sculptures of that period retain secrets that are bared only with time by the persistent viewer.
The eighties and nineties saw the birth of the grandchildren, one by one: Tom, Noam, Ben, Bar, Gal, Tav, Rotem, Eden, Suff, Tut. Aharon photographed them often as a clump, in a row, in a ‘pile'. These images would reappear in his bronze and wooden works and especially in aluminium-cuts in the nineties and first years of the third millennium.
The eighties and nineties saw a new direction in his work as he dragged into his studio old wooden plates found strewn in various sites. The old, scratched plate seemed to reveal its own story, and Aharon would enter that story. He cuts into the plate, carves figures out of it, and then reintroduces them onto the original plate. Thus a dialogue emerges between old and new, between the site where the artist finds the plate, and his own imagination.
In the late nineties and first years of the third millennium Aharon 23 returns to his figurative style and sculpts minimalist wooden works,at times mere hints devoid of any detail, bare essence. These are usually human forms: a female torso, mother and child, embracing couple, man and woman. In some, parts of the original wooden block are left in their primal state, indicating that the figures still belong to it, and are not a mere figment of the artist's imagination.
At this time, Aharon met Rachel who became his life-partner. They shared his home in En Kerem, Jerusalem.
Today the studio is opened to visitors...
The city of Harath, like the rest of Afghanistan – thus Aharon will recount years after having left it – is drab and colorless. There was never any art, but the pant legs just visible under the hems of women's embroidered skirts, the head kerchiefs, tablecloths, carpets and rugs in the Sukkah – all of these shimmered in myriad colors. And there were the stories, countless tales that the father and uncles brought back with them from their travels as fur traders. Stories of long, perilous voyages, high mountain ranges and deep valleys, of people haunted by ghosts, of horses ridden and spurred on by demons, of bizarre strangers met along the way. Through these stories,told around the stove in long winter nights, an enchanted, colorful existence was reflected time and again.
Aharon is deeply rooted in this past, despite his wishes to leave it behind when he came to Eretz Israel. The roots of his family tree, which many years later he painstakingly drew, painted, framed and hung up by his family portraits, reach back to the city of Mash'had, Iran, in the first half of the eighteenth century. Years after taking off his skullcap, having abandoned the stricter religious way of life and wholeheartedly embracing Israeli culture, he never misses a chance to gather the family at his secular home and celebrate the holidays in Afghan-Jewish tradition. That is when the old songbooks are taken out, and songs that his father had translated from Hebrew into Persian and set to music, are loudly and merrily sung by the whole family, down to the third and fourth generations.
In 1938 the family arrived in Jerusalem. The journey lasted about half a year. A new, strange world opened up to the curious boy who had been dreaming nights of a ‘celestial Jerusalem', bathed in glimmering golden light. Worldly Jerusalem, the city they had reached by bus was nothing like the dream. Cold, muddy and dark was the road to the Beth-Israel neighborhood where the family settled into the Jewish-Afghan community, and where Aharon's younger brothers and his parents' grandchildren were eventually born. With time, Aharon would come to love the city and leave it only for short periods of time, always returning to the stalls and restaurants of the Mahane Yehuda marketplace, to the Iraqi flat-bread bakery in Beth-Israel, to the ultra-orthodox quarter of Meah-Shearim where he knows every nook and cranny. Even as his hometown would eventually become more of a burden to him, and other cities enticed him – in their open, modern, livelier ways –the images and characters of Jerusalem would persist in his work.
In the 1940's the young Aharon was already looking far beyond the confines of his religious school, for different horizons. In secondhand book shops he found tomes of geography, archeology, history and world literature as well as practical sciences that taught him chemistry, electricity etc. But most of all he was drawn to art books, and although he could not read them – art books in Hebrew were very rare in those days – he purchased them, thirstily looking for the pictures. The Rockefeller Museum, within walking distance, was a regular target for Saturday strolls with friends. And he went there time and again, enchanted by the archeological finds, the Greek 11 and Roman sculptures, the Egyptian and Assyrian figurines, the representations of ancient history and the sights of ancient cultures that had not been part of his home world nor his studies at school.
In the early forties, Aharon and some friends from his community founded the Afghan young people's association, whose goal was to familiarize the youth of this community with Israeli culture. His older sisters learned to read and write in the evening classes set up by the association. In those days he took several courses at the Bezalel Academy of Art, where he would return for a while in the early fifties.
Seeking employment, Aharon met Martin and Helga Rost, a German-Jewish couple who taught him wood-carving and some words in German. He worked for them until his conscription as the ‘War of Independence' (1948) broke out. Some of the miniatures he carved in their studio are displayed in a glass case at his home – characteristic Jerusalem figures carved in European technique and style: Kurdish, Libyan, Moroccan and Bukharan Jews in their colorful ethnic costumes, kibbutzniks, rabbis and Ashkenazi Hassids alongside Arabs, men and women, in traditional garb and embroidered dresses.
Martin Rost was killed in the war. Upon his widow's recommendation, Aharon was approached after the war by the Alice Seligsberg Vocational School for Girls at Jerusalem's Ha'Nevi'im Street that had purchased the Rost's equipment, and together they founded the school's handicraft department. Mrs. Rost taught painting and ornamentation, and Aharon would teach wood-carving for eighteen years.
In 1952 he married Bath-Sheba and set up a small workshop by their home, where he carved miniatures after school hours. But these were no longer the folklore objects that had characterized his earlier work. New motifs had emerged: larger Biblical images, originating in the stories of his childhood and youth, now took on the shapes of Canaanite and Nabatean figures.
Aharon Bezalel's Biblical figures are neither symbols nor metaphors; they constitute a narrative, a seemingly simple story of Biblical scenes: Samson grappling with the lion, Eve offering Adam an apple, Jacob wrestling with the angel, King Solomon's Trial and many others. But this apparently simple, naïve figurativeness actually bears the interpretation of one who is very much at home with these stories, yet observes them from the outside as well: Eve in her seduction dance with the snake – who is the real seducer here, and who the seduced? Moses, a small man whose outstretched hands are really the Tablets of the Law; Jacob and Rachel united into one body; Samson and the lion in a sparring dance for male domination. The narrative-mythological level and the interpretation intermingle with motifs of ancient local art in these sculptures, especially with the figurines that show up repeatedly in his work to this day.
In the fifties, as Israeli art explored paths to its Biblical roots on the one hand, and to Mediterranean indigenous modes on the other, Aharon's small sculptures became very successful. They were literally grabbed, and galleries just could not show enough of them.
The traditions and stories upon which Aharon had grown up seemed to compete over Aharon's soul with Israeli culture – to whose quest for its own unique voice he was intensely drawn. Apparently this combination established his place in Israeli art at the time. Many years later, when the Israeli cultural arena would resound with stormy discussions over the repression of various cultural ethnicities in the name of ‘melting pot' ideology, Aharon Bezalel would not be able to fathom the conflict. He would not see any contradiction between the 19 quest for ‘Israeliness' and the conservation of long lost traditions.
1954 saw the birth of his eldest daughter, Butzit, his second daughter, Tali, was born in 1956, and his youngest, Yael, in 1963.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Aharon broke out of his earlier formats. Now he was drawn to the dimensions, volume and possibilities offered by techniques of casting. These, as well as the discovery of new materials, led him to search for essence and forego detail.
For a while he abandoned wood – to which he would return in the eighties – and went on to create in aluminium and bronze. This transition also involved a shift in themes. These became more universal: women and men, the couple, the family, the group. Aharon was establishing himself as a known artist with his own unique style. Exhibitions in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv brought on further commissions and shows. After an exhibition at Boston's Pecker-Safrai Gallery, which helped to open more doors in the United States, he left his teaching job at the school and began to devote all of his time to his studio work.
In spite of his activity in the Jerusalem Artists Association – chairing it in 1974-1975 – and his close friendship with many Jerusalem artists (David Polombo, Avraham Ofek, Avraham Mandel and others), he avoided being identified with any specific group or school.
In 1971 Aharon spent half a year as a guest artist at the Cité – ‘the artists' city' – in Paris. Due to technical constraints, he began to cast his sculptures in segments in order to assemble them later. Here, as if by mere chance, he discovered the principle that would characterize his work from then on: the whole body is split into two figures like the Platonic Androgynus along each of their outlines. Often these are a man and a woman. Each of them is a whole entity in itself, but their movement towards each other indicates their desire to reunite and be as one. Upon discovering this divided sculpture form, he began to create modular works. Figures are placed in differing relations to one another, and the viewer is invited to participate and play with the possibilities. Interrelation is always preserved, however, maintained in the form and movement of the figures.
The Talmud had this to say of Aharon of the Bible: “Moses would say let justice be done though the heavens fall, whereas Aharon was peace-loving, pursuing peace, and making peace among men.” Of Bezalel it was said that “he knew how to combine the letters of which heaven and earth were created.”
Indeed, Aharon Bezalel admits that in his work he has always aspired towards harmony, beauty revealed to the eye of the beholder. He is a stranger to the trends of deconstruction, dismissing the object, deconstructing the subject, etc. – which have taken over culture and art. He is also a stranger to conceptual art, although he has learned to respect it, and continues to familiarize himself with it in his visits to museums and galleries. He himself has remained loyal to form, artistic object and traditional aesthetics.
In the seventies, Aharon's work was exhibited more often and many of his sculptures were installed in public places. Alongside his well-known ones – the Nursing Woman at the Hadassah Hospital, the wooden totem-like sculpture at Tel Aviv University, the three gates at the Eye Institute in New York's Columbia University, the athlete at Zinman College, Wingate Institute and many others – new works emerge: “Man and His City” at Lansing, Michigan, “Man and his Deeds”, a relief of nine wooden panels at the Jerusalem School of Medicine, and others.
A commission for a Holocaust memorial sculpture drove him to visit Dachau concentration camp. The site struck him deeply. The sculptures and reliefs which this visit yielded constitute a return to the simplest, most direct forms and symbols: “A Last Kaddish”, “Minyan”, the globe torn asunder by a swastika. His work “Holocaust Menorah”, presented to the Vatican by the Jewish-American Asssociation for Inter-religious Understanding – replicas of this Menorah were later placed in numerous American churches – is a typical expression of this trend: an immediate, simple rendition of the inexpressible.
Aharon and his family spent the years 1975-76 in New York. This city charmed him and became his second home. He would return there in future years, explore and discover its secrets. In his sculptures, New York's skyline and local color would often make themselves felt.
In the eighties Aharon resumed his wood carving. But, unlike his previous years, here wood is no longer raw material but rather a partner to be contended with in dialogue, not an object for imposing foreign forms. Aharon cuts into the wood, trying to expose that which it contains, discover its inner shapes and colors. Many of his wooden sculptures of that period retain secrets that are bared only with time by the persistent viewer.
The eighties and nineties saw the birth of the grandchildren, one by one: Tom, Noam, Ben, Bar, Gal, Tav, Rotem, Eden, Suff, Tut. Aharon photographed them often as a clump, in a row, in a ‘pile'. These images would reappear in his bronze and wooden works and especially in aluminium-cuts in the nineties and first years of the third millennium.
The eighties and nineties saw a new direction in his work as he dragged into his studio old wooden plates found strewn in various sites. The old, scratched plate seemed to reveal its own story, and Aharon would enter that story. He cuts into the plate, carves figures out of it, and then reintroduces them onto the original plate. Thus a dialogue emerges between old and new, between the site where the artist finds the plate, and his own imagination.
In the late nineties and first years of the third millennium Aharon 23 returns to his figurative style and sculpts minimalist wooden works,at times mere hints devoid of any detail, bare essence. These are usually human forms: a female torso, mother and child, embracing couple, man and woman. In some, parts of the original wooden block are left in their primal state, indicating that the figures still belong to it, and are not a mere figment of the artist's imagination.
At this time, Aharon met Rachel who became his life-partner. They shared his home in En Kerem, Jerusalem.
Today the studio is opened to visitors...
