The art of being Arie Aroch

"Arie Aroch," edited by Mordechai Omer; deputy editor Varda Steinauf; design and production Varda Raz di Miranda; Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Phoenix Assurance Company. The catalogue is dedicated to Arturo Scwartz. The exhibition is sponsored by Bank Hapoalim. Hardback, 345 pages, NIS 400.

For about two years, side by side and behind a door, hung a painting by Michel Kikoine (a Parisian Jew) and one by Arie Aroch (an Israeli Jew), and in the same room, on an exposed wall, works by Candido Portinari, the great Brazilian, and by Jules Pascin, the great Frenchman, hung side by side - until Arie Aroch came along and with his own hands changed the order of the paintings: Arie Aroch next to Portinari and not - heaven forfend - next to Kikoine.

At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the `70s I spent a great deal of time with Arie Aroch. The days spent with him made me a hostile witness. Sometimes intimacy engenders (slight) scorn. It is for good reason that traditional Jewish law prohibits a student from bathing with his rabbi. It is for good reason that it recommends not being too frank. I remember Aroch as always alarmed. In the exhibition curated by Prof. Mordechai Omer, there is a small work from my family's collection. The portrait photographs of Aroch in the catalogue were taken by Ariella Schweid. Over the years I have published little about Aroch, and most of what I have published has been a bit hedged. In 1971, Aroch painted a ketuba (marriage contract) for Ariella Schweid and me, out of so much love. And also to effect a reconciliation with me. The ketuba is included in the exhibition. In 1974 Aroch died and we had not managed to effect a reconciliation.

Before his death he still tried to rehabilitate my memory of him, in the context of his efforts to dictate the way in which he would be remembered, and for him I was someone whose media activities might thwart to some extent his plans for being remembered and therefore he asked to re- record the conversations we had held. Aroch was worried about things he had said, and sometimes he wanted to erase them from the memory of his interlocutor. He did give interviews here and there, but anyone who really knew him knew that even the little frankness that was interjected into the interview was sometimes contrived.

Not only for amusement, Aroch supported local young people who built him up as an "avantgardist." At first he was afraid that these young locals would fall away from him if they discerned the element of submissiveness in his personality, the submissiveness of someone who is dependent on the Foreign Ministry for his living. Yet his service in the Foreign Ministry mesmerized them with the enchantment of "internationalism" and so on. And Arie Aroch understood very well the psychological need of a society in the making (Israel) for an "avantgardist." And this psychological need blurred, even for the best of these young people, the difference between middling and high philosophy.

Aroch, an indefatigably small individual, had a talent for talking like a philosopher, which was supported by his ability to flatter his interlocutor a little. Refined obsequiousness, a matter of process. And Aroch was also able to feel the pain of experience, including the Jewish experience, in a most refined way. And most definitely the pain of the "artist." In general he spoke well, and was charming and pleasant. And his inventiveness in evading Josef Zaritzky's embrace was also part of the "the art of being Arie Aroch."

Kikoine and the other Parisian Jews were not part of the materials of his construction as an "avantgardist," and Aroch always wanted to forget and to encourage others to forget the connection that there had been between them in 1930s, and when I opened the door to my parents' home and showed him that he was hanging next to Michel Kikoine, he blanched for a few seconds.

Behold: A family from Hapoel Hamizrachi that collects art still considers him just another "Parisian Jew," but he has already brought "Agrippas Street" into Israeli culture!

There are only two or three Israelis, of all the many Israelis who "talk art," from whom I will learn about art. Most of the texts about Aroch are crippled in my opinion. Most Israelis who attribute to Aroch a connection unique in its nature to Jewish capital are ignoramuses who don't know from which direction to slaughter a beast. And a minority of them are excellent people who have fallen captive to Arie Aroch.

After some time had elapsed, Aroch took down (elegantly, always elegantly) his small work, the one next to the Parisian Jew Michel Kikoine, and hung it next to the a small work by (the great) Braxilian Candido Portinari. "As you like," we said to ourselves, and we let Aroch determine for us his place and his context on the walls of our own home. In 1957, Aroch wrote an introduction to an exhibition by Portinari. To speak today, in 2003, to Israelis about Kikoine and Portinari is like preaching to the dead. In the catalogue, Mordechai Omer talks well and at length about the connection between Aroch and Portinari. Most of Omer's writing about Aroch is to Aroch's credit, and not primarily to Omer's credit.

And overall Prof. Omer's catalogue "Arie Aroch" is an Israeli publishing event. In what sense? Not only its physical extent (more than 500 pages), but mainly the fact of how detailed it is makes it a catalogue raisonee; the fact of the scientific precision of the research, which often gives things the aroma of an archeological find; its friendly language (simple and illustrious) serves well its intention not to get swallowed up among the art specialists, the internal editing is intelligent and seductive and the printing is good. The faith that Omer has in Aroch is loyalty. A catalogue that is a monument. There has never been a (monograph) catalogue like this in Israel.

But before my eyes I see Arie Aroch in our home removing himself from the Kikoinian context, and putting himself, almost by force, beside the (great) Portinari. And indeed, here Omer places Aroch the way Aroch himself wished: Portinari, Marcel Duchamps, Paul Klee, S.Y. Agnon, Mark Rothko, James Joyce.

And in the matter of Paul Klee's influence, Omer quotes a line from an interview I held with Aroch, but in that interview I did not mention that the conversation about Klee also included an attempt to get Aroch to talk about "The Creator," 1934, an oil on canvas by Klee. We were always interested in "the culture of the names of works." And here was "The Creator." The American artist Julian Schnabel also painted "God" in the 1980s. And here, in the matter of Klee's (painted) "Creator," Aroch was just like most Jews for whom the bitterness of their material life is sufficient and so on. And here Aroch's "Men on the Promenade" (1943) leads Omer to talk about Alberto Giacometti, whereas at the sight of "Men on the Promenade" I spoke about a certain picture by a Parisian Jew, Abraham Mintchine. And when I presented Aroch with the connection to Mintchine, he was filled with wrath. There is no self-righteousness in Prof. Omer's Aroch, but only greatness.

In the `50s and the `60s Aroch painted synagogues and Passover haggadahs, and Omer devotes a chapter to this, because here, in his opinion, there is Aroch's Jewish intimacy. An intimacy that can differentiate Aroch from most modern Israeli painting, including Ardon's religious painting. I was very keen to read this chapter but nevertheless I obediently followed the order of Omer's book and reined in my desire to read it first. After all, our passionate desire for an Israeli-Jewish painter has really not been fulfilled, even if Michael Sgan-Cohen was among us. After all, our modernism, in its sense of enlightened recognition, is coded in the Israeli-Jewish.

And with respect to Aroch's Jewish intimacy, my opinion differs from Omer's. In my opinion, Aroch's (painted) Jewishness has no pretensions beyond a nice gesture to Jewish history and is no deeper than biographical nostalgia. Nice, developed gestures, full of charm and good sense, and not a real illumination of Jewish consciousness, not a new interpretive force. And most of Aroch's "Jewish" painting is basically "a subject for a picture" and not a new light.

This supposedly Jewish painting derives from "art," from "appearance," from "biographical memory," prettifying or self-torturing, or prettifying and self-torturing with them and around them, and in sum is an artifact (a man-made object, art-art). A seductive object and often properly enchanting, having been made properly. And in general, Aroch aimed at Zachen (things). Thingy things. "It's not art, it's things," properly made, even when things want to go beyond the proper manners of accepted painting.

For Aroch, "properly made" means: justified, right for its time, in the "language," even if it violates it, in a reasoned physical size. And "properly made" also included restraint from too much virtuosity and indeed: bearing an explanation, or several explanations, even different ones.

And for Arie Aroch "properly made" meant properly studied: a properly studied product, properly studied color, properly studied physical size. And indeed Omer does not refrain from presenting series of "similar works." They are not "similar" but rather relate to one another, develop.

In 1969 I came to Aroch himself personally, to his studio, for a year or two in the wake of his 1968 "Boxes" (cubes). At the time, a flock of ignoramuses was spreading the rumor that the avantgardist was painting phylacteries. He showed his flock of disciples phylactery-wrapping, but he did not confirm that these were indeed phylacteries. Be righteous with disciples. And the Holy Name be thanked, these cubes were (only) another studied product.

In Aroch's studio. I will not be able to expand here on the charms of Aroch's studio, a small studio, let us say as tiny as the premise of a watchmaker on Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa, which is entered through the stairwell. Aroch's works of small dimensions were also derived from the physical size of the studio. The finish or the polish (of the works) was also connected to the physical closeness (there was barely room to move an elbow) to the works.

For hours I sat there watching "Aroch at work." We have a few photographs from those hours. Interpreters of Aroch have expended lifetimes trying to discover the meaning of some of his works and in my opinion, going by my personal experience, the meaning of some of them is not veiled in mountains of sanctity, but is in the inherent nature of the shapes, the inherent nature of the color, the brush strokes, the craft, the polish, the signing, the covering, the blurring, the etching, the painting, the filling, the scratching, the desire for thinginess, the emphases, the takings away and so on: Aroch within the material and the form, Aroch forced to work with the material and the form.

That is, there is quite a lot of simple explanation in Aroch's work. The simplicity of craft. A great deal of simple explanation and little attempt to look beyond the screen. The craft itself as an obsession: painting itself as an obsession. That is, the craft of painting, and not necessarily sublime (hidden) meaning. Craft, a craftsman, form in the continuum of Arochian forms, form complementing form. A known degree of the automatic. Of hours like that in Aroch's studio it cannot be said to me: Go find a better way to spend time.

Why has Aroch's work not ended up like the work of Zvi Meirovitz, that is, in a suitable room that does not include the placement of the artist on the main stage? Is Aroch's journey from Kharkhov to the glory of the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum, and to his status as the declared avantgardist here, also well-studied, that is - derived from knowledgeable understanding?

Prof. Omer does not deal with the politics of art and its offshoots, but this does not obligate others not to do so. In my opinion, Aroch's strategy was indeed built mostly on the virtues of his work, but also on a policy that was expressed in the holding of relatively few exhibitions; on limited cooperation with the "lyrical abstract"; on a few well- considered, cautious and always seemingly modest avantgardist declarations; on keeping an eye on American painting (Rothko, Barnett Newman, Larry Rivers); on the limited production of strong aesthetic surprises like "Agrippas Street"; on pointing to himself through Joyce, Klee, Agnon; on a rare talent for finding young agents for himself. And if I am sinning against Aroch in this, I will wash away my sins by next Passover in the realms of literature and letters. You will see more on the matter of "letters" further on. And the "talk about art."

What had we already heard from Josef Zaritzky? What had we already heard from Marcel Janko? We had begun to hear something from the young Igael Tumarkin. But Aroch offered us the longed-for intergenerational, cross-border figure, the figure that moves back and forth and acquires assets for us, the figure that moves confidently and between "the painting" and "the concept." The Zachen: a modesty that is arrogance. And Marcel Duchamps. Aroch manipulated us according to his will through the intelligence of Marcel Duchamps and his innovative ideas, until he almost positioned himself in our consciousness as Duchamps' active heir.

Joseph Beuys has already informed us that we had exaggerated considerably in the matter of Duchamps, and we here have exaggerated considerably in the matter of Aroch and Duchamps. Aroch did not restrain himself and distanced himself from Kikoine and juxtaposed himself to Portinari.

"Zachen." And as he was not a natural virtuoso, he tended towards a kind of goldsmithing, to a "craft" that produces a kinds of objects, "things" (Zachen, as noted) that are both "art" and "craft" and also a kind of paraphrase of "amulets."

And most of the things are lovely, sensual, sometimes inviting to the touch, seductive, "right." And this was accompanied by the thought (theory) that indeed painting was not dead, but its traditional boundaries had been breached, and Aroch is the representative of the painting as "thing." And concerning Aroch's Jewish "thing": There was no real outlook in it, and there was sentiment.

And most of Aroch's' Jewish commentary is folkloristic in nature, in my opinion. And I am referring to "My Brother Joseph," 1949, and to "Moses in Sarejevo," 1955, to which Omer devotes detailed attention. And concerning this detail: Omer cites things Aroch said about "Agnon and the Letters," things that were printed in an interview with Yona Fischer, and had there been more room here I would have expanded on the matter of Aroch's limited and folkoristic understanding of the matter of (Hebrew) letters. And whence most of Yona Fischer's attentiveness to Aroch's "Agnon and the letters"? Both from Fischer's exquisite courtesy and his great curiosity, and from the fact that he is a secular Israeli. And furthermore his conversation with Aroch exuded a philosophical narrative leisureliness almost like the conversation of Fernando Pessoa. Letters?! If Yosef Caro knew Birkhi Nafshi by heart, why did he order himself to recite this prayer from the prayer book itself, from the letters?

But we will not hide our admiration for the fact that Aroch did not bow to the local (primitive) modernist dictate that bordered on the denial of the Jewish biography. Yet nevertheless we did not admire and we shall not now admire the "Ketuba for Ariella and Adam Baruch," 1972, which is on show in the exhibition and described and printed in the catalogue: A hybrid pasting-together of two pages from the encyclopedia "Humanity - The History of Culture and Art (Volume 5: Life During the Renaissance)," in which the page of Hebrew text is fitted onto a photograph of Isabella d'Este's reading room in the ducal palace of Mantua, from the 15th century.

And this is what Omer has to say about the implications of this ketuba: "And thus (Aroch) adopted the culture of the West (the renaissance) to himself, to his Jewishness and to his Hebrewness. This bold grafting exemplifies, perhaps in an extreme way, Aroch's longing to be both Jewish and Western, at one and the same time, concrete and metaphysical, personal and universal, abstract and symbolic, believing and secular." As I see it, the great charm of the ketuba does not excuse its frivolousness.

The Jews among us were quite pleased by Aroch's leanings towards his Jewish origins. A modernist in the footsteps of his murdered fathers, and not out of weakness of mind! And in general we were pleased to see a modernist Jew with our own eyes. And indeed, the Jews among us looked kindly upon Michael Sgan-Cohen - the youngster.

As "art," most of the works that Omer has included in Aroch's "Jewish" chapter are excellent. Works about a "subject." Neither Larry Rivers nor Barnett Newman, both of whom were known to Aroch, were capable of painting (transmitting) their "Jewish subjects" as anything but "art." The longing for an Israeli-Jewish artist had not yet been fulfilled. Mordechai Omer: "One of Arie Aroch's great arenas in his work, perhaps the greatest of all, is the ways in which he expressed his Jewishness, the importance he attributed to it, his sensitivity and love for Jewish objects ... Aroch aimed to a new, personal and modernist formulation of his Jewish icons." And indeed, in the reasoning of the 2003 Israel Prize committee the "Jewish" tendencies of Moshe Gershuni were also mentioned.

Omer does not relate in detail to Aroch and Israeli society (politics) and let us say, and not only out of poor manners, that Aroch was primarily politically obedient, and most of his land of Israel and Israeli landscape paintings worked as glorying in the place, in the Zionist-establishment sense of glorying.

"Agrippas Street," 1964, oils, crayon, etching and street sign on wood, 116 cm. by 53.5 cm. Aroch's exalted avant-garde status sprang from "Agrippas Street." His work can be divided into pre-Agrippas and post-Agrippas. Up until Agrippas, his work is mostly "period piece," that is, definitely of its times. When during the 1930s he was influenced by the (Jewish) School of Paris, his work was decidedly "period piece," if also personal and excellent. In my opinion, Agrippas too was in the main clearly a product of the times, and apparently I am the only one who thinks so.

"Agrippas Street" was acquired jointly by the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and has the life of a sacred object. There are those who pin historiosophy on it: disappointment with governors, with representatives of foreign rule, sovereignty, exile. Maybe. I spent hours with Aroch discussing Agrippas, and all his stories came from "art" (Modernism, Ready-Made, expanding the boundaries of painting) and not from historiosophy.

The fierce longing for a local modernist found rest in Agrippas. Indeed Agrippas is lovely. Indeed Agrippas is excellent. But it could only have become a sacred object. Agrippas was not a force of nature that erupted from the ground bearing deep roots that had been unknown to us. It embodied only (and only well) high mediation, in which there was intellectual and sensuous amusement, which was all a response to the nearest modern insight of art: an answer to the interest of the Russian avant-garde in shop signs; an answer to the expansion of the list of "legitimate" (respectable) art materials; and an answer to the breaking of the framework of painting itself; to early Pop Art; to Ready-Made.

Is Agrippas not a definite product of its times? Is Agrippas not a captivating example of the relations between painting and object? Is it not proof of Aroch's ability to produce an aesthetic surprise? Is there not a lesson from Agrippas and a lesson for all us in all this? Why have we bothered to raise Agrippas so high above itself and make it a masterpiece of the avant-garde and so on? Because of our psychological need for this: The need of an overheated art world desirous of an avant-garde masterpiece of its own. And because nevertheless in Agrippas there are signs of greatness.

Adam Baruch's book "Our Life," deals with the Jewish-Israeli constitution.