Nahum Tevet's number one fan is Robert Rauschenberg. For real. In the summer of 1974, two years after Tevet put on his first solo show at Sara Gilat's gallery in Jerusalem, the esteemed American pop artist, now 81, came to Israel for the opening of an exhibition of his works at the Israel Museum. During a visit to Gilat's home, Rauschenberg came across some pieces by Tevet and fell in love at first sight. Then he saw more of the artist's work and was still in love, and at the press conference for the opening of the Israel Musuem exhibition, Rauschenberg announced that he had found a young, fantastic artist in Israel named Nahum Tevet. Hardly anyone knew whom he was referring to.

When one looks at Tevet's hands, so rough and cracked from work, the first thought one has is that they must belong to a hardworking manual laborer, not to an artist. Tevet, 60, one of Israel's most prominent artists, was born on Kibbutz Mesilot and lives in Tel Aviv. For 30 years, he has been wearing out his hands on his unique sculptures, most of which could be ascribed to the minimalist and post-minimalist schools. His work has not gone unnoticed: His talent gained recognition outside Israel as well, after pieces were shown at major international exhibitions such as the Documenta 8 in Kassel (1987), the Sao Paulo Biennial (1994) and the Venice Biennale (2003).

For the past 30 years, his studio in south Tel Aviv, a dusty workshop full of bits and pieces, has been the place where Tevet presides as "Papa Gepetto," as he likes to say. His "carpentry shop" produces hundreds of cubes, frames, tablets, tables and boats that he constructs out of simple plywood, without much of an idea of what he'll end up doing with them. In the next stage, he moves to the "paint department" in the studio, where the forms he has made are colored with various types of paint and polishes. He enjoys this stage, although, like its predecessor, it also lacks a specific purpose. His assistant never gets to paint a thing. This is Tevet's territory alone. This is where he gets friendly with the objects he has built, with the entities and forms that, by virtue of their simplicity and amateur nature, will eventually, in the finished work, impart a sense of intimacy.

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"This part of it in which I just come to it without much thought and saw and cut and paint is important to me. It's my occupational therapy," he says. "It's a place in which I'm not wearing a white robe and doing art and saying to myself, 'I'm an artist who's creating sculptures.' I like to divide the studio into departments, like in a factory, and I'm the guy who's producing piles of odds and ends. In the studio there are no sophisticated tools, everything is simple and basic. There's nothing sterile about the objects and when you see them you want to touch them."

When the shelves are crammed with bits and pieces, he starts to prepare to sculpt. As someone who doesn't know until the last minute which way he's going to go, all Tevet says to himself is something like, "I want a dense work of large dimensions," or maybe just the opposite - a light, airy work. "My sculptures are born out of nothing. There's an empty room in the studio and I start to place the objects I've made in there and I look at them and add to it until, all of a sudden, in a certain situation, something surprising happens, and it thrills me anew each time."

Last week, an exhibit of Tevet's later sculptures, from 1994 to 2006, opened at the Israel Museum. The exhibition catalog (beautifully designed by Michael Gordon) contains an essay by curator Sarit Shapira, as well as articles by philosophy professors Dr. Hagi Kenaan and Dr. Eli Friedlander, both of whom have been following Tevet's work for years. In a series of photographs, the artist Yossi Breger provides his own perspective on Tevet's work. Choreographer Ohad Naharin writes about the affinity between his work and Tevet's.

Tevet, who also runs the MFA Program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, says that his motivation is the enjoyment he derives from seeing "a dumb cube or small table be transformed, in a certain arrangement, into something I didn't plan and didn't imagine, and which manages to surprise and excite me every time."

The most impressive work in the exhibition is "Seven Walks." When Tevet began it he didn't know where he was going with it, nor was he certain he would ever get there. The work took over his life; he worked on it in a huge studio on Moshav Beit Hanan (the space formerly housed a school gym), and it took him eight years to finish it. "Seven Walks" is a construction that sits on the museum floor, and contains a crowded but elegant assemblage of wooden shapes and structures in green, yellow, brown and white. The piece is 8.5 x 13.5 meters and rises to a height of 2 meters. At first, one is tempted to ask: What's going on here? Until a sense of logic quickly sets in, along with the desire to enter into this beautiful, abandoned-seeming urban-like maze and wander around in it.

"Seven Walks" originated in two other works from a decade ago - "Man With Camera" and "Untitled," which are also in the exhibition. At the time, Tevet was working in his Tel Aviv studio, and in artists' workshops in south Tel Aviv. "Because I'm the only lunatic in the world who works completely by hand, without anything virtual or any simulations. The dumb carpenter who does things by hand, pre-Industrial Revolution-style, and I knew that I was tired of works that are made quickly and shown quickly. Like I told you, I wanted to see how far I could take this move. When the work filled the entire studio in Tel Aviv, I moved to Beit Hanan. Every morning, five days a week, I went to the studio and worked there for 12 hours. I was there all the time. I'd stop for a bite to eat, take a 20-minute nap in the afternoon, sometimes read something or chat on the phone for a few minutes, and then get right back to work."

The work took up so much space that it eventually spawned yet another work. "In Beit Hanan, for the first time, there was a separation between the carpentry shop and the painting shop and the installation space of the sculpture, for the prosaic reason that the work was complicated and I didn't want the dust. When I completed the work, the question arose of what I would do after having done something of this magnitude. Sort of like what a writer must wonder after he's finished writing his great novel.

"And then I felt that I wanted to do an airier work that creates a different relationship between itself and the viewer. This is the work that closes the exhibition, called 'Several Things' (2006), which takes up the same space as 'Seven Walks,' and yet you come out of it with the feeling that you've emptied your lungs all at once."

The works have a melancholy aspect to them, even a chilliness, one could say. Tevet acknowledges this: "I think that the works create bittersweet things," he says. The feeling comes, he says, from the image of a city that the works impart. "Some see the inside of a house, the shape of the furniture, and the most abstract objects are painted in Formica-like colors, in the style of kitchens from the 1960s and '70s or of institutions like schools, hospitals and children's homes. If you're talking about feeling, it usually comes from these things."

Are the 27 years you lived on Kibbutz Messilot reflected in your works?

"It definitely is reflected, but not in the kind of whining way that was expressed in the exhibition 'Communal Sleeping' at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art [an exhibition held about two years ago in which various artists presented works depicting their experiences of sleeping in the communal children's houses that were once the norm on kibbutzim], but in a much more organized and delicate way. It connected to a kind of post-minimalism. Shapira wrote that the works relate to early modernism, to an aesthetic that seeped into the kibbutzim with its functionality and simplicity."

On the kibbutz, Nahum was the painter of the class. His father, Mendel, came to Palestine in 1934 and was part of a Hashomer Hatzair hakshara (kibbutz training) group in Hadera, where he worked as a tailor and later as a baker. Mendel worked for most of his life as a fisherman and was a founder of the fishing industry in Messilot. He met his wife, Feige, in the training group. Their daughter, Shlomit, who became a journalist, was born in 1941, and Nahum was born in 1946. A few months after Nahum was born, his mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and she died when he was just a year old.

He grew up in the children's house and with his father, who never remarried. "When I was old enough to understand, I realized that I was an orphan," says Tevet. "I suppressed everything. My mother was the first woman who died on the kibbutz. My father worked all the time in the fishery and I was in the children's house and we didn't talk about it. I know very little about my mother. It's a part of my biography and I really can't say if a sculpture looks a certain way because it was made by an orphan. I like to say that I'm a professional orphan."

In seventh grade, he transferred to the school near Beit Alpha (a regional boarding school for kibbutz children, as was standard in those years throughout the kibbutz movement) and there, for the first time, he had a painting lesson.

"It was a formative experience, just the fact that there were desks and paints there," he says. The teacher was liberal and nurtured Tevet's talent. In ninth grade, he was sent to study with Marcel Janco at the Pedagogic Seminar in Oranim. His teachers felt he was an excellent colorist and predicted that he would become an important artist.

During his army service, he became an officer in the armored corps and fought on the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War ("The army is a funny part of my career"), and afterward he decided to study art in Tel Aviv. A few lessons at the Avni Institute of Arts proved enough for him. One day, he stopped in at the Gordon Gallery, where Sara Levy (who would eventually own her own gallery) was working. "She said, 'From the way you're looking at the paintings, you must be a painter. Show me some of your work.' And she sent me to Raffi Lavie, who was living in Ramat Gan then."

"The criterion for measuring an artist is uniqueness, and Tevet is unique," says Lavie, who was Tevet's most significant teacher. "Every artist who is interviewed always says that he's a lone wolf. Tevet is not a lone wolf, but relative to contemporaries like Michal Na'aman, Dganit Berest, Tsibi Geva and others, he is different and represents constructivism, which is a minority area in Israeli art. He is also an important teacher."

Is it possible that as a critic, you weren't supportive of him?

"The structural nature of his works began with chaos, and when I was the art critic for Ha'ir in the '80s, I referred to it as 'moving house' and this was construed as an insult. I erred in the wording. On the one hand, Tevet does create order, and on the other, what stands out is the disorder in his order. These are not just complex forms that he builds. They contain countless allusions and associations and in this way he approaches artists of his generation like Michal Na'aman."

In 1972, he had a solo show at the Sara Gilat Gallery, and then came Rauschenberg's memorable visit. "Rauschenberg told Sara Gilat that he wanted to see my works, and I came with a plastic bag filled with pictures of them and he thought it was great and bought four of them. A little while after that, he called me from New York and said that he was sending a $400 grant from a foundation that supports artists and that I should come to New York, but the money wasn't enough and I couldn't obtain support from local foundations, so with the $400 I went to Europe. I did meet Rauschenberg several times in New York. He was always a bit tipsy from whisky and amazingly friendly. He said that he'd hung my works in his living room right next to paintings by Jasper Johns."

Tevet has been married since 1970. His wife, Neta, owns a chain of clothing stores called Gertrude (her grandmother's name). Their eldest son Yaal, 34, studied at Bezalel and is now a designer and a partner in a company called Roth-Tevet Experience Design. Their younger son Noam, 25, is working as a pizza deliveryman while he completes some matriculation exams. Nahum and Neta live in a loft on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv that they bought in 1980, some time before nearby Sheinkin Street became so trendy.

Tevet has had 24 solo shows and numerous installations at international exhibitions, and won many prizes and grants, but when it comes to money, he insists he's far from sitting pretty. He says that "Seven Walks" left him broke. A friend of his calculated that the basic cost of investment in the work exceeded half a million shekels. He says he completed the new exhibition "without a cent to my name. I have no money to continue working and I hope that someone from MOMA in New York or from the Israel Museum will purchase the work. My works are expensive to produce. I can't ask for funding from the start for a project because I follow the model of the artist who does everything alone in the studio." As a professor at Bezalel, he has something to fall back on, but "my pension will be only 50 percent of my current salary," he grumbles.

Tevet is a highly esteemed teacher. Since the 1980s, he has been teaching sculpture in the Bezalel art department, and his former students include such well-known names as Yehudit Sasportas, Sigalit Landau, Guy Bar-Amotz, Ohad Meromi, Avner Ben-Gal, Gil Shani, David Adika, Adam Rabinowitz and Eli Petel, among others. In 2001 he was appointed to head the master's degree program.

In recent years, Bezalel has been directing its graduates toward success at galleries and museums abroad. Isn't this a little bourgeois and pretentious?

"Bezalel is one of the best schools in the world, and our aim is for the works and the model of activity to be considered high-quality in every arena, the international one included. I think, and this is true of museums in Israel, too, that the standards and so on needn't be strictly local, but that they should be able to be part of a dialogue and to fit anywhere else. We're trying to produce the best artists around. Galleries and museums are on the hunt and want to catch these people when they're still young. Relations are complicated. The art market tries to intervene in the educational system and we have to deal with that. But we definitely do not preach for success abroad. What we preach is excellence."

And how does this go along with the worldview of the carpenter within you?

"I'm an 'old-fashioned guy.' Today it's a different generation and I can be the most influential teacher, but my influence on the young artist is limited."

What sort of experience can viewers expect from the exhibition?

"My works deal with the attempt to offer some kind of orientation in relation to the place and time in which they are located, and then they pull the rug out from under you. Another image I think about in relation to the sculptures is that it's like the floor is a spinning strip, never calm or stable. But also, while the works in the exhibition have a complexity, by nature they also offer a kind of quiet, of frozenness. The works require an involved viewer who reads them via the body and not just via the eyes. 'The eyes detach from the body,' Sarit Shapira writes in her essay."

What are you really saying - that you're like a kid playing with Lego blocks?

"I wouldn't go that far. I know and am aware of theories in art. But when I'm in the studio I leave all the theoretical discussions outside. I work with intuition. What I mean is that I sense and feel and have gut feelings and so on and I look at the work and tell myself that I want chaos in one place in the work and something quieter in another place. It's a process that's been going on for many years. One of the things I did in the '80s was to go back to a model of the sculpture in the studio, which at the time wasn't something that people took for granted. I'm not some brainy type who sits down and makes a sketch and plays it clever. Of course, I don't think that I'm dumb, but my intelligence can come through seeing how to put one thing on another, or how to see things that are going on and to get excited by them."

The intelligence that's in the act itself.

"Working on a sculpture means being open to adventure. I want the adventure. I want to see if these 'silly' things that I've created as a carpenter and painter a million times can all of a sudden create a situation that I never conceived of. There's a question that's constantly hovering: Today will I still be able to surprise myself? Do I have the ability to be an unexpected provocateur?"

You've been engrossed in this kind of work for many years - obsessively, one might say. What motivates you?

"There's something improvisational about it, and inventive - painting these things all the time, with the same basic components, and then being moved by something that appears, by the way in which you do several moves and then something exciting happens. A scene is created, an experience is created. That's the whole story. You work and work and you want something to be revealed. There's an obsessiveness about it, certainly. The element of repetitiveness is striking in my works, and when I want to take it to an extreme, it can really become something obsessive. Just a little more, and a little more.

"The present exhibition shows a very consistent process, whose starting point came in the early 1970s, out of a minimalist stance. It was never the dogmatic American minimalism; even back then it had something of a critical tone regarding minimalism, but in any case, the move was in the direction of complexity, of complicated experience and of an intuition that the space is a much more fluid thing and that the experiences within it cannot be planned ahead of time."

You have the stature of a leading artist in this country, and yet you cry poverty. How do you view the concept of success?

"To me it's a question of artistic achievement - in other words, someone who has succeeded in building a world and making a statement in an exciting way. In terms of the quality of my artistic production, I'm very successful. Money is not a criterion. Anyway, my works turn their backs on the system. In this sense, I really ought to praise the Israel Museum for taking on the project of this exhibition, in which the installation alone took about two months. With my works, the operation is expensive and so is the transportation. My works have been exhibited in prestigious places abroad and people know about them and are interested in them, but when it comes down to it, success is being able to maintain a studio. I recently left an expensive studio for a smaller studio in Tel Aviv because I didn't have the money. In that sense, I'm a total failure."