Eliahu Gat
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (October 2023) |
Eliahu Gat | |
---|---|
אליהו גת | |
Born | Eliahu Gulkowitz 1919 |
Died | 1987 |
Nationality | Israeli |
Education | Beaux-Arts de Paris |
Occupation | Landscape painter |
Years active | 1949–1984 |
Eliahu Gat (Hebrew: אליהו גת; 1919–1987) was an Israeli landscape painter.
Biography
Eliahu Gulkowitz (later Gat) at was born in 1919 in the small town of
Artistic career
Gat was among the founders of the Group of Ten, which held its first exhibition in February 1951 at Beit HaOmanim in Tel Aviv, home of the Israeli Artists Association. The group consisted of Gat, Elhanan Halperin, Shoshanah Levisohn, Ephraim Lifshits, Moshe Propes, Shimon Zabar, Dan Kedar, Claire Yaniv, Nissan Rilov and Zvi Tadmor – all graduates of the Stematsky-Streichman studio. The two participating sculptors were Shoshanah Heiman and David Polombo. The philosophy of the group was to paint the local Israeli scene realistically, as opposed to the abstract art and universalism of the New Horizons group.[1]
Influences
In 1952, Gat traveled to
“The Group of Ten” exhibitions / realism
In April 1953, Gat, together with others of the "Group of Ten” participated in an exhibition of drawings by young artists at the
The writer concludes by opposing “New Horizons” and the “Group of Nine”: “… Should you parachute a person into a ‘New Horizons’ exhibition, he would not know which country he had fallen into, nor the period of its art. Undefined and cosmopolitan, the works float beyond time and place, beyond life's problems.”
Artistic style
Gat was enamoured of colours containing “Oriental” characteristics such as is prominent in Islamic decorative art. In the years following, though he continued to show his work in the exhibitions of the Group of Ten, his paintings became dark and monochromatic, composed of controlled light and dark contrasts. The forms were now delineated by heavy contour lines and the composition was based on a plastic rhyming of lines and a repetition of vectors. Lines used in two planes, unifying near and far, emphasized the flatness of the depicted space. The artist tended towards a treatment of architectonic themes such as the facades or roofs of houses and, as strange as this may seem in light of the ideology of the group, his paintings became increasingly stylized and abstract. One influence in evidence here is Gat's architectural background. Another is that of the French painter Souverbie under whom he studied.
The transformation apparent in Gat's work during these years is better understood against the background of the shift in the attitude to abstractionism and modernism in the mid-1950s. The leftist ideology, which at the beginning of decade had preached an art engage, adherence to realism and a non-elitist and non-individualistic approach, lost much of its vitality (among other things due to the change in relationship of the "Progressive Culture" circle to the Soviet Union and the 1954 split in Mapam). A greater number of Israelis, including artists, traveled to Europe where they witnessed the popularity of abstract art. Art criticism and polemics, which now began to filter in from the West with greater frequency via journals and visiting art critics, reinforced this notion, The charisma of "New Horizons was such that from an oppositional fighting force in the early fifties it had evolved into an influential group not unpopular with the art establishment. With this in mind, the course os artists who began as realists but who, by the end of the 1950s, went over to the abstract, is more intelligible. The last exhibition of the "Group of Ten" took place in 1960 at the Tel Aviv Museum.
Abstract Art / "Tazpit"
Gat's abstract painting from 1961/2 constitutes a sharp, unequivocal stylistic turnabout, an open departure from his work of the immediate past. He began experimenting with aquarelles on paper, based on random dabbing, a liquid effect and the spraying of paint. The compositions lack definite direction and have no reference to up, down, right or left. The only figurative notation is the existence of a central area, more intensive in relation to the periphery in terms of colour. The degree of abstraction in these paintings is greater than that achieved by many veteran Israeli abstractionists. The last works of this phase contain geometric forms reminiscent of rows of houses. In the same period Gat joined various organizations of abstract painters, the most important of which was that resulting in the "Tazpit" exhibition (Israeli painting and sculpture) at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1964. The "Tazpit" exhibition was born of a feeling that abstract artists lacked a central exhibition space in which to show their works. Among its initiators were artists who had recently returned to the country (
The paintings Gat showed in "Tazpit" were a first stage in his return to the figurative. Already in 1963, he exhibited what were called "abstract landscapes" at the Dugit Gallery in Tel Aviv. In them, the line of the horizon was very high or even absent (landscape without sky). Most of the paintings were inspired by
Whereas Zaritsky, Streichman and Stematsky use the landscape as a formal core from which lyrical abstract shapes grow, in Gat's abstract-like paintings the lyricism itself (the liquidity, the quivering of the brush) is born of the inspiration of the landscape. Unlike Zaritsky and Streichman, he remains umbilically tied to the landscape to the end of the painting process. In the 1970s and 1980s, Gat would try to separate between the different components of the painting – between the details of the landscape, between the figures and the landscape, between image and background – to try to remove them from the context of abstraction, from a system whose danger lies in its tendency to impose itself arbitrarily on reality. Rather than anchor his work in a method, he chose to utilize the experience of reality, i.e., to return to a kind of realism.
Gat's view of the process of painting as an adventure may explain his frequent reversals and shifts in direction. The exhaustion of a particular stage in his artistic development immediately spurs him to a change of approach.
The realism of the 1970s and 1980s/ Landscapes
Gat's landscapes of the 1970s and 1980s represent the artist's familiar haunts: Safed,
Color / Composition
Gat applies the impressionist principle that contrasting or complementary colors placed one beside the other in equal intensity radiate a strong, vibrating, multifaceted light. Gat is a "practical theorist" of color and is connected to the impressionist tradition which does not recognize black as color and translates the value contrast of light and shade into color differences. Such as red and blue or orange- red and ochre. His paintings demonstrate that colour is only a part of a color structure in which each component derives its meaning from the whole. Thus, for example he shows that blue and green can become warm colors in a given color environment.
Gat employs his concept of color to convey the blazing Mediterranean sun, the earth, from the sands and the flesh of the mountains. Heat is the Israel land factor in his works. The green surfaces of his canvases resemble oases' saturated shadows in a desert of fire. "I'm a painter of Israel's heat, not necessarily of its light'" he says. Gat adopts the harmonious synthetic color approach. By intentionally admixing strong colors to create a synthesis of contrasts ("in this country both the light and the shade are hot"), he joins an Israeli impressionist landscape tradition which developed in the thirties under the influence of French painting ("painting the landscape, we have no choice but to be impressionists" Menahem Shemi said at the time). The color contrasts in Gat's paintings also have an emotional quality. The express the painter's dynamic impression of the subject. The multiple rapid strokes, while conveying the dancing light, are also lines of rhythm, conveying not so much the rhythm of the landscape as the psychological rhythm of being moved by it. The line, rather than forming a structural foundation, constitutes a driving force, the embodiment of energy and movement in the painting process. It does not serve to separate areas; on the contrary, it unifies them with its vibration.the contour lines of the objects blend like arabesques in the general weave of the brushstrokes. Gat in both a colorist and a draftsman. The translucent air of Israel renders colors in a distance as strong as those near by, hence the colors are spread over the canvas in equal intensity. Thus Gat creates a uniform surface reminiscent of abstract painting which, in addition to its identification as a landscape having a spatial depth and linear perspective, constitutes yet another level of interpretation. Like in the abstract mode, Gat institutes a complex reworking of the canvas surface: opaque alongside transparent, dry with glowing, translucent and turbid, rough and smooth – all these qualities are distributed evenly over the canvas without a particular faithfulness to the depicted landscape. At the same time, Gat is not an advocate of the intellectual structuring of a composition. Everything flows in this paintings and, like in a free sketch, he preserves the heat of the pictorial process.
There is a close correlation between Gat and Monet's later painting in the garden of his home in Giverny, despite the fact that Gat's brushstrokes are "wilder" than those of Monet and he does not play with the translucence of objects or divide reality into units of color. Gat's work is also related to that of the Jewish artist Chaïm Soutine in whose works the objects and depicted landscape are in a state of turbulence and dramatized to the point of distortion. Gat's admitted affinity with the Jewish Ecole de Paris of the first decades of the century may provide the link between the two sources of Gat's identity: Jewishness and Israeli particularism. Gat was born in Eastern Europe where he spent his youth. After World War II he discovered that his family had perished in the
Interior-Exterior / Nudes-Still Lifes-Landscapes
The landscape, the common denominator of all the Gat's works, also provides the background for his nudes and still lifes. The principle informing Gat's nudes and still lifes is pantheism—the unification of all natural elements—flora, mountains, hills, people,—into a single vibrating whole. His vase with flowers, for example, painted in the 1960s, disappears into the ground as though woven into it. In the same period he painted a green nude in which one type of brushwork was used over the entire surface so that the body's contours dissolved into their surroundings. The same principle was applied to figurative paintings. Gat's nudes are characterized by a foreshortened reclining position which creates a perspective illusion of depth. The foreshortening precludes the classical aesthetic spread of the feminine curves. The figure is always recumbent, never engaged in any daily activity, and generally devoid of eroticism. The conquest of the woman is achieved, as with the landscape, through the act of painting. The flesh of the figure is treated similarly to the features of landscape which always, as noted, constitutes a background to the picture, and the same color principles are applied to both. There are instances where the nude is depicted as a continuation of the landscape, for example when a path seen through a window seems to travel into the room up to the body of reclining woman. Topographical features of the landscape echo in the lines of the female groin, a parallelism which reinforces the idea of the identity of woman and landscape. On the other hand, the geometric shape of the window frame emphasizes the rounded contours of the recumbent female figure. In some instances the window is represented as a mirror facing the figure and reflecting it. The landscape in Gat's painting becomes the true portrait of the woman. The nude and still life represent the artist's inner world, his "interior." They are staged as artistic subjects rather than as part to a daily authentic environment. This "interior" is very like an exterior. Gat's paintings do not contain actual exteriors. The indoor scenes are always represented close to the window-sill, tending to slide outwards, or even to form an integral part of the outside. Therein lies the message: the artist's inner world and nature are one and the same. His workshop, his life, his art and his desires, are all woven into nature. The landscape is not simply a visual subject but an essential component of his existence. In Gat's case, nudity constitutes a complement and interpretation of the landscape, its sensuality and its repose, and of the artist's erotic relationship to it.
"Aclim" (Climate)
Gat was a founding member of "
Awards and recognition
- In 1949, he won the Prize of the Fallen in the War of Independence, in memory of the sons of six artists who fell in 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
- In 1959, Histadrut Prize for Art.
- In 1972, the Ministry of Education and Culture Art Teachers Prize.
- In 1978, the Dizengoff Prize for Painting.[2]
Selected one-man exhibitions
- 1984: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- 1981: Art Gallery at Leivik House, Tel Aviv
- 1979: The Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
- 1978: Artists House, Jerusalem
- 1977: Visual Art Centre, Beer Sheva
- 1976: Katia Granoff Gallery, Paris
- 1975: Art Gallery at Leivik House, Tel Aviv
- 1973: Art Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
- 1972: Artists house, Holon
- 1970: Katz-Idan Gallery, Tel Aviv
- 1969: Kibbutz-Lim Gallery, Tel Aviv
- 1966: Dugit Gallery, Tel Aviv
- 1965: Museum Bat Yam
- 1964: Dugit Gallery, Tel Aviv, The Negev Museum, Beer Sheva
- 1963: Artists House, Tel Aviv
- 1960: Artists House, Jerusalem (together with Ephraim Lifshitz)
- 1958: The Tel Aviv Museum, Dizengoff House (together with Ephraim Lifshitz)
Selected group exhibitions
- 1982: "Aclim", the Jerusalem Theatre, Jerusalem
- 1980: "Aclim", Art Gallery at Leivik House, Tel Aviv
- 1979: "Aclim", Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv
- 1978: "Aclim", Tel Aviv Municipality House
- 1977: "Aclim", Goldman Art Gallery, Haifa
- 1977: "Aclim", Artists House, Tel Aviv
- 1977: "Aclim", Hirschberg Gallery, Boston
- 1976: "Aclim", The Jerusalem Theatre, Jerusalem
- 1976: "Aclim", Haifa University Library, Haifa
- 1975: "4 Israeli Painters - Aclim," Ansdell Gallery, London
- 1975: "Aclim", Museum of Modern Art, Eilat
- 1975: "Aclim", Hazrif Gallery, Beer Sheva
- 1974: "Aclim", Artists House, Jerusalem
- 1974: "Aclim", Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv
- 1974: "Aclim", Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
- 1973: "From Landscape to Abstraction From Abstraction to Nature", the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- 1973: "Homage" (or Tribute), Artists House, Jerusalem
- 1964: "Tazpit", Tel Aviv Museum, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion
- 1956: "The Group of Ten", Mishkan Le Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod
- 1956: "The Group of Ten", Tel Aviv Museum, Dizengoff House
- 1956: "The Group of Ten", Marc Chagall Artists House, Haifa
- 1956: "General Exhibition - Art in Israel", Tel Aviv Museum, Dizengoff House, Tel Aviv
- 1955: "The Group of Ten", Artists House, Tel Aviv
- 1953: "The Group of Nine", Artists House, Tel Aviv "Black On White," Tel Aviv Museum, Dizengoff House
- 1952: "General Exhibition - Art in Israel," Tel Aviv Museum, Dizengoff House
See also
References
- ^ Information Center for Israeli Art: Eliahu Gat
- ^ "List of Dizengoff Prize laureates" (PDF) (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv Municipality. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-12-17.