Jerusalem Report, January 4, 2010

Israel Hershberg, painter and teacher, is a large presence in an area of Israeli art that was overlooked and undervalued until he developed it. Good representational painting almost drowned under the egos and “-isms” of the past decades, but with the help of Hershberg and the Jerusalem Studio School it has been brought into the mainstream. Suddenly, to use a hack phrase, the still life is sexy.

While the international art world looks increasingly like a big rock ‘n’ roll party—noisy and glamorous, with everybody wanting to get in and get noticed—Hershherg speaks of painting as a humbling experience.

Outwardly Hershberg is not humble and, if he were, it is doubtful he could have achieved his position of influence. But his paintings reveal a contemplative spirit, deep thoughtfulness and feeling, and an adventurous imagination. He is an artist who spends months struggling with a painting and years working towards an exhibition.

Not only zealous and inspired as a painter, Hershberg has a mission to bring rigorous academic art education to Israel and to spread his almost revivalist passion for classical culture. At the Jerusalem Studio School, which he launched in 1998 for this reason, a different kind of observation and practice is taught, methods closer to the old masters than to contemporary painters.

Things happen fast in Israel. In this short time, his school has made a visible impact on galleries and museums—a couple of Tel Aviv galleries seem even to have opened with his ex-students in mind—and one ex-student, Aram Gershuni, has started his own school. And, with Seth Altholz newly appointed as executive director of the school, Hershberg wants to extend the outreach. Serendipitously, there is a wealthy new Israeli middle class to support what might come to be called New Israeli Realism.

For students at the Jerusalem Studio School, history of art is not relegated to the past. They are exposed to Western art without regard to its place in time, laid out like a living geography on a map that includes ancient Greece, classical Rome, Renaissance Italy and 19th-century France. Less obviously, American Realism has an underlying impact on the school. Not only is Hershberg’s background that of an American realist, and his teacher Edwin Dickinson an abiding influence, but a network of visiting artists with a similar perspective take part in events at the school, exhibit there, and give slide shows and talks about their work.

These artists bring with them a certain confidence about representational painting, which has a bigger and more comfortable niche in America—perhaps just because of the size of the country—than it does in Britain or Europe. There is also, in America, a widespread respect for the well-crafted object, and ‘a solid market for decent realist art. For better or worse, American realist artists tend to lack the disturbing aspect of self-irony and underlying angst that is part of the complexity of British painters like Lucien Freud or Lean Kossoff—or a Spanish painter particularly admired by Hershberg, Antonio Lopez-Garcia.

The students’ exposure to ancient culture is equally direct. Last year Hershberg went on a Herculean shopping trip to the British Museum, bringing back an extraordinary cargo of 32 plaster casts of sculpture and friezes—mostly huge—from ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance. This is the flrst time anything like this has appeared in Israel, and even though they are out of place in the Talpiot warehouse inhabited by the school, they generate their own atmosphere. In the school’s promotional film, a teacher, Eldar Farber, says that he found it hard to decide whether to pray or to draw when he first saw them, and a student says that working with them is like a religious experience.

Drawing from these casts takes Hershberg’s students back to a long-lost period, when getting an art education included learning a craft. In most British art schools, this came to an end in the 1960s—along with drawing from a live model or still life. Since then, at schools like the Royal College of Art in London, or Goldsmiths (which produced nearly all the now middle-aged Young British Artists, including the prosperous Damian Hirst), each student has a personal tutor with whom to explore ideas—a luxury similar to Oxbridge, or psychoanalysis.

“I’m not interested in personal expression. It’s boring.” says Hershberg. “Everyone doing the same self-analysis, it’s so self-indulgent.” For him the cutting edge of culture is not in London, New York or Berlin, it is in Italy, specifically Rome. And this too is offered to students as a direct, visceral experience: Every year the Jerusalem Studio School organizes a five-week painting and art viewing trip to Italy.

Israeli students may relate to the way parts of Italy look rather like parts of Israel—especially seen through a haze of heat; which perhaps explains how landscapes in the background of religious Renaissance painting can look so uncannily appropriate, even though artists like Piero della Francesco or Giotto never traveled to the Middle East.

Italian landscape featured largely in Hershberg’s own recent exhibition, “From Afar,” at Marlborough Chelsea in New York. For all his love of classicism, these dusty, atmospheric landscapes, with buildings seen from a distance, show Hershberg to be a Romantic after all—a highly disciplined Romantic, but one with strong personal feeling at the heart of his work. There is an edge to Hershberg’s view of Italy—and love of European culture—because it is an American’s view, and an outsider’s appreciation. Henry Miller in Paris comes to mind. An American in Paris—or Rome, or Tuscany—might risk being overly reverential, but Hershberg’s foreignness gives him a distance that adds clarity to his astute eye. Whatever he paints, in any case, he makes his own.

Although a landscape, cypress trees or an open box of sardines may be what Hershberg is painting, he says that representing the subject is of no importance to him; what matters is “how things come together.” He says that he considers himself an abstract painter—and when asked how or why he chooses a particular subject, says that it “insinuates painterly possibilities.” While this is not a statement that would confuse another painter, non-painters need to remember that all painting is of course abstract, and that good painting has to succeed as abstraction, and not illustration.

Hershberg’s enthusiasm for the art he loves is only equaled by his disgust for the art .he despises. After a few decades when art critics, curators and historians have been ruling the roost in the art world, intimidating artists and buyers alike—and only now, perhaps, being toppled by the gallerists, who are overpowering even them—Hershberg is a vehement and refreshing voice of opposition.

Lavishly comparing his colleague Stuart Shils to the renowned Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, he says that the work of both painters “silences the secondary, parasitic ramblings of the theorists, the critics, the academics, and their cadre of complicit artists.” But the other side of Hershberg’s generosity and expansiveness is that he is derisive about the art he has shut out of his life—and his school—and allows it no space, and no second chance.

This partly explains how it is that his students’ work is so immediately recognizable. This would once have been considered a good thing: Rembrandt’s apprentice would have been proud to be identified with his old master, and not bother about the stamp of sameness.

But today artists are considered to have come of age only when they find their own painting language. The cult of originality has been taken very far, perhaps too far, and resulted in a global art world rather like the Tower of Babel, with every artist shouting in a different language and very few making sense. When students leave the Jerusalem Studio School, they at least know how to paint.

Hershberg says he looks for dedication in his students rather than talent, and wants to give them “the tools that will make it possible for them to move forward.” They must submerge themselves in a daily regime of hard work, and submit themselves to that humbling process, “In this struggle there are no formulae,” he says. “I am struggling just like them.”

How does any of this advance the search for Jewish or Israeli or Middle Eastern identity, or reflect anything of the turmoil and shift of events in this region? Does art have this responsibility? It is worth remembering that Morandi painted rows of bottles throughout World War II, and that they not only survive as some of the best painting of the century but also seem to say something about human relationship during that time. If Hershberg’s paintings change the way we look at a tree, or a Jerusalem street, or a raw tongue on a kitchen table, and if his teaching increases the visual language available to his students, those are the gifts he is offering.