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
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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
The students’ exposure to ancient culture is equally direct. Last year Hershberg went on a Herculean shopping trip to the
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
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
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
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