Joseph Hirsch was clearly a complex man. What is equally plain is the incontrovertible fact that not only was he a uniquely gifted and incisive artist, but almost 30 years after his death he is still adulated by his students, many of whom are now celebrated artists and beloved educators in their own right.
The evidence for Hirsch’s go-it-alone pathway to his own creative and personal truth is currently on display at the Israel Museum in the form of the “The Poetry of Sight” exhibition, which runs through to April 20. The 30 or 40 frames dotted around the Hagit Gallery hall, curated by Ronit Sorek and Avishay Ayal, with more than a little help from assistant curator Loti Gombosh, grab the eye, prod the brain, and tug on the heartstrings.
As Sorek notes in her foreword to the exhibition booklet: “Two prominent characteristics stand out in Joseph Hirsch’s work: humanism and the love of drawing.” That’s not exactly an “i” dotting, “t” crossing observation, but both those attributes are palpably evident as soon as you walk up to the first monochrome ink picture. Did I say monochrome? Scratch that. Yes, the works were all done in numerous shades that run the gamut of the black-white arc, but you get a strong sense of a subliminal rainbow of colors in there, too.
Hirsch was born in 1920 in Bytom, then part of the Upper Silesia region of Germany. It was a coal mining town, and it has been suggested that the constant pall in the air of industrial detritus he saw, and inhaled, during his youth may have nurtured Hirsch’s preference for monochromic cadences.
Escape from the Nazis
Hirsch managed to obtain a certificate from the British Mandate authority and made aliyah in 1939, with the help of celebrated Jewish German artist Hermann Struck, who had made aliyah in 1922. The latter also helped Hirsch gain entry to the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (now the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design) in Jerusalem. Mind you, he didn’t last long there. “They threw him out after two years,” his daughter Dorit Blumenthal chuckles. “He only wanted to draw. He didn’t want to paint at all.”
The young man may not have toed the institutional line, but he did leave an impression on one of the major forces at the school. “Mordechai Ardon, who was my father’s most important teacher there, said my father would be the only student from the class who would become an artist,” Blumenthal notes. That despite the rich talent that abounded there at the time. “That was a class that included [later well-known artists] Friedel Stern, Yossi Stern, and Ruth Schloss,” she adds.
Hirsch served in the British Army during World War II, principally as a sign painter in Egypt. After the war, he continued in the trade and developed his skills as a graphic artist, settling in Haifa. In 1964 he got the call from his alma mater, relocated to Jerusalem, and, ironically, began teaching at the institution that had expelled him for his single-minded pursuit of his chosen discipline some two decades earlier.
Invisible lines
One of the most tantalizing facets of Hirsch’s drawing gifts is his ability to apportion and differentiate deftly scaled shades of gray without any visible lines of demarcation. That attests to a keen eye and practiced hand, and a finely calibrated appreciation of the nuances of aesthetics, and how visual subtleties can affect each other and the viewer.
He also had a rare knack of seeing beyond what met the eye at first glance. That is patently evident from the series of drawings he did of sitters in an armchair. There are a bunch of them at the museum, all named Untitled, and each is more fascinating than the other. In basic stylistic terms, they are a curious mix of the figurative and the abstract. You can discern the character in the frame, but there is nothing realistic about the corporeal shape, facial expression, or body language. Then again, the person in question comes across as vibrant and highly sensorial, and provokes an immediate connection between spectator and model. You get an uncanny sense of what the sitter was thinking and feeling at the time. The individual’s prevailing mood is right there in plain monochromic gradated view.
Gombosh underscores Hirsch’s immersive focused ethos. “He set constraints which came from his desire to delve deeply, to the core, in a limited medium, and working in a limited format. He doesn’t have any large works.” That served to train the artist’s thoughts and efforts on the essence of the task at hand. “His works are always one figure sitting in the same armchair,” she adds. It may be the same pew across a series of drawings, but it takes on a different life of its own on each occasion.
Since Hirsch’s death, the furniture item has since achieved legendary status. “The armchair is now in Marek Yanai’s studio,” says Gombosh. “No one ever sits in it or even lays their hat or anything else on top of it.”
Yanai was in Hirsch’s class. He is now 78 years old, a noted artist and senior lecturer at Bezalel. The screen near the entrance to the exhibition hall shows a seven-minute video in which Yanai and several of his former classmates relate anecdotes about their time with their mentor, and offer insight into his personality and what made him tick. Yanai evokes Eastern thought in endowing Hirsch with a lofty accolade. “In the Far East, there is the concept of the sensei. That is someone who is more than a teacher. Others taught; he had impact,” Yanai declares.
However not everyone, it seems, was on the same wavelength as the revered educator. Hirsch did not suffer fools gladly and would let his students know when he thought they were underachieving. Artist Elie Shamir, 71, also one of Hirsch’s former charges, says he got few pats on the back in his first year at Bezalel. But there was nothing superior or condescending about the man.
A man of the people
It is said, for instance, that Hirsch he preferred to drink tea – with a nip of cognac – with his students rather than hobnob in more rarefied settings with his peers and the upper echelons of the Jerusalem art world’s hierarchy of the day. “He was someone who liked people as people. He didn’t play the political game and curry favor with the right people. That wasn’t his cup of tea,” Blumenthal says.
She believes that his down-to-earth view of life also feeds into her dad’s oeuvre. “You can see that in his work. You get the essence of life. I think you can see the core of mankind in his work.” Blumenthal references a group of items that appear under the collective title of “Twirling.” They, she feels, demonstrate her father’s ability to get under his subject’s skin and to mine hidden individual seams and the human condition in general. I posit that the works imply a surrealistic sensibility, not in terms of the genre per se but more with regard to the inference of things going on behind the scenes. “I think they represent all kinds of situations which people encounter during the course of their lives. They are sorts of confrontations of a person with themselves, their surroundings, their god, you name it. He really drew situations from life.”
Gombosh says “The Poetry of Sight” exhibition is a “bestseller” and has drawn large crowds since it opened in late December. That claim gained credence during my hour or so there, as youngsters and adults of all ages popped in to take in some of Hirsch’s gems.
Blumenthal puts that partly down to her father’s folksy philosophy and his ability to convey his intent to the ordinary Haim or Rachel on the street. “People are a bit tired of going to see so-called contemporary art and not understanding what the artist wants from them. I think people connect with something real. These works are timeless. I think this speaks to all sorts of aspects of who we are as human beings.”
Hirsch’s egalitarian view of life, and the people around him, also fed into his classroom demeanor.
“He was a tall man, and he would lean over the student while they were working, and he’d make very intelligent remarks,” says Gombosh. “Sometimes the student didn’t understand what he wanted to tell them.” In the film, Yanai recalls Hirsch commenting: “You did the best you could.” “That may have meant your best was not good enough or, perhaps, you did your best, so leave it at that,” Gombosh says. “Not everyone got who he was. But he expressed a lot of compassion toward his sitters, and also toward his students. He gave them the basics and allowed them to follow their own path into art.”
Figurative to the end
Hirsch stuck to his fundamentally figurative guns despite working in a predominantly abstract artistic milieu. At the time, the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) school of thought was very much the flavor of the day, with the likes of Yehezkel Streichman, Joseph Zartisky, and Avigdor Stematsky striding purposefully through abstract domains.
The works at the Israel Museum impart a sense of fearlessness and an ironclad determination to seek out and portray a hard-earned and irrefutable personal truth.
The drawings are full of shading contrasts, and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, if taken at face value, appear to be irreconcilable but somehow not only add up to a harmonious whole but augment the aesthetic bottom line with cerebral and emotional substrata that enhance the viewing experience.
Hirsch maintains a delicate balance between robustly forged lines and backdrops, and a keen sense of texture and coloring. One of an artist’s greatest challenges is to know when to stop, and when to leave a particular spot on the canvas or paper untouched. Sometimes less is so much more. Hirsch certainly got that.
Notwithstanding his steely dedication to his accrued credo, and his uncompromising approach to teaching and his own creative endeavor, Hirsch was not devoid of a sense of fun. That comes through in the aforementioned “Twirling” set, in which Hirsch created theatrical, somewhat grotesque scenes which run the gamut from the humorous to the unreal. They also provide an oxymoronic foil for the static armchair drawings, and exude dynamism and even a sense of frenetic energy. Hirsch really let his hair down here.
Hirsch prowled broad artistic avenues. “His approach was to progress from white to black, and from big to small,” Gombosh explains, adding that he was also happy to let things be. “In general, the drama takes place where there is nothing, in the void.”
A full 23 years after a large-scale posthumous retrospective at the University of Haifa and at the Artists House in Jerusalem, Hirsch has finally been given a slot by the Israel Museum. It was worth the wait.
For more information: www.imj.org.il/en
