Mention the name Menashe Kadishman to most Israeli art consumers, and the knee-jerk response will invariably be something along the lines of: “Oh, the sheep painter!”
But, as an exhibition currently on display at the Israel Museum clearly demonstrates, there was a lot more to the late, internationally renowned Israel Prize-winning artist than just funky renditions of woolly farm animals.
The “Urban Nature” collection, curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, with assistance from Mika Nachtailer, includes not one single sheep. True, it is far from an expansive set, with only around 20 or so works in the cozy Hagit Gallery space, but it offers the public a new perspective on the larger-than-life character and his oeuvre.
Walking the walk
Kadishman, who died in 2015 at the age of 82, was a colorful figure who walked the walk throughout his 50-plus-year career. He was constantly on the prowl for new lines of aesthetic, disciplinary, and philosophical departure, and was forever leapfrogging boundaries and diving headlong into new, surprising territory.
He sprung the aforementioned leitmotif creature, for example, on the unsuspecting world at the 1978 Venice Biennale, where, as Israel’s representative at the art world’s most prestigious event, he unveiled a flock of sheep, bearing a slew of hues. At the time, he explained that the work blurred the line between art and nature.
That yin-yang feature reemerged numerous times as his portfolio evolved. Many of his outdoor iron and steel statues incorporated gaps or hollows, and, when strategically positioned in suitable urban spots, one could espy through them leafy trees or parts of city green lungs. In so doing, he seamlessly straddled the interface between Mother Nature and humankind’s intervention in her vibrant verdant continuum.
“URBAN NATURE” focuses on Kadishman’s output between 1969 and 1979. That was a formative passage in his artistic growth, as he forsook minimalist sculpting and gravitated toward his trademark sheep-based presentations. But, always ready to bring anything and everything into his creative sphere, he also embraced everyday objects.
That was sparked by an out-of-sync time-lapse predicament in which he found himself on a trip to New York. Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, at 4 a.m. he was fired with creative fervor and, bereft of any suitable raw materials through which he could expend some of his nervous energy and pent-up conceptual foraging, he turned to a hotel bedside accoutrement.
Looking out his window at the nighttime Manhattan skyline, he ripped out a page from a telephone directory, took a pen, and began drawing the structural contours in view.
Perhaps, for folks who weren’t around in the pre-Internet world, I should explain that every city in the world had a – generally – fat tome or, in larger places such as New York or London, several volumes, with lists of names of locals, together with their address and telephone number. That is how we mostly found and communicated with each other, in addition to writing letters and, if we were in a hurry, sending telegrams.
Telephone directory topography
Kadishman took the directory’s textural topography and ran with it, spinning out lines that followed the shapes of the buildings around him. That opened the thematic floodgates, and, in the following years, similar pages formed the substratum of hundreds of works that fed off urban and other dynamics.
Several relevant specimens appear in the Israel Museum exhibition, including a particularly attractive work Kadishman created in honor of the illustrious art repository’s 10th anniversary, in 1975.
A few years later, he expounded on his newfound course of visual expression: “I related to each column as if it were a building, a skyscraper.” He subsequently took the structural concept into more abstract climes. “Later, I related to the page itself, not what I saw around it, only to what was on the page,” Kadishman explained. “I arrived at a whole landscape, paths between the letters, a cardiogram of the page.”
That also involved taking a cerebral and philosophical leap of faith, as Kadishman took the dry information in the directories into corporeal domains, as he reimagined the data as a direct and accurate reflection of the street-level reality of millions of New Yorkers, Londoners, or other city dwellers, their houses, and day-to-day lives.
Characteristically, he didn’t just stick to a simple artistic extension of the urban facts on the ground. He took ordered page structures, with their neat, easily legible and accessible rows and columns, and created unfettered feral arrangements that exuded dynamism and high energy.
Rather than keep that adventurous visual notion to himself, he enlisted the help of numerous professional colleagues, from Israel and abroad alike, to take his telephone directory initiative a step or two further in all sorts of directions.
His siblings in boundary-pushing arms included similarly inclined graphic-leaning artist and educator Raffi Lavie, modernist painting pioneer Yehezkel Streichman, abstract painter Lea Nikel, and lyrical abstraction proponent Moshe Kupferman. All Kadishman’s partners were A-listers in the field, and some of the results of that project – originally exhibited at the museum in 1979 under the “Kadishman Connection” banner – feature in “Urban Nature.”
Artistic balancing acts
Kadishman not only delved into different and apparently disparate artistic disciplines; he also fused them almost against their will. That applied equally to areas of life that feed off contrasting energies and sources.
The delicate balancing act between contemporary civilization and the environment appears repeatedly in the placement of his creations.
That spawned jarring yet, somehow, harmonious confluences that seem to scream out at town dwellers: “Look at me!”
One such venture in 1970s New York produced an unmissable display of large, rectangular, yellow metal boards affixed to the trunks of trees in Central Park.
“He didn’t ask for a permit to do that,” explains Nachtailer. “He just put them up. They were removed a day later,” she laughs. He pulled a similar antic in Uruguay, too.
That was typical of the man. He had a gentle demeanor yet an iron will to follow his ideas through to their artistic denouement, come what may.
A change of garb for the president
He had an imposing presence, with his impressive girth, loose-fitting shirts and ubiquitous short pants. He simply trod his own unique path. Mind you, he did make the odd compromise, actually donning long pants for the Israel Prize ceremony at the President’s Residence in 1995.
That was very good of him, to defer to ceremonial protocol, but he made no concessions when it came to his envelope-pushing work, across the disciplinary and material board.
He pushed on with his interventionist dialogue with nature on his home patch, too. A tree in the museum compound came in for the yellow treatment, as did a spot on the ground in the neighboring Valley of the Cross.
Yellow is the color
Kadishman clearly had a thing about yellow. That harked back to his stint on Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, where he lived for three years and worked as a shepherd.
“For him, yellow was the color of the tractor plowing the field,” Nachtailer enlightens me. I’m assuming the kibbutz used John Deere tractors, easily recognizable by their iconic green-and-yellow color scheme.
The equilibrium-imbalance confluxes line of thought, for the artist, was both an extension of, and an oxymoronic adjunct to, what grows out of the soil as the Good Lord intended.
“I wanted to work with the Creator’s forest, the organic forest, and incorporate into it a man-made mechanical forest, which would have forms that clash with nature,” he noted in the context of his favored hue.
“The shadows of the branches and tree trunks were reflected on the yellow panels, changing with the movement of the sun,” he observed, referencing his projects in New York and Uruguay.
It was very much a matter of harnessing terrestrial and celestial kinetics and seeing how they affect his seemingly dissonant input.
“In nature there are thousands of forms that change with the movement of the sun. My shade of yellow doesn’t exist in the forest’s color palette.”
Kadishman maintained his ding-dong synergy with his natural surroundings and enjoyed a long, fruitful relationship with the Israel Museum, periodically recruiting its expansive hilltop grounds and its vegetation, of an arboreal ilk, as a milieu for his creations.
Getting into trees
Trees often underpinned new aesthetics, including some of his own making, such as in his eponymous work that comprised naive-looking blue metal tree shapes interspersed in forested parts of the museum site.
Back in the day, there were others around the world who interacted with nature, including Joshua Neustein, Georgette Battle, Dani Karavan, and particularly Itzhak Danziger, who, like Kadishman, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
Despite his abundant range of outdoor metal pieces, Kadishman didn’t work exclusively with rigid addenda. He was all for allowing his works to take up the attraction mantle and communicate themselves to the public.
In 1975, he assembled his Laundry Forest installation near the then-entrance plaza of the Israel Museum. The set comprised large white canvas sheets, suspended from cables, with tree shapes cut out of them. The absence of the natural figure drew the observer into completing the picture themselves, enlisting them in the creative process.
Ever alert to the dynamics of the world around him, he planned the installation to make optimal use of the ebb and flow of daily life and meteorological conditions, animating and complementing his design.
Communicating with the public
He was also keen to bring others into the creative fold, and visitors to the museum could walk through the work as the material flapped in the wind and reflected the dovetailing momentum of sun and shadow.
Laundry Forest had a nostalgic element. Kadishman talked about childhood memories of playing betwixt freshly laundered sheets his mother hung on a line outside the family home in Tel Aviv.
The exhibition at the Israel Museum offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the machinations behind setting up the installation in Jerusalem, with a couple of monochrome photographs that conjure up the ambiance of the day and the artist’s mien.
Art lovers used to viewing Kadishman’s more monumental alfresco efforts, or locked into his famed sheep-themed works, will get a peek at other areas of his adventuresome oeuvre and, thus, a better handle on his artistic and human makeup.
It might be stretching matters somewhat to call Kadishman mercurial, but there is ne’er a dull moment in his professional timeline as he constantly strove to marry the quotidian urban continuum with the forces of nature through his fearless artistic acts.■
“Urban Nature” closes in November 2027.
For more information:
www.imj.org.il/en/exhibitions/
menashe-kadishman-urban-nature