Hana Kofler

Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv: 1990s-2000s

In the early 1990s Moshe Givati continued to live in the loft on the fourth floor on Neve Sha’anan Street. After com­pleting the series “Children of Paradise,” the paintings were sold to various collectors. Ami Steinitz staged an exhibition of his work in his Neve Tsedek Gallery. On that occasion, the paintings scattered among the various collectors were gathered and presented to the pub­lic for one evening. They were returned to their owners that very same night, and the space was cleared for an installation that opened the next day.
Givati’s life in the loft was not easy. The living con­ditions were uncomfortable. It was hard to heat the place in winter, and cool it in the summer. The daily climb to the fourth floor became more and more difficult, and the intense life he had led started to manifest itself – phys​ical​ly and mentally. His health started de­te­ri​o­rating, and in 1993 he had a heart attack and was rushed to the hos­pi­tal. When he was released, he could no long​er climb to the studio on the fourth floor. The debts accu­mu­lat​ed, including rent which had not been paid for a long time. Benjamin Givli gathered all of Givati’s works and stored them. The debts were paid with the money from two paintings purchased by one of the collectors and additional works purchased by an insurance com­pa​ny, but Givati himself remained homeless and had to start all over again. He worked as dish washer and juice squeezer at the Cen­tral Bus Station, in Mordecai Luck’s restaurant (the man who had been smuggled out of Egypt in a suitcase by Mossad agents), and at nights slept in dancer Aviva Paz’s home.
One day Givati called art collector Haim Shiff, who had previously purchased three of his paintings, and the latter visited his studio together with his son, Dov (Dubi). Shiff invited Givati to stay at his Marina Hotel, and Givati moved into a small room overlooking the sea. He soft­ened the blinding light that came into the room from the west with brown paper he hung on the window, al­though the sea thus disappeared from his view. At the Marina Hotel Givati made works on paper. It was a sharp transition from the monumental formats he had creat​ed theretofore. At the Hotel he also met Rami Rosen, who had previously profiled him. In an extensive back­ground piece published in the weekend supplement of Haaretz, Rosen unfolded Givati’s chronicles in recent years, pre­senting him as an artist entirely cut off from the “art field”. Givati who was in one of the worst periods of his life at the time, refused to cooperate with the in­ter­view​er and responded with defiance: “You want a schmaltz sto​ry? You won’t get it from me.” Rosen made this phrase the title of his article. From the interview Givati emerg​es as a per­son who does not feel sorry for himself, nor thinks his situation is desperate:
I realize that you want schmaltz, and I won’t give it to you, even though, in certain areas in my paintings I like schmaltz very much. You must try to understand that it is not necessarily tragic that at fifty one doesn’t have a home, a sofa, and a Polish wife who tells him what to do. Perhaps it will enable you to see the sit​uation through my eyes… I, for example, have done nothing but paint for dozens of years, while most of the artists in Israel, even those who can afford it, do not dare. They need another option at all costs, and are not willing to trust their art alone. I trust my art (Haaretz, 5 November 1993 [Hebrew]).

On November 15 of that year, at Gallery 90 on Ben Yehuda Street, another exhibition of Givati’s work opened, featuring the works on paper he created at the hotel. All the works in the exhibition were sold.
Givati stayed at the Marina Hotel for nearly a year, until renovations started and he was forced to move. Shiff offered him a studio apartment at the Diplomat Hotel in Jerusalem, and he lived there with his daughter Shifra, who studied in the city at the time, until she graduated. For some eighteen months, Givati observed the Arab villag​es behind the 1967 lines and the surrounding Jerus​a­lem hills from the windows of his apartment. In that pe­ri​od he painted a series of hinted landscapes in cold and very light colors. In April 1995 Givati staged an ex­hi­bition of paintings from that series at Peer Gallery on Gor­don Street, Tel Aviv. Following the exhibition, Anat Meidan, journalist of Yedioth Ahronoth’s “7 Days” sup​plement, published an article about him entitled “Grateful Prisoner.” As part of the research Meidan traveled with Givati on the day of the opening from Jerus​a­lem to Tel Aviv:
On the way he emptied four beer bottles, and when we parked at the entrance to the gallery where his ex­hi­bition is featured, he didn’t hurry in, but rather crossed the street to the nearby pub and ordered a pint of drought beer. ‘My head,’ he explained, ‘must always be in a slight​ly blurry state, this is the only way I can go through life.’ The eight paintings in his exhibition show great op­ti­mism. The light, clear colors of blue, green and white, the great light reflected from them, inspire tran­quili​ty, even romanticism. The landscape seen from the window of the apartment he was given by Haim Shiff, is mirrored in the canvases, and there is no mistaking, the place does him good (Yedioth Ahronoth, 20 April 1995 [Hebrew]). 

Haim Shiff and Benjamin Givli at the opening of Givati’s exhibition
in Neve Tzedek Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1996


Givati affirms that the landscape seen through his win­dow was indeed breathtaking, and that his life in that pe­ri​od was peaceful, but personally he felt banished, de­tached. He managed to stay in Jerusalem for about two years – as long as his daughter’s studies continued – and then left. He lived for a short while in Kibbutz Gezer, with his ex-wife Roni, then sold a few paintings and rent​ed an apartment on Ben Zion Blvd., Tel Aviv.
Givati continued to paint in small and medium size formats. The landscapes of Jerusalem still accompanied him shortly after his return to Tel Aviv, through distant vistas that ended at the urban edge where exterior and interior meet, as well as in delicate interiors and pale-col­ored still-life formations. In the spring of 1996 he fea­tured an exhibition of landscape paintings created at the Diplomat Hotel in Jerusalem at Neve Tsedek Gallery, Tel Aviv.
In 2000, during a visit to his daughter Vered in Klil, Givati had another heart attack and was rushed to the Nahariya hospital. Following a catheterization, the doctors determined that he had to have a bypass operation. He was taken to Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv for the op­er​ation, during which he had a stroke. His left side re­mained paralyzed, but a miracle happened on the fourth day and the paralysis disappeared. Nevertheless, the op­er​ation was accompanied by medical complications whose outcome was visible for quite a while. When Givati re­turned home, he was successfully rehabilitated and grad​ual​ly started painting again. The pieces he creat​ed at first were pale. On medium size canvases emerged solitary, dissociated figures, zombies devoid of ex­pression that in­car­nat​ed as motifs in his subsequent works. When he felt that this series of figures was exhausted, he started cre­ating still life paintings in different vari​ations. The pale can­vas​es gradually acquired vivid, in­tri­cate coloration. Givati regained his confidence, and at some point felt the need to deviate from the boundaries of the format. He or­dered larger canvases and started making diptychs, triptychs, and monumental paintings. The dimensions of the canvases were determined by the largest size that could pass through the stairwell leading to his home and work place, so that they could not ex­ceed 220x185 cm.
The works created by Givati in recent years were nev​er exhibited. In those years in which he was entirely de­tached from any local occurrence, he came closer to himself, stopped drinking, and started confronting the giant can­vas​es he set up for himself as if he were em­barking on a long battle involving a daily Sisyphean rou­tine in an of­ten slow and tiring progress.
Givati’s personality and his art have always been con­tro­ver­sial. The reviews written about him throughout the years have usually been mixed – some enthusiastic, others negating, and yet others – lukewarm. His art and life have always been intertwined – his work stemmed di­rect​ly from his life style and largely functioned as a seis­mo­graph reflecting his personal condition.
The Israeli art world labeled Givati as follower of the lyrical abstract school. A comprehensive perusal of his oeuvre spanning half a century, however, reveals that while this tendency played an important part in his ar­tis­tic evolution, only certain distinctive elements of the lyr​ical abstract have accompanied him throughout his ar­tis­tic career. In fact, Givati’s most quintessential quali​ty is the oscillation between poles: between total ab­straction and pronounced figuration. Throughout most of its ar­tis­tic periods, his work reflected a variegated, strat​ified combination of the two. Givati has always created series of works, so that the epitome of abstract in a giv​en series was usually concluded with a figurative touch, like a sign for the future, or a cue for the beginning of the next se­ries, and so on. Furthermore, one may also find a cy­clical return to exclusive work in black in Givati’s work. In some periods he used to apply grays as well, but avoided white and graphite so as not to generate ar­ti­fi­cial gray.
In the thematic context, if such a context exists at all, I depart from nowhere, I have no point of de­par­ture. I don’t set out to depict some story already sketched in my mind. I approach the canvas and start drawing freely, nothing is predefined in my head. I sit back and look at the canvas. Within that initial drawing I iden­ti​fy things. I don’t define them, but I start constructing the painting so that it will have three footholds. In fact I ‘create’ a painting rather than ‘paint’ it. My painting is primarily application, followed by reduction or re­mov​al that evolves into meaning. Where the painting is figurative, there is, in fact, no meaning to the figure in terms of its physical structure, but only to its contours inasmuch as they serve the canvas. It has no meaning in the painting beyond the form and color stain required where it transpires. The fig­ures do not carry any charged meanings, they have no underlying texts; they are present solely due to their paint­er​ly meaning. I’m not busy telling myself what the figure is doing there in the painting. I work with simple, round brushes, sometimes I work with a knife or with an etching roller. I use cloth or any other means I need at the moment. Most of all I love the first touch on the blank canvas. There is something Japanese about it. After that it starts to become complicated. Some say that they rec­og­nize my handwriting, even in the sharp transitions be­tween total abstract and figurative painting – transitions that have occurred in my work throughout the years.

Shmulik Kraus, Elisheva and Benjamin Givli, Moshe Givati and
friends at the opening of Givati’s exhibition in Neve Tzedek Gallery,
Tel Aviv, 1996


Some paintings are virtually created offhandedly, but these are usually the minor ones. More commonly I sit in front of the canvas and don’t really know what to do, how to start. After hours, if not days, I touch the can­vas, and in that very first touch something wrong, some­thing distorted, is created. The rest of the process is a harsh and bitter attempt to fix it, so it somehow be­comes a painting. After such great difficulty, when I finally leave the canvas, I find it hard to believe I will ever manage to make another painting. The blank canvas has always scared me, and I have always approached it without knowing what will happen there in the end.

Givati’s good friend, artist Jacques Greenberg, per­cep­tive​ly defined his work mode:
There are tribes in Latin America and Africa that weave rugs around a mistake they had made. This is what happens to Givati. He makes a mistake at the beginning of the painting process, and therefrom he creates an aes­thet​ic thing. Very few painters are capable of con­structing an aesthetic world around a mistake. Givati has psy­cho­log​ical​ly managed to break the abstract and create an inner thing all his own. This is the true avant-garde of the period – the quest for the inner self, for the point of the psyche (the subconscious), and the greatness of this path is that it opens up the painting for everyone (Ma’ariv, 21 June 1985 [Hebrew]).