Yael Bedarshi

‘I want you to leave now. I need to be on my own,’ he pushed me to the door and inserted a roll with all his best cotton paper and a large amount of huge acrylic tubes into my hand. I remained in the stairwell outside the iron door on which the words ‘Studio Givati’ were inscribed in thick pencil, wondering what to do. I heard his steps drawing away from behind the closed door.
Several hours earlier he walked about in the studio in one of his lousiest moods ever. His wife Roni went to the kibbutz and took his daughters, Shifra and Yehudit, with her. He had no idea what happened be­tween them, but on that day and hour he was under the impression that he would never be able to see them again. I had nev​er seen him so despairing. The gaze in his eyes was black. A dark, desperate gaze with enlarged pupils, the gaze of peo​ple who are in an abyss from which there is no re­turn. Friday, four in the afternoon. The studio was si­lent. Only a gloomy violin melody issued from the radio which was tuned to the Voice of Music. Neve Sha’anan Street, which on weekdays is far from being the tranquil oasis suggested by its name, was sooty and empty. The workers from the shoe factory on the top floor had gone home. Gigi and I also intended to go home because it was impossible to paint in such a sti­fling atmosphere. Only Givati, who had no home to go to, walked around the room, turned in circles and mum​bled strange things to himself. All of a sudden he gathered all his paints, put them in a bag and dis­trib­ut​ed them to us. Then, with trembling hands, he rolled his best print papers, stuck them in our hands, and sent us home. Gigi went first. I stayed a little longer and tried to gain time. These paints and papers were his sole possessions, and their dis­tri­bution to his students was a fare­well. I tried to protest, but he was determined and urged me to leave. ‘I apologize. I need to be alone. Goodbye.’

Self-Portrait, 1985, mixed media on
paper, 80 x 70, collection of Hagit
and Alexander Doron, Ramat Gan


I stood by the door for a few more minutes. The sound of approaching steps and planks being dragged on the floor broke the silence, and then a hammer start​ed knocking forcefully on the doorframe. He was clearly nailing the planks to the doorframe. He was locking him­self from within with the boards that were supposed to serve as frames for the canvases. Why does he have to knock in so many nails if the door is locked? Who would want to break in anyway?
I ran home, I managed to catch the last no. 5 bus. What do you do when you know someone is going to commit suicide? I called Eran, Mental First Aid. The vol­un­teer who answered asked me whether I studied civics in high school, and answered himself that if I had I would know that in such cases you have to call the po­lice. This was bad advice. Indeed I did my ma­tric​u­lation exam in civics the year before, but anyone who is familiar with Givati knows that he abhors the es­tab­lishment, the bour­geoi­sie, and mainly the police, so he would not want to meet a policeman while in a fit. The sun set and I knew that he was dead. I also knew that it was my fault that I didn’t send people to save him. But I did not have the number of anyone who could per­suade him to continue living.
I don’t know when and how he came back to life. It was a fact: the next time I came to Neve Sha’anan, he was there, big and alive, with the laughter wrinkles at the corners of his sad whale eyes. He probably owes his life to his quick metabolism that changed his brain’s chem­is­try: with the same speed he decided to kill him­self, he also changed his mind. Perhaps it was a phone call that did it. In any event, he did not want to take back our farewell gifts. He ordered a large quantity of new papers and acrylics for himself, and I still keep many bad paintings executed with top quality acrylics on the finest cotton paper stored away, a souvenir from 20 Neve Sha’anan Street.
The group that moved with Givati to the studio in Neve Sha’anan had formed when he taught at the Artists’ House on Alharizi Street. I came there as a soldier to find out about drawing workshops. In the hall I met a big, charismatic man with a beard who said to me some­thing like, ‘forget about these old women, come with me.’ He went to the Arta store downstairs and start​ed emp­tying the shelves in a shopping spree. With​in minutes he piled a selection of the best products on the counter – enormous amounts of brushes of all kinds, huge tubes of acrylic, countless heavy sheets of thick printing paper, thick graphite pencils, canvases, rolls of newsprint. He asked all these to be sent to his loft at 20 Neve Sha’anan Street, and left, gracefully mumbling, ‘And put it on my bill, will you?’ A group of young peo​ple was forming in his loft, he explained. There will be a model for drawing, and you will be able to work freely. To my question how much the lessons will cost, he replied enthusiastically, ‘It will cost nothing. Just come and paint, the materials are on me.’ Givati was one of the most generous people I have ever known: a pauper who lives like a king, giving out the best of the best to his subjects.
I found it hard to believe such a heaven really ex­ist​ed, but I came to Neve Sha’anan nonetheless. Be­tween the buses, the sex shops, the rotating shwarma, the hawkers shouting ‘three for ten,’ and the legless haberdashery sell​er who mumbles as you pass him by, ‘telephone to­kens, combs,’ was Givati’s desert island: a whole empty floor in a building which housed mainly shoe factories. The floor contained a very large empty hall and a small​er room used as a studio and a living room. ‘Hi Yaeli,’ he wel­comed me happily, while rolling a joint. He sat on the sofa like a laughing Buddha, surrounded by all the par​a­pher­na­lia needed to sustain the existing state of eu­pho­ria. On a small table stood a bottle of vodka and a carton of guava juice from which he concocted his fa­vor­ite trop​ical cocktail. When the juice ran out, he turned to who­ev​er was around and said, slowly, with long pauses be­tween sentences: ‘Darling, I want you to do me a really big favor. Go downstairs, yeah? And get me a Guava juice from the kiosk, yeah? And a pack of cig​a­rettes. I really appreciate this.’ 1987 was marked by Tropicana: the Cen­tral Bus Station kiosks sold a new drink called Spring in guava, peach, and mango flavors. Combined with Ma​don​na’s hit La Isla Bonita, that played loudly from the cassette stalls, one could mistake the steamy Tel Aviv for a blazing suburb of Havana or Rio. The monumental canvases that leaned against the walls were likewise as col­orful as a Brazilian parrot: red, green, yellow, black and white, vivid paintings, vital and powerful. The studio it­self looked like a bustling train station. The monstrous radio tape worked at full vol­ume, there was always some­thing to drink or smoke there, people came and went. Among them were model Laila Schwartz who used to sit for him for hours, leaving behind a long trail of drawings, dancer Tamar Bor​er, who practiced in the big hall with cellist, Yuval Mesner (and in return sat as a model), and there were, of course, us, the students, a handful of 20 somethings, serious-looking and sad-eyed. In com­par​i­son to Givati, we looked like a tired old bunch. It was hard to be younger and “higher” than Givati, and as hyper as he was in those first months in the studio.
 He took his role as teacher seriously, and ded​i­cat​ed a great deal of time and love to us. When he in­vit​ed one of us to ‘review works,’ he used to narrow his eyes, light a joint, and reflect for a long time. Some­times he would suddenly shout, ‘it’s a gorgeous painting,’ and some­times he would just say, ‘keep working.’ He liked to go up to the painting and turn it upside down. He used to do that with his own paintings too: once a painting appeared fin­ished, he used to invert it and start working on it again. The next morning I would find him bleary-eyed, after a night in which he was caught up in a “whirl of work,” sitting at the other end of the enor­mous hall, with a to­tal​ly different painting leaning against the opposite wall. The most decisive criticism he would give to himself: it was either ‘an important work’ (one of these important works was purchased by an in­surance company, and he entreated us to go to the building on Hamered Street to see it), or it was simply a ‘crap painting.’ Tact was never his forte. It was not very pleasant to fall into his jaws when he was in a biting, critical mood, but toward his students he was always as soft as a rabbit. He never offended or humiliated anyone, never said anything depressing, nev​er interfered or dug too much into an unwilling soul. When he said something, he was very careful and accurate. He was paternal and protective, and imparted generously and warmly with­out expecting anything in return. It was pure total giving.

Nude, 1990, Indian ink and gouache on paper, 72 x 103,
collection of Prof. Charles Tapiero, Herzliya Pituach

Months went by, the studio overflowed. The paintings multiplied, ashtrays filled, vodka bottles were emp­tied. At the height of the manic period came Mercedes, a foreign worker from Latin America, among the first on Neve Sha’anan Street. Givati let her live in the stu­dio, and in return she cleaned the place, put it in order, went downstairs to buy things and listened to him, even if she didn’t understand everything. From the moment she came into the picture, he would utter her name countless times a day in various intonations, Mercedes this and Mercedes that, until she fell out of his favor, and he asked her to leave.
The fall was soon to follow. One day Givati stopped drinking. Fifty years of consuming large amounts of al­co­hol on a daily basis came to an abrupt end, causing an earthquake whose waves continued for months there­af­ter. The abrupt rehabilitation shook him completely. The chemicals that ran wild in his brain caused radical mood swings. Enormous quantities of energy wanted to break free, putting him in a state of nervous delirium. He couldn’t sleep for weeks. His eyes sank in their sock­ets and acquired a haunted gaze. The separation from his wife, which was or wasn’t the result of this process, accel­erat​ed the deterioration. His paintings became gloomy and scary. The demons and monsters that occu­pied his psyche, as in Goya’s “Black Paintings,” peeked through the abstract. The vivid colors were replaced by black, white, and bright red, and the canvases looked like dissect​ed living flesh, like carcasses that were food for the birds of the sky.
You could never know in what capricious mood you would find him. One day he took a bucket of paint and a large brush and started marking boundaries on the floor. He outlined an area in the space for each of us, which we weren’t allowed to cross. The strange people he had brought into his life with happiness and kindness, sudden​ly seemed to invade his privacy, and he felt the need to demarcate borders for himself and for them. The harsh energy permeated his body like a poisonous gas and set​tled in the space around him, to the point of suffocation. It was all rather scary at times, but I trusted him, and I think that all those who survived the storm and stayed in the studio felt the same way. He lost con­trol, but he was in­ca­pa​ble of harming anyone but him­self.
His lowest point was that suicide plan that never ma­te­ri­alized, after which the storm subsided. I remember one painting, calmer and more sober, that concluded the pe­ri​od. It was a self-portrait on which he inscribed some kind of an equation, something like: Givati minus al­co­hol minus drugs = ?, I don’t remember what it equaled.
At the end of 1988 I went to Berlin. In the months before leaving, my calendar was speckled with re­minders: “Call Givati, tel. 378219.’ You could no longer come over without prior arrangement, which indicates that he was protecting his privacy and setting clearer borders for himself and others. Since then I saw him only once. I was embarrassed to meet him because I had stopped painting. I cannot thank him enough for what he gave me in those two intense years. I rummage in the re­minders I have left, and discover that they resemble Givati’s painting a bit too much. When you turn them upside-down and look under the acrylic coats, the truth is re­vealed: a light, childish painting that tries to mas­quer­ade as ‘real’ painting. For a while I thought that in or­der to paint you had to be like him, a tormented total artist. Now I un­der­stand things that he gently tried to hint to me back then. He saw the counterfeit, but he also saw what lay beneath it.
Sometimes there is a special combination of cir­cum­stanc​es in nature: a habitat where a new life develops, where evolution occurs. Givati’s studio in Neve Sha’anan was such a habitat. Givati, a whale of an extinct species, swam to a remote corner of the ocean engulfed in a cloud of plankton and little fish that accompanied him, cleaned him and were nourished around him. As long as the balance was kept, life continued to be created there. When the whale swam into the depths, the fish scattered in all directions. None of them returned to him or to that re­mote corner of the ocean. But there is no telling what influence those moments had on each of those or­ganisms: each of them or their offspring carries within him some­thing of that rare whale.

Tel Aviv, May 2006

Yael Bedarshi was Givati's student. In 1988 she was accepted to the HDK School of Fine Arts in Berlin with a portfolio that included mainly paintings created in Givati's studio. In Berlin she studied with artist Rebecca Horn, abd in 1995 completed an MFA and returned to Israel.