| Hana Kofler
New York: 1974-1982
Givati landed in New York in October 1974 together with printer Arie Moskowitz. He spent the first night in a jazz club near Columbia University, where the leading musicians used to perform. The next day, Ovadia Alkara took them to the Chelsea Hotel, which was famous for its place in the history of New York art, and where Israeli art and culture figures also used to stay for shorter and longer periods. At the Chelsea Hotel Givati met George Chemeche and Pinchas Maryan. Maryan was a friend of Yehuda Ben-Yehuda, and of Ruthie and Danny Shani, brother of poet Rina Shani, also among Givati’s friends. In the couple’s apartment at the hotel Givati met poet David Avidan, who was also staying there during his visit to New York. Givati recalls that Maryan bought a wooden horse for Ruthie and Danny’s son, and a similar horse appeared in his own paintings as well. While visiting Givati (in the loft to which he later moved), Maryan complained that he was not invited to present his works in any leading museum in Israel. The Chelsea Hotel foyer walls were lined with original works by prominent American artists who had lived there over the years. It was there that Givati first encountered Larry Rivers’s artworks, to whose works critics in Israel compared Givati’s earlier paintings even a decade before. Givati later saw a monumental painting by Rivers at the office of an American publisher with whom he worked. It belonged to one of Rivers’s series addressing epics from American history. It was an abstract painting which Rivers traced with quick pencil lines, and it left a profound impression on Givati. At the entrance to the Chelsea Hotel there was also a work by Christo, as well as paintings by Lea Nikel and George Chemeche.
Moshe Givati, New York, 1979
Givati met Lea Nikel – who arrived in New York immediately following her solo exhibition curated by Gamzu at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1973 – at the Chelsea Hotel after he had already moved elsewhere. Adam Baruch and Ariela Shavid also lived at the Chelsea Hotel. Givati stayed in the Hotel for a month, and then decided to postpone his return to Israel for a while. He was determined to withdraw from the contract he had signed with Gamzu, and canceled the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum. The hotel owner’s son offered him a studio on the premises by a special arrangement, but Givati preferred to move away, and rented a large loft nearby. Together with Moskowitz he once again set up the screenprint workshop, and stayed to live and work in Chelsea.
In New York Givati met Roni Lavie whom he would later marry after his divorce from Yael. She was an art student who lived and worked in New York. They met through a mutual friend who brought Roni to Givati’s studio. Following the visit, Roni started working in the screenprint workshop, and eventually moved in.
On April 9, 1975, Givati’s solo exhibition at AICF Israel Art Center, New York, opened. Meira Gera organized the exhibition which featured some forty large prints as well as works on paper that Givati had brought with him from Israel. The 30th issue of Tarbut (a periodical published in New York by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, providing up-to-date information about the goings-on in Israeli art and culture for the local Jewish community) contained an interview with Givati by Doris Cylkowski. Cylkowski described the house/studio/workshop as a great big open loft with numerous windows, devoid of partitions between the various functions of work and living. She then went on to review the works Givati painted in New York – large-scale silk screens reworked with brushes, oils, pastels, pencils and ink, and occasionally – spray. In the interview Givati explained that he does not paint “ideas”:
I am not a philosopher or an intellectual. I paint beautiful paintings. On the other hand, if art lovers find ideas in the paintings, they are experiencing their own discovery. My touch on the canvas is my story (Tarbut 30, Spring 1975).
Joav BarEl and Moshe Givati, Mabat Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1969
In the summer of that year, in his absence, Givati’s screenprints were presented at Goldman Gallery, Haifa, and Arta Gallery, Jerusalem. During his stay in New York he painted the series “Equus,” inspired by a play by that name staged on Broadway. Givati saw the play twice, day after day, once with Richard Burton, and once again with Tom Courtney, who was double-cast with Burton in the same role. Written by Peter Shaffer, the play, which was also staged in Israel at the Cameri, recounts the story of a psychiatrist exploring the motives of a young man who entered a psychotic state and blinded six horses with a spike. The representation of the horses on stage was obtained via silhouettes, and these inspired Givati’s images in the series of paintings where he returned to the horse motif which had already been present in different variations throughout his oeuvre. Originally, the horse image served Givati as a means of communication in early childhood. When he was returned at the age of five from his grandmother’s home in Khotin to Israel, and could not yet speak Hebrew, he used to sit and draw horses that his mother’s friends and relatives deeply admired, often “purchasing” a painting from him in exchange for an apple.
Givati’s life in New York evolved differently than he had planned. He painted very little, made a living in real-estate, among other things, and spent a great deal of his time at the movies. With a loan from Bank Hapoalim he purchased the loft on the sixth floor in the building where he lived, and moved the workshop that was theretofore housed in his residential apartment. Later he also purchased the loft on the eighth floor, sold the property where the workshop was housed for a fair profit, and moved the screenprint workshop to the next street.
Givati and Joav BarEl maintained a correspondence, and in 1976, when BarEl took a sabbatical from the Technion, he came to New York, straight to Givati’s loft where he stayed for six months. Givati recalls:
He was a wonderful guest. He hung around the city a lot and enjoyed every minute. Joav was an excellent chess player, but because I had no idea how to play chess, I taught him backgammon, and from the fourth game he constantly beat me. Roni and I joined him twice to see plays, and we once went out together to some club. Since he was a ‘man of ideas,’ he used to sit and invent things, and conceive of countless original ideas. At the time he talked about mass distribution of a ‘Love Glove’ he invented, and Roberto Cavalli, the Italian fashion designer from Florence whom he met in New York, created it for him. The intention was to market it through the American Playboy magazine. Joav didn’t make contacts with the Israeli artists who lived in New York at the time, and hung out with various local characters.
Joav BarEl and Moshe Givati, Mabat Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1969
New York of the 1970s was teeming with Israelis. Michael Sgan-Cohen, who arrived in the city in 1973, after several years in Los Angeles, accurately described the life of the Israeli artists and cultural figures in New York. In an article he published in the periodical Kav he recounts how he met Michael Gitlin, whom he had met previously in Jerusalem, as well as many artists whom he met for the first time in New York, such as Yehuda Ben-Yehuda who exhibited at OK Harris Gallery. He also met Koki Doktori, who like Ben-Yehuda, engaged in environmental latex casts which he exhibited at Rina Gallery. This was the focal point of Israeli artistic activity in New York in those days, featuring artists such as Joshua Neustein, Michael Gitlin, Zigi Ben-Haim, Georgette Batlle, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Buky Schwartz, George Chemeche, Benni Efrat, Micha Laury, Micha Ullman, Gerard Marx, Mirit Cohen, and others. Sgan-Cohen:
As for the interrelations between artists, one must recall that this issue was always accompanied by great tension. To wit: the idea that mutual influence is something that cannot and must not be avoided was not common, and the artists, I believe, did not always understand that excessive openness and generosity in such matters could benefit them more than threaten their identity, including their personal identity as artists, and could even promote the Israelis as a group with standing and power. For me, as one who came from the field of Art History, groups and manifestoes were a precondition for the creation of a ‘group,’ but this was not the general spirit. The Israeli artists in New York never dreamt of joint practical-theoretical activity, and, as Gerard Marx once told me: the mutual influences between the artists occurred ‘despite the personal relationships,’ rather than out of free will. At the same time, there was some collective atmosphere, and there were gatherings, mainly social, of Israeli artists -Cohen, “Between New York and Israel,” Kav 7/6, June 1984 [Hebrew]).
Moshe Givati and Shifra with Yehuda Atai, New York, 1979
At this point Sgan-Cohen shifts to a description of an Israeli party held in George Chemeche’s suite at the Chelsea Hotel. He names the participants and finds that in these “parties” came together:
…expatriates of sorts, with common troubles, a lot of Hebrew, a shared distant flavor, and an unsurprising affinity to the base camp. But many of these parties were familial, parve, whereas each infiltrated America individually, in his own way. There were no long conversations into the night; the events were ‘social.’ Still I remember one night in Gitlin’s studio, when a spontaneous conversation evolved about Israeli identity: there were Kupferman, who came to New York for his exhibition at Rina Gallery, Pinchas Cohen-Gan, Doktori, and Gitlin even recorded the spontaneous conversation… The contacts between the artists were more mundane: exchange of information, and mainly work contacts and concrete help (Ibid).
Givati avoided social contacts with the community of Israeli artists, including those who used to call on Joav BarEl. His New York path differed from that of the Israeli artists who came to the city. He painted very little and did not hang out in the “right places” to promote his career, but he loved New York and lived there his own way. Talking about BarEl he recalls:
Joav also felt that New York was the place for him. He opened a bank account there and planned his next moves. When he decided to go back to Israel to close out his business there, he gave me power of attorney for his account and left. He intended to end his work in the Technion neatly, sell his apartment in Tel Aviv, take his wife Esther and move to New York. After he left I started attending to the legal side of his move to New York, as a specialist in Plexiglas design in my workshop.
Roni went to Israel and Joav was supposed to pick her up at the airport. He never showed up. She called his house and someone told her that Joav died. Roni still made it to the funeral. I immediately went to the Bank in New York and informed them of his death. Roni took care of transferring the money to Esther, and Roberto sent her the ‘Love Glove.’ Two weeks after Joav’s death, his US work permit arrived.
That same year Maryan also passed away at the Chelsea Hotel. Givati went to hear the eulogies at the funeral home in New Jersey, where his widow sent the body to be cremated:
She insisted on it. Roni went with her to buy an urn. They sent the urn to Paris where it was finally buried in the Jewish Cemetery. He was supposed to be buried at the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, since he received the French Legion of Honor before he died, but things became entangled because of French bureaucracy.
Moshe Givati and Shifra, New York, 1980
After Maryan’s death, Marc Scheps arrived in New York to organize a comprehensive exhibition of Maryan’s work at the Tel Aviv Museum. He wanted to take the opportunity to meet Givati as well, but the latter thought there was no point in a meeting at this point in his life, which ran its course between “one hangover and the next.”
Givati and Moskowitz operated the screenprint workshop for some two years. They employed approximately seven workers, usually art students, and produced quality prints, some for the Graphics Department of the prestigious Pace Gallery. Following an economic crisis in the print branch Givati was forced to close the workshop at the end of 1977. He moved all the equipment to Moskowitz’s possession. A year later he sold the property where he lived, and bought a loft on 36th Street, in the confection industry area. Roni, who became pregnant in the meantime, gave birth to their daughter Shifra in November 1979. About a month after her birth Givati went to Israel for his mother’s funeral, and shortly thereafter, visited Israel again for the wedding of his daughter, Vered.
From 36th Street the couple wandered on to Crown Heights. On Purim Givati befriended a group of young Chabad Chassids whom he met through his friend, Yehuda Atai (who had purchased several of his paintings from the New York period, the only ones that survived from those years):
I was caught up by the whole business. I was empty inside, and it intrigued me. The Jewish ghetto of Crown Heights attracted me. A twenty-minute subway ride from the city center there was a Jewish shtetl, just like those described in pre-World War II literature. We moved there, and I loved the place. At home I lived as I pleased. I had a television and a stereo. Talented Yeshiva students from among the Chabad youngsters liked to visit me, watch television, listen to music, and smoke a joint. They always had conflicts about the food, they were not sure everything was quite ‘glatt-kosher’ in my house. I later realized that kashrut was so deeply-rooted in an ultra-Orthodox Jew, that even if he ‘left religion,’ the need to be wary still accompanied him for a long time. Roni stayed in Israel at the time with her parents at Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk. Following a letter I had written to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, where I described my condition, they handled my divorce from Yael through an emissary (so I didn’t commit a sin), and when Roni and Shifra came back, they arranged a lawful wedding for us, separating men from women, and with a spread that the Rebbe’s chef prepared for us overnight.
We lived in Crown Heights for a whole year, during which I had three personal meetings with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. During one of these I was photographed going in to meet him. I enjoyed listening to him talk and explain things in his unique way. In the Jewish neighborhood I finally found some peace of mind, and even painted. I used to pray in a small shtibel where I arrived every day late in the morning. I never left the ghetto. Everything I needed was at arm’s length, including grass which I got in an Afro-American shop that bordered the neighborhood. There was a synagogue there that housed Afro-Americans who had converted to Judaism years back, among them the Ben-David family. Their children learned in ultra-Orthodox cheder and yeshiva schools. For some reason, all the community’s ‘outcasts’ prayed there. I liked that synagogue because they had a piano, and instead of sweet Kiddush wine they served whisky, and there was also first rate grass.
Moshe Givati and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Crown Heights,
New York, 1980
During the eight years in which he lived in New York, Givati painted very little. He created a series of “Black Paintings” on which he worked at the loft on 36th Street. Henry Shelesnyak visited him there and liked the series. He made a collage on a white canvas that stood at the side and left it for Givati as a gift. Givati took the black works with him to Crown Heights, where he traced over them with paint. When he returned to Israel, he gave the canvases to a friend for safekeeping, the friend forwarded them to Ovadia Alkara’s studio, and from there their whereabouts have since been lost.
The Return to Tel Aviv: 1982
In the early 1980s Roni and Moshe Givati decided to return to Israel. Even though Shifra had a nanny, and the couple led a rather comfortable life, Roni had difficulties adapting to life in Crown Heights, mainly because she could not relate to the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. Their Chabad friends offered them an apartment in Kfar Chabad, but in the end Givati rented an apartment in Tel Aviv, on Hayarkon Street, across the street from Atarim Square. For a while he used to pray in the Chabad synagogue on Nahalat Benyamin Street, occasionally together with Moni Moshonov. One Friday evening, when the two came back from synagogue, after the meal, Moshonov was preparing to leave for the theater for the last night of the play The Last Striptease Show, where he performed alongside Shlomo Bar-Aba. Givati recalls:
Moshe Givati and Lea Nikel at the opening of Givati’s exhibition,
Sara Levi Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1982
I wanted to see the play, and I told him that I would walk with him to the theater, but then I realized the grotesqueness of an ultra-Orthodox Jew entering a play in the theater on a Sabbath eve. I at once removed the yarmulke and the fringed garment, and we took a taxi to Tzavta. It was still a long time before I could go into just any restaurant and eat. The Kosher issue clings to you and doesn’t let go all that quickly. Quite soon I started working and became myself again. We lived on Hayarkon Street for about six months, until Roni was pregnant again. I rented an apartment on Alharizi Street, near the Artists’ House, which served us for living and work. I always worked where I lived, which I still do. While I lived in New York, the general situation in Israel changed. There was serious inflation, and I still hadn’t gotten back to selling paintings. Pinchas Abramovic organized a paid job for me – I taught screenprint at the Artists’ Association print workshop.
Tzila and Yehezkel Streichman, Sam Leiman and Lea Nikel at
the opening of Givati’s exhibition, Sara Levi Gallery, Tel Aviv, 1982
After returning to secular life, Givati resumed his former routine: painting now filled the void created during years of artistic “drought.” In one of the openings at Sarah Levi Gallery, he met artist Ami Levi, Sarah’s son. Levi wanted to work with him in the print workshop at the Artists’ House. Givati was pleased to discover that he had no prior knowledge in print, and gave him professional training. Shortly thereafter Levi offered him to exhibit in his mother’s gallery. In May 1983 Givati staged a solo exhibition at Sarah Levi Gallery.
Since the exhibition at Dvora Schocken Gallery in 1974, Givati had not exhibited in Israel, and nothing had been written about him in the local press. The limited exhibition he now staged received favorable references in the art sections, which for some reason abstained from any mention of Givati’s long absence from the local art scene. Nissim Mevorach, in his article “Depth without Perspective,” noted Givati’s avoidance of all figurative elements positively:
Moshe Givati is interested in suggestions, mainly in transparencies. His point of departure is the canvas and the occurrences thereon. He concocts small, entirely abstract stories without any overt link to the landscape, as one can mistakenly think. His large-scale works, which somehow find their place within the small gallery space, are replete with detailed sensitivities that must be followed, a fact that furnishes the viewer with deep pleasure, as he scans the surface bit by bit.
Moshe Givati works without waiting for the undercoat to dry before applying another layer of oil, and yet, with great dexterity, he constructs a system of colorful, expressive layers, obtaining superb visual qualities.
The artist tries not to draw away from his base, the canvas, and this aspiration is more than a mere technical matter. It is an expression of the principle of clinging to the means themselves, without redundant wallowing in thematic mud. Although reality here, and perhaps in the entire world, needs fixing, Givati does not attempt to rectify it in his paintings. This is not his job, and unlike many others, he is well aware of this. There is no trace in his paintings of what one encounters in a prevalent kind of works charged with all types of ‘pros and cons,’ which enables many inferior artists to hide their artistic powerlessness with a highly charged thematic fig leaf. In this respect, Moshe Givati’s highly recommended exhibition is practically an exception (Haaretz, 20 May 1983 [Hebrew]).
Moshe Givati, Tel Aviv, 1983
Ilan Nachshon, in his article “The Covert and the Overt,” indicated the return of the lyrical abstract into Givati’s work:
Moshe Givati, who is known as an artist and a print teacher, exposes a different facet of his artistic persona this time. Vis-à-vis the colorist ‘insensitivity’ of the manual reproduction technique, he presents oil paintings that emphasize a panorama of color qualities.
His large-scale canvases attest to his being a seasoned professional who strives to display his experience rather than to innovate. Indeed, he is fluent with the material as far as 1950s lyrical abstract is concerned. Of the three painterly masters representing this style, he is closest to Streichman’s hinted approach and hues.
Givati’s point of departure is a landscape view of which he leaves only a few traces at the end of the road. His practice focuses mainly on construction of structural and color textures, their covering and exposure, delving into the depths and unfurling a soft range of sensibilities which he juxtaposes with accentuated sections (Yedioth Ahronoth, 20 May 1983 [Hebrew]).
New York Stories, 1983,
watercolor on paper, 75 x 55,
collection of Dov Shiff,
Tel Aviv
Raffi Lavie largely concurred with Nachshon’s observation regarding the lyrical abstract, and praised Givati’s works:
In a week full of shallow exhibitions one ought to go as far north as Sarah Levi Gallery to see two beautiful large paintings by Moshe Givati. When I say beautiful, I don’t mean beautifying-decorative. The style is somewhat Streichmanesque, but with a more melancholic, turbid orientation, with fascinating nuances of color and matter. It is pleasant to see an artist who tries to find himself at home – in the good old lyrical-abstract painting. And he still has something to say therethrough (Ha’Ir, 20 May 1983 [Hebrew]).
New York Stories, 1983, watercolor on paper, 56 x 74,
collection of Nili Salomon Halevi, Rehovot
Collectors started visiting the “painters’ shop” once again (as Givati used to call his workshop after a term coined by art critic Psel Friedberg years earlier). Givati sold none of the works at Sarah Levi Gallery, but one diptych exhibited there was later purchased by the Phoenix Assurance Company.
About two months after the exhibition, Rami Rosen published an article that reviewed Givati’s turbulent personality and life. He met him in the afternoon sipping cognac and talking with Yosl Bergner at Bernard Gallery at the end of Dizengoff Street. Rosen then followed Givati from one bar to another throughout the city, and the latter unfolded the story of his life, describing his self-destruction manifested in drunken fights in the city and his aggressive treatment of collectors, colleagues and the establishment. As part of that article Rosen gathered a range of opinions about Givati from friends and other artists. When asked what he thought of Givati, Streichman replied:
As a person, I don’t know him enough. As a painter, he is extraordinary. Talented is an understatement. I wish everyone would like his paintings as I do and say about him what I feel for him as a painter. It is a shame he disappeared from here for ten years. I cannot understand what made him become a rabbi in Brooklyn. Otherwise he would have long occupied the first rank of Israeli artists (Koteret Rashit, 13 July 1983 [Hebrew]).
Kadishman added:
He is a wonderful, great, sensitive painter. I wish I could paint like him. It sounds like a eulogy, but that’s the truth. I like his wisdom, his bluntness, and his pure scale. His inability to bend his artistic ethic, as others do, has prevented his extensive success with the public at large.
Garbuz thought that Givati got into trouble because of the alcohol:
I think his becoming orthodox was a mental hitch due to the bottle. Now he is finally painting as he never did before. Without any ‘isms,’ without unnecessary ideologies. Let’s hope that he does not get involved again in fights with artists and the establishment... that he will engage in painting, because he does that extremely well.
New York Stories, 1982, watercolor
on paper, 70 x 50, collection of
Bernard Ben Soussan, Kfar Saba
And there was another old friend of Givati’s who wished to remain anonymous and talked about:
…a bitter, tormented struggle of an artist who strives for wide recognition, and when it comes – destroys it with his own hands. The self-destructive powers possessed by this man are simply unbelievable. He is a fear-stricken man who requires a great deal of recognition from his surrounding. His insults and curses are like those of a little child who doesn’t know how to please his kindergarten teacher. But behind the brutal appearance lies a vulnerable artist. His best paintings remind me of angels’ song. He paints for the sake of painting, and his one and only friend is alcohol.
In his conversation with Rosen, Givati openheartedly confessed his alcoholism and its implications on his interpersonal relations. In that same interview he also settled some accounts from the past with collectors who were potential buyers until he offended them and sent them away, with artists with whom he had collaborated, and with establishment injustices. To Rosen’s quandary about the strange story of the secular Jew from Hashomer Hatzair who returned to the fold of religion in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s court, Givati replied that there was nothing strange about it:
Because the Lubavitcher’s court is not any different from the court of Meir’ke Yaari in Hashomer Hatzair or the artists’ court on Dizengoff Street. The conceptual collectivity, like the fact that you are exposed and judged every single minute without having a place for yourself, is shared by all courts.
At the end of the interview Givati announces that he has no regrets:
Neither for the wanderings, nor for the lost paths whereby I have made peace with myself. Today I paint directly from within myself. In the past my inner need in wide and immediate recognition created some kind of dependence within me. Perhaps this is why I became an alcoholic. I have managed to kick that dependence, the alcohol – not yet…
Those who followed Givati’s work throughout his long career should already know that he never fully and exclusively adopted abstract painting, but rather returned to it in different variations each time, and from there embarked on a new search. At the beginning of October that same year Givati opened another solo exhibition at Bernard Gallery, where he presented paintings created during the Lebanon War, this time based purely on figurative painting.
Raffi Lavie once again reviewed the exhibition in an article entitled “The Warm-up Phase”:
Moshe Givati presents small amusing paintings at Bernard Gallery, at 207 Dizengoff Street. On a printed base he has added and painted illustrations replete with humor and rich coloration. Animals, flowers, roller-skating figures, etc. – all these appear in the series entitled ‘Little Stories from Manhattan (Ha’Ir, 7 October 1983 [Hebrew]).
New York Stories, 1983, mixed media
on paper, 70 x 50, collection of
Bernard Ben Soussan, Kfar Saba
Under the title “Lewd Stories” Ilan Nachshon wrote:
Artist Moshe Givati is an experienced professional known as a lyrical abstract artist whose power lies in the creation of refined color fields charged with nuances and moods. This time he has taken a break and decided to have fun. He presents small, hand-colored prints containing New York stories, the city of sin where he lived for several years.
These are tiny, lewd stories, basically he-she stories, with humor and direct, blatant, raw lines. Men with cock-heads and pricks. I preferred those where Givati created compositions and soft color surfaces as well. I liked less the ones that look like hasty press illustrations (Yedioth Ahronoth, 7 October 1983 [Hebrew]).
The exhibition at Bernard Gallery was concluded with a party with lots of alcohol and belly dancing, attended by artists, students from the print workshop, family and friends. The party received full-page coverage in the weekly magazine Haolam Hazeh:
All the guests enjoyed meat refreshments from the restaurant next door to the Gallery, and toasted Givati. The paintings on the walls represented a long period in the artist’s life. The theme: transvestites. The time: the early 1980s. The place: New York (Ha’olam Ha’zeh, 26 October 1983 [Hebrew]). |