| Marc Scheps
Creative Surge and Communicational Silence
Any discussion of Moshe Givati’s work in the first years of the 21st century immediately raises a question about his disappearance from the art scene as of the second half of the 1990s: Where was he all those years, why did his work receive no exposure? Did he paint throughout those years? Doubtlessly, the last question can be answered in the positive; as to the other questions I will try to present the amazing developmental continuity of a talented and qualitative artist, who has been received by the media in silence for a variety of reasons. It is a fact that his work has not been publicly exhibited since the spring of 1996. The last reportage about him was published in April 1995 in Yedioth Ahronoth i.e., over ten years ago. It is worthy of note that this is the second time that there has been a vacuum in the media regarding him: the first time was between 1975-1983, a period of some eight years. However, the reason then related to the fact that he was living in New York, far from the Israeli public. It was a period in which he took a break from painting. But this is not true of the first decade of the new century. In this context it is worthy of note that he suffered from health problems as of 1993. However, he overcame them and soon after continued painting with renewed creativity. In 2000, after another health crisis, he returned to painting with ever-increasing energy in his studio on Ben-Zion Boulevard in Tel Aviv.
The reasons for Givati’s refraining from exhibiting over the years cannot be found only in objective obstacles and therefore we should seek them in the deeper strata of his personality. After delving into the matter I have reached the conclusion that during those years Givati was enveloped in an attempt to reinvent himself, both as a human being and an artist. His self-imposed abstention from the world of art created for him a space and time that were vital for him to complete the process of inner coping.
Givati’s attempt at renewal and re-creation began when he was 60, in other words, an age at which most veteran artists have established their achievements and seek to expand or deepen them. Givati’s life circumstances obliged him to experience the process of his “rebirth” as an artist. Now we must examine the results. Obviously, we are not speaking of starting from scratch. In his work in recent years we find the so familiar elements which were based on the earlier decades of his work; but our main interest lies in examining the singular characteristics of this period and the elements that differentiate it from his earlier work.
Attempting to locate the common denominator in Givati’s work, I summarized several characteristics, with the full recognition and knowledge that in the course of analyzing his new work their divided nature will surface and mandate a broader and more detailed discussion. Givati is divided between the organic and the geometric, the real and the abstract, the meditative and the expressive, the monochromatic and the colorful, the amorphous and the structural, the transparent and the covered, the empty and the loaded, the implicit and the unequivocal, the dream and the imagination, optimism and despair, connection and separation. His entire corpus of work is based on the contrasts between these extremes and his ongoing attempts over many decades to find an equilibrium between them. Givati does not always triumph in these struggles, but when he does, his work is profound and forceful, particularly in the last decade, in the course of which it has changed, matured, finding balance and inner unity.
There Are No Black Flowers
I visited Givati’s home on the corner of Ben-Zion Boulevard and King George Street in the heart of Tel Aviv. While I was sitting with Moshe I looked around me and saw a sheet of paper hanging on the wall, and on it a text in big letters, and assumed that the artist accorded it importance. He told me that he had taken the words from T. Carmi’s poetry book (T. Carmi, Davar Aher [‘Another Version’] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1970). where it was included among his poems: “The essential creation of the soul is joyfulness, light, while you make the shadows into its only acceptable manifestation; it is imperative, you believe, to dress it only in black, but there are no black flowers (Karl Marx).” I am sitting in the studio in which Givati has secluded himself since 1995, when he disconnected himself from the art world. Here was where the secret decade began, and here is where, at the end of 1999, a short time after suffering a severe health crisis, he began painting the picture on which he wrote “There are no black flowers” . The painting implicitly defines an inner space; a stool is standing on the floor and on it a jug. A few vertical lines divide the canvas, while a few spots of paint are hovering in the space. It is an intimate painting that documents Givati’s engagement in poetry, and heralds the use he will make of language in his painting. In general terms he takes this stance to clarify the visual messages he wishes to deliver. The day is not far off when flowers will appear in his paintings, the first sign of a return to life. Then they definitely will not be black. However, black will plunge into his work at a later stage, when optimism will have passed and be replaced by gloomy thoughts which will preoccupy him more and more. The sentence “There are no black flowers” indicates the duality of a reality in which flowers symbolize the colors of liveliness, while black symbolizes bereavement and the end of the road. Givati’s work will shift from now on between these two poles – moments of joyful color on the one hand, and the attraction of fear-arousing black, on the other.
Zombie
Givati does not give titles to his paintings. In most instances he believes in the power of the painting and does not volunteer interpretation. He will provide information on the background and the circumstances of his painting, but does not deal with theory. Nevertheless, when he speaks about his first group of works since 2000, he calls it “the zombie”. The Dictionary of Israeli Slang defines ‘Zombie’ as “a dead person who has returned to life, after a West-African language.” (Ruvik Rosenthal, Dictionary of Israeli Slang (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005), p. 123 [Hebrew]). The first painting was done in extremely light shades of purple, transparent and devoid of materiality. Against this background stands a frontal figure wearing slightly darker purple clothing. This alludes to a hazy figure, similar to a ghost silhouette, limbless, its face almost merging into the background. The figure is standing like an erect lifeless pole. Givati returns from afar, and with this painting begins his century. He awakens after a prolonged sleep, still not knowing exactly where he is, approaches it hesitantly, softly, like a person relearning the praxis of creation, and therefore the painting abounds with mystery and reflects a Giacometti-like spirituality.
The purple shades will return two years later in pictures painted at a time of personal crisis. At times the artist reaches a state of existential crisis, extremity, until the moment the struggle to survive comes to an end, leaving only deep and silent pain, and an aching soul which is beyond bodily affliction. The purple figure, perhaps present, possibly absent, is hopefully waiting for revival. Later Givati does a group of paintings which have a similar structure: a figure in profile whose head is only sketched, and an upper torso in pink. The background is divided horizontally; the bottom half is painted in ochre, and the top in blue. One figure is different, and unlike the others that have no clear-cut definition, it has a clear and interesting identity: it is wearing a skullcap and on its pink shirt a Star of David and a blue strip; on the seam between the ochre and the blue of the background a burning memorial candle appears. This painting, the last in the series, was painted during the last days of the late Haim Shiff, and was completed after his death. On the back of the picture Givati wrote a personal dedication. Givati, fighting to return to life, sees how his friend, the art collector who supported him from 1993, takes his leave of life in pain and agony. This traumatic experience brings Givati back to his own personal crisis, and thus he draws encouragement from the fact that he was able to overcome both physical and psychological crises while finding new vigor to continue creating.
In the Zombie series the colors reflect self-confidence and joie de vivre, while the deep blue is reminiscent of the blue paintings of the 1990s. Here for the first time he uses ochre, a warm color that reflects light, the color of earth flooded with and parched by the sun. Soon this color will play a central part in his work and will define his most important series of the last years. Reduction to three strong and flat colors, presenting the figure’s profile and the relinquishment of all virtuosity, are reminiscent of the primal and naïve power of children’s pictures. Indeed, Givati’s new paintings belong to the period of childhood. The gaze of the figures is directed outside the picture frame, to a future that is awaiting the artist; he still does not know how it will look as he has not yet invented it.
Flowers and Windows
Givati’s Zombie paintings are a gaze into the artist’s soul, while the corpus of his work with which we will now deal constitutes a deeper look into the broader environment. Givati goes into his studio, sits down on an armchair which he calls “the cockpit,” and looks at the interior. His gaze falls on a low table on which there is a vase of flowers. Behind the vase there is a window that takes up the full breadth of the canvas and becomes a kind of wall; the window blinds are closed so that the gaze remains inside the room. The vase and flowers are situated in the center of the painting, and attract almost total attention. The canvas in its entirety is composed of horizontal and vertical lines . This is a modest beginning with a frontal and focused gaze, a renewed attempt to connect to the world on the most quotidian and routine level. The colors continue in the blue and ochre combination which appeared in the Zombie series. The scene is not illuminated, but the colors reflect warm light.
These artistic expressions indicate that Givati has regained his joie de vivre, mustering strength and attempting to find serenity, learning to accept himself and the world. So far the format of his paintings is opportune and enables quiet work (approximately 100x100 cm). The year 2000 comes to an end in paintings that present different variations on the theme, and Givati is now ready for his first breakthrough. He feels that he is willing to return to his painting ambitions, in which reality is merely a point of departure from which the artist builds a world of his own through his creative imagination, an autonomous painterly territory, free of any dependency.
The year 2001 begins with a thrust of work, manifested in diverse spheres. Givati decides to paint in larger formats. For over two years he paints on two-meter high and 2.2-2.5 meter wide canvases. Due to technical reasons all the paintings are composed of two equally sized canvases, connected to one another side by side. The connection leaves a thin vertical strip that divides the picture into two parts. However, it is one picture and Givati presents it as if the division does not exist. He draws an ochre circle that fills the entire area of the canvas, and in it centralizes a complex and subtle fabric of different motifs, which appear to be seen from a bird’s-eye view . Floral motifs and latticed patterns, similar to pieces of fabric, appear in the picture; thus the circle looks like a table on which they are placed. The motifs appear in shades of blue, purple and white; some are covered in transparent ochre. Unlike the previous floral series. Givati is no longer looking at the environment but examining the fabric’s surface and constructing the picture from a coalescence of his memory bank and his imagination that flows in free associations and intuition. The next pictures connected to this series tend to be abstract; they are more dynamic and powerful purple colors are added, thus reflecting a measure of eroticism.
Givati feels that so far his pictures focused on an isolated and static subject, which did
not accord a feeling of space, in which the time dimension has stopped. He decides to give
his work an additional dimension of width.
The dimensions of the next picture are now 200x315 cm, and composed of three parts. Here, too, ochre is the dominant color, in shades that range from yellow to red, which at times have a greenish transparency. This subtle network of horizontal and vertical lines restrainedly divide the ochre surface, and above this floral motifs, leaves and imprints of patterns are dispersed on it. A woman’s torso, also in yellow ochre, creates a focal point on the right side of the picture, from which emerges an arch of lines in various directions. The picture exposes an inner dynamics, a surface upon which conflicting forces meet, but nevertheless they complement one another. Everything seems flowing, blending, seemingly without any inner logic, but despite this, an equilibrium is created between all the forces involved in the picture. However, this equilibrium is fragile and temporary since all the components are in perpetual movement. A prolonged gaze at the picture reminds one of the works of the surrealist Roberto Matta, who knew so well how to create in his imaginary spaces worlds abounding in mystery that draw their inspiration from the depth of his intimate experiences and from the fragments of realistic memories. Givati paints a picture that does not reflect quotidian reality, while at the same time he does not ignore it. Neither is his world abstract and even less so a dream world – he simply paints a picture which gives expression to his emotions, memories, and thoughts, and sensitively connects them, transforming them into a visual message in its own right.
After the warmth of the ochre, after the heavy feeling of a closed and dense space, Givati again discovers the airy and breathing space of the outside on the canvas, and despite the abstract nature of his work we feel the presence of nature, which is alluded to freely. The lines and surfaces are reminiscent of birds, branches, vegetation and flowers. Givati returns to painting in his shades of purple of the year 2000. This time his representations seem to float and move, the entire description is transparent and rendered swiftly, as if it were an aquarelle of an imaginary landscape. Nevertheless, the picture is balanced by stabilizing its components with two horizontal lines, one dark at the left edge of the picture, and the other light on the other side. The bottom part of the picture is a drawing of a delicate and transparent square net. Despite the spontaneous appearance the picture is well composed and creates a tissue of elements that support one another. The picture transmits the inner dynamics of disquiet and vulnerability, and even if it still does not indicate a galvanized style it expresses complex and intimate feelings – at times contradictory – of an artist seeking from the depths of his soul a new path which will be more introverted and at the same time uncompromising in its search for inner truth.
Givati is mesmerized by the world’s beauty, which he expresses in another painting. It is apparent that this painting was created without hesitation, and all its elements organically integrate into a picture of true joie de vivre. Givati chooses to deal with the subject of the window and the relationship between the interior and the exterior, a motif deeply anchored in modern painting from Matisse through Streichman. In this uninhibited painting he succeeds in merging the interior of the room with the landscape beyond the window, forming a powerful visual and painterly reality. The painting is based on an intriguing dialogue between the blues and the pinks, while the brown lines of the window frames complement it. The transparent colors are radiant and transmit optimism and elation. The association with Matisse’s work is not accidental, and it is interesting to compare Givati’s picture with Matisse’s Open Window from 1905, the year Fauvism came into being.
Givati’s colors are cold and transparent, while Matisse’s are warm and project sensual materialism. It is also interesting to note the comparable items in both pictures, such as
the dark colorful strip on the left side of both pictures – blue in Givati’s picture and green in Matisse’s – or the pink ones on the right side of both paintings. However, the most important component in both paintings is the nullification of the dimension of depth, nullifying the contrast between the interior and the exterior, and rendering them as a magnificent colorful texture on the canvas surface. Matisse, more than any other early modernist painter, succeeded in nullifying the perception of the illusionist painting, while Givati, on the way to post-modernist painting, repeats this step as a tribute, but at the same time as a parting gesture. From now on his painting will conduct a dialogue with itself. It will no longer reflect an exterior reality, but an inner truth which will be reflected on the canvas surface.
Coping in Blue
As early as the mid-1990s blue dominated Givati’s landscapes, but his 2001 blue is not airy and pale as it was in his earlier work: it is deep and intense, and the unidentified objects hovering in the painting’s space in chaotic density resemble a submarine scene in which the flora and fauna live in an ever-changing symbiosis. Givati dove into the depths of his imagination and invented a world that derives from the unconscious, far from the reality on earth. The floating bodies perform a dance whose significance is not comprehensible at first sight. Givati detached himself from his environment and it appears that he is seeking the other, the mysterious, perhaps something impossible, the surreal. He invents a world rich in experiences and our gaze does not tire of the brilliant and complex scene that takes place on the canvas. If in this painting and in several others, purples and browns appear in the blue, in the next picture blue is predominant while white creates a both colorful and formalistic contrast. Seemingly abstract shapes extend over the entire picture, and are crossed by its top and bottom line. The shapes, drawn against an ultramarine background, remain white with light-blue shades, and spread like two figures performing a ritual dance, or perhaps they are in a wild fight. Here we have the dynamics of growing closer and moving away, while there is no possibility to separate between the connected bodies. The description is also reminiscent of a ritual, the purpose of which is to create a symbiosis of opposing forces, which ultimately create an equilibrium. When dealing with the color blue Givati frees himself of the diverse and contradictory forces coursing through him, deriving from a yearning for serenity, an inner cease-fire and mutual acceptance. The moment has come and he will devote the necessary time in the course of the next two years to his most significant series of that period, which I will call “The Ochre Period,” after Picasso’s “Blue Period” or “Pink Period.”
The Ochre Period
Once again we will devote our attention to the dimensions of Givati’s paintings, which have become routine. If until now there were minor differences in the width of his paintings, in the ochre period, which commences in 2002 and ends in 2003, the measurements are identical (200x230 cm). This series comprises some 20 large paintings in ochre, and are all the same size. Division of the picture into two identically sized canvases constitutes a distinctive mark of this series. The division does not play an active role in the picture’s composition, but its very existence obliges the artist to preserve the completeness of the picture and its inner unity. The division also fine-tuned Givati’s awareness vis-à-vis the fragility of the picture and his understanding of its boundaries.
What caused Givati to concentrate, over a relatively long period, on a specific color whose developmental range is relatively limited? The Hebrew Encyclopedia defines ochre as “a natural, inorganic color substance, possessing different shades, from yellow through brown, a mixture of iron hydroxide, silt and lime… artificial ochre, a mixture of soda or lime, used for the art of painting.” 9The Hebrew Encyclopedia, 1951, Vol. 1, p. 855 [Hebrew]). Following years of intensive scrutiny of the sky and sea, and preoccupation with the color blue in all its shades and transparencies, the artist is directing his gaze to the earth – that solid and firm substance which constitutes a basis and platform for our existence. Givati treats the color of earth like a multi-layered substance in which he will bury his imaginary world, sense its depth, and bring forth a world of shapes buried in it and composed of the same substance. The monochromatism of the ochre paintings affords a feeling of materialism. As we advance through the series, it becomes clear that what is happening on the canvas is not achieved by laying paint on the surface, but evolves from the numerous layers of substance which emerge from them and become part of them. The combination of a uniform format and one color over a prolonged period indicates resolve and patience, but also a touch of the obsessive. Nevertheless, the focused preoccupation with ochre was limited in time, like Picasso’s blue period which lasted for less than two years, between 1902 and 1903. A comparison between this specific phenomenon in the work of two artists enables us to learn about the intention underlying this engagement in one uniting component of creativity. In both cases the artists sought to galvanize a new painterly language, in both cases restricting themselves to one color afforded their painting an introverted meditative character, and in both cases the light is faint and emerges from the shades of the color itself – the element that both unites and coheres.
In the first paintings that were created in the series, ochre constitutes a solid basis upon which Givati builds his images. In the first we can discern a brown cross upon which a dress is hanging. Parts of unidentified figures and shapes and a segmented and slightly chaotic drawing create a tense atmosphere, in which the contexts are associative, of the kind that do not transmit an explicit and unequivocal message. From the ochre, implicit lined events emerge, and the feeling is that the covert in the layers of substance are no less important than the overt. Givati engages in a kind of archeological dig, in which some of the findings are exposed on the surface, while he engages in guessing about the others still buried deep in the ground. The picture expresses the ongoing process of discovery and not the freezing of a given moment.
Later in the series Givati no longer presents his “findings” on the surface. The colorfulness is reduced, everything remains implicit and appears in a haze through the layers of ochre. Now body parts, mainly legs, begin to appear; they move in the ochre space, as if thrown in at random, and they too are part of the same color substance, part of the same sandy and sun-baked earth. As the series develops the paintings become more serene. Each component that might have been interpreted as drama, disappears, and now there are scenes with figures and vegetation which merge into the ochre, alluded to subtly in the picture . We see the figure of a mother with two children under a tree, a fine vertical line crossing the picture on the left side. The picture gives the feeling of radiant and innocent spirituality, it reflects an introverted and pleasant quietness which reminds me to a great extent of a Giotto fresco.
Another painting illustrates how the last hold on identifiable objects disappears. In the depth of the ochre we discern shapes that look like an x-ray, a feeling of an intangible reality drawn from the depths of the substance that hides it. The reductional element continues in another picture in which a net of vertical and horizontal lines creates an atmosphere of a pastoral landscape, bathed in silence. This is a moment before the ultimate end of the picture, that hypnotic moment which may attract Givati. But he is also afraid of it, and therefore he returns to the basic structure of the picture in another painting and freely lays a network of vertical and horizontal lines over the entire canvas. The net repeats itself in Givati’s works: parts of it are overt while others are covert. It constitutes the infrastructure of the picture, and is at times the source of its only rational grip, a lifeline for the artist drowning in the storm of his emotions and experiences. The net ensures the uniformity of the picture, protecting it from the danger of falling apart. With the overt net as the declared subject of the painting, Givati completes the cycle of the large canvases in ochre. Through it he has learned the secret of reduction, the power of the overt and the rules of wholeness, overcoming contrasts, conquering instinct, discovery of the inner light, the force of silence, the triumph of the spiritual over the material, and the advantage of intimation. He discovered anew that a painting requires patience and demands discipline. His ochre period can be regarded as one of the important achievements of his contemporary work, if not the most important one of his corpus.
The last painting of the Ochre Period is different in its dimensions. It is a vertical painting composed of only one canvas. A vertical shape appears in the picture, which begins at its base and its apex is close to its upper boundary. The form is of an abstract pole, whose color is ochre, slightly lighter than the background. The laying of the two lines is uniform and Givati here reaches the limits of reduction and restraint – beyond which the painting will turn into an object.
Trees Die Tall
Givati preserves the dimensions of the previous painting but from now on the platform returns to the horizontal. After the ochre period, in the last stages of which he segregated himself from the world, he practiced reduction in form and color and reflected a kind of quiet serenity. He is now willing to open up to the environment and the phenomena that threaten its integrity and very existence. Following his verbal silence after painting There Are No Black Flowers in 1999, he writes the words “trees die tall” in ochre in the picture . The overall color of his work continues to be ochre, part of which is in transparent shades of green. Two tree trunks are painted on the right side of the picture and two red grooves around them describe their intentional injury, their sap flowing out. One of the tree trunks is painted in black above the red groove and symbolizes the death of the tree. If one could interpret the vertical pole in the previous painting as a symbol of vitality and optimism, here the brutal slaughter of the tree indicates existential concern of which the artist cannot free himself. The tree is a metaphor for man, and Givati, who suffered a severe existential trauma, shares with us his most intimate thoughts about life and death. But the words, “trees die tall,” do not necessarily manifest pessimism or anxiety; the emphasis is on the way in which death is accepted, in other words, the possibility of accepting the verdict while standing tall. Givati writes the words and above them paints a small house on a hilltop, from which purplish smoke rises, expressing life that goes on. In the upper part of the painting there is a small area of blue, an allusion to the sky or a water source. The picture expresses the cycle of life and death, and the existential cyclicity of nature. The death of the individual is a brutal and painful act, but it is counter-balanced by the continuation of life, and with his metaphor Givati offers us a way of coping: death while standing tall.
In the next picture Givati continues his reflections on life and death, but this time he touches upon a current and central subject with which society is preoccupied: the environment. He feels that implicitness is insufficient and therefore he printed letters in lines upon lines that fill the canvas with the words ‘ground water pollution’. These words are repeated in continued succession. The letters are hollow and through them you can see a mountain range upon which lie blue half circles, and at its foot – a blue horizontal line turns into green until it disappears in the background. The polluted water has lost its blue color and the painting, which like the earth is entirely in ochre, is polluted, its letters crying out, warning against an ecological catastrophe.
Givati declares that he is not a political artist, but he is a person who cares and he gives both verbal and emotional visual expression to his fears. It is not by chance that as a continuation to this painting he remembers a group of pictures that he painted when he worked together with Itzhak Danziger on a Rehabilitation of the Nesher Quarry project. With the picture “Ground Water Pollution” Givati closes this chapter of work in ochre and his obsessive preoccupation with the earth. Hence, he chose the dryness of ochre as the basis of his idea of renewal, and decided to create in this colorful desert and build his spiritual world from material poverty.
The aquarelle series in black and white on the Nesher Quarry was created in 2003 . What made Givati go back to dealing with this subject 30 years later? Hana Kofler reconstructs accurately and in a thought-provoking way all the stages of Givati’s deep involvement in the project, and in particular the reaction of the critics to
his exhibition at Mabat Gallery in 1971, which was devoted to the subject. Was his disappointment from the chain of events and his ensuing depression so strong that decades later Givati felt a profound need to free himself of the distress that this affair left in its wake? Was he trying to settle accounts with all those who took care to obliterate his part in the project? Doubtlessly the answer is yes, but it is only a partial answer. Givati’s paintings on the subject in the early 1970s were totally different and are well described by Reuven Berman, who said that “the paintings… related to the subject of the quarry are more like etudes and sketches on isolated attributes than complete and mature compositions” (Yedioth Ahronoth, 22.1.71).
The new watercolors exhibit painterly sensitivity and are reminiscent of art from the Far East. They also testify to Givati’s virtuoso painting capabilities. The drawings are now carried out from a totally different perspective. They exist in their own right and not as part of an environmental project. Givati relates to wounded nature by allusion, and through the drawings rediscovers his attraction to black, which returns with a great deal of impetus in his work. His memories of the Quarry combine with his renewed interest in environmental problems and this is a decisive factor. From here he will expand his perspective of the environment in an attempt to bridge the divides between his art and life.
The power of the pervasive images seen daily on the television screen that intrude into the private space of each of us, quite naturally affects a sensitive artist like Givati. As a painter he seeks a way to relate to the picture and the reality they represent. In the first stage he adheres to these pictures, as if seeking to preserve their documentary character, and a certain degree of objectivity which enables maintaining a distance, as if he wanted to refrain from over-emotional involvement. These pictures do not indicate the qualities that characterize his pictures over time, like the sensitive complexity, the implicit expression, the deep and the multi-layered. In the next stage Givati shifts to charged subjects, such as Israel’s disengagement from the Occupied Territories, and gives expression to his emotional storm. He depicts the human drama, the violence, the vortex of colliding bodies. Here he paints a picture which uses black, and presents us with the subject of the cutting down of the Palestinians’ olive trees by Jewish settlers. The picture is horizontally divided into two unequal parts. The left side shows the cutting down of the tree, while its upper part is separated by a line that divides the picture. The words “I am from Issawiya” are written in Arabic at the foot of the tree trunk. It is imperative that the message is unequivocal. On the right side of the picture, on top of the hill, a cube, resembling a house, appears. The picture’s division is a cutting of the picture into two and constitutes a visual severance that cannot be reconnected. This artistic motif constitutes a reinforcement of feelings aroused by the cutting down of the tree, an act that cannot be rehabilitated, the tree will never be reconnected. A thin red diagonal line crosses both parts of the picture and highlights the impossibility of reconnecting both sides. If we remember the picture Trees Die Tall we will immediately understand that the tree is a metaphor for human life, and its violent death, caused by people living under changing circumstances, symbolizes the forces of destruction dominant in our world. Givati lost his serenity and inner quiet which he sought in the Ochre series and is now painting pictures that give expression to his anxieties and anger in dramatic black lines, but also to his reflections on violence and death that cut down the tree of life.
Over the years, different and bizarre animals, at time mythological monsters, appear in Givati’s paintings. Often they were intermixed with human figures. Horses appeared in different periods, but in particular we remember his 1979 series from New York, dedicated to Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which include a brutal scene in which the horse’s eyes are torn out by a young boy. In the picture before us from 2006, the horse does not relate to the theatrical performance mentioned above, but presents a stage from real life, the tsunami disaster. It was the worst catastrophe that has beset the human race in recent times, and its images riveted television viewers throughout the world. The tsunami washed away the ground and indiscriminately obliterated life with huge force. But we know that various animals, thanks to their unique senses, were saved when they escaped earlier to the mountains. Givati’s picture is painted entirely in shades of grey, and at its center he drew the profile of two horses. The entire canvas is covered in transparent grey-white shades, beneath them lines emerge, the meaning of which is difficult to define. Only in the top right part it is possible to identify a few lines that can be perhaps interpreted as a corral. Givati describes the moment after the drama, the silence and hush after the storm, and those who survived, the horses. He gives sad expression to what remained after the disaster, after the destruction and loss: pain, sorrow, loneliness, impotence, aimlessness and lack of direction – life that is paralyzed and lost. It is a silent painting, Givati is attentive to the doomed fate of man, identifies with him in the knowledge that at times man must accept his fate. Givati knows that a painting cannot deal with the scope of a disaster like the tsunami, or anything of the kind, and therefore it is a metaphor for the catastrophe that the individual, whose entire world is shattered, suffers, but he survives and hopes to regain his strength in order to continue fighting for his personal survival.
Personal Diary
At times Givati’s paintings touch upon what is most dear to him, flesh of his flesh. His two daughters have been living with him since his separation from his wife. When his daughter Shifra became pregnant she underwent a routine scan to ensure that the fetus was developing normally. The transparent photograph of the unborn child was enough to move the artist and ignite his creative imagination. Following the event he paints a canvas composed entirely of subtle laying of paint in transparent pinks, and hesitantly draws fetuses in the process of becoming, which float in the maternal circles of the womb . In the Ochre series Givati depicted floating body parts which ultimately could connect into a complete human figure. In many of his paintings he depicts shapes in the process of formation, whose autonomous positioning and existence are not guaranteed in advance. For the painter, the colorful materiality is the living and amorphous flesh, from which he attempts, while struggling, to extract a form which has an independent right to exist. He feels the deep connection between the picture of the fetus, in the process of being galvanized into a form before birth, and the artist’s creative process. Pink symbolizes the blood of life, but it also expresses the joy of creation, the joy of the birth of a work of art which uncovers a hidden world. The pinks are reminiscent of an earlier painting mentioned above which heralded the return to life. Albeit hesitant and pale, Givati now paints the vortex of life, a subtle tapestry which reveals, side by side with a lively flow, also vulnerability and instability. These inner contrasts are characteristic of Givati’s work, but even in their extremity reflect a course of life that shifts between birth and death. It is also the living space of his work, which is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but responds to the existential fluctuation that shakes the artist. He reports on these fluctuations in his personal diary which candidly exposes, with no inhibitions, his pain and joys. It is not easy to follow the changing faces of his work, the extreme fluctuations and inner contradictions. There is no doubt that all these arouse questions vis-à-vis the artist’s stylistic and personal stability, but it is imperative for us to understand that Givati does not create in a uniform style because in his perception it is clear that life is far more complex and complicated, and the artist has diverse ways of expressing it. In the post-modernist era, the lack of an enduring style is no longer problematic. It is the personal handwriting that is important. This is the deep characteristic of the work and it is clear that Givati, both the man and the artist, feels, thinks and expresses this in a personal way in the deepest meaning of the term, and therefore one can find in his work the threads that connect his diverse creative processes, and create a unified corpus of work throughout the different periods. Givati decided to expose himself totally. He chose to constantly endanger his achievements in order to discover new ways, and if this stance has a price, he was willing to pay it.
Another picture was painted during a storm of emotions which Givati suffered following an event related to his other daughter. Givati wrote down the precise date on which he painted the picture, which is uncharacteristic of him. At first glance the picture appears empty and pale, except for the word kri’ah written in its center. Another glance shows that in his anger and desperation the artist covered an earlier painting, painted prior to the stormy incident, in white. Hence, this is an erased painting, a self-destructive act which was the result of a psychological need to obliterate what happened prior to the event. The word kri’ah, written in red, is an expression of ostracism, of a painful and forced parting from the dearest of all. No image can describe the suffering of that moment and therefore Givati is reminded of the word kri’ah that is deeply embedded in the tradition of ritualistic Judaism, “The tearing of clothing as an expression of sorrow and bereavement… while tearing the clothing the bereaved blesses… the true judge.” (The Israeli General Encyclopedia (Jerusalem: Keter, 1987), vol. 3, p. 400 [Hebrew]). The kri’ah symbolizes the final parting from those closest, the family. Givati’s act seems extreme, but tradition expanded this act and “the duty of tearing included anyone seeing The Temple or the cities of Eretz Yisrael in their destruction, and also anyone seeing the burning of a Torah scroll” (Ibid., ibid).
Givati feels that the intensity of his personal pain over loss or destruction does not depend on its origin, but on the ability of the artist to give deep expression to any kind of pain. In its radical reduction this painting possesses unusual artistic existence beyond the passing personal event which brought it into existence. It is also beyond the formalistic tradition of kri’ah; it is expression of the universal pain of a father weeping for the loss of a child. The loss was not final and absolute, and the painting remains as evidence of a momentary crisis, and is added to the artist’s personal and revealing diary.
Metamorphosis
Givati’s impetus continues with his dialogue with black. “I wanted to make black abstract canvases,” he says. He has an aspiration for black, but feels that the time has not yet come. It is questionable whether Givati really means Malevich’s absolute black, or the ongoing process of walking towards the end, and black is the color that symbolizes this in that it is located at the edge of the spectrum. Givati begins to paint a series based on expressive black drawings with the addition of transparent, brown and white backgrounds. His daring, swift and often wild drawing depicts imaginary worlds in their making, which coalesce into creatures and later fall apart. These are the worlds in which opposing forces combat one another in an attempt to create a temporary equilibrium. These are worlds which are born out of the chaos of the Creation and the forms that coalesce are borrowed from mythological stories.
In one of his paintings Givati adds the word ‘metamorphosis’ above his signature. This is an association with a modern play, but originally it was the title of Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses. It is an anthology of stories collected by the Roman writer from the Greek and Eastern mythologies. The stories tell of events in which the shape of people was modified, often as a punishment for their mistakes, betrayals and destructive ambition. Givati, of course, does not tell stories; his abstract pictures are the boxing ring of the creative forces which create and change shapes. This is a fierce struggle between lines and spots, between light and darkness, between the spiritual and the materialistic, and this struggle on the canvas gives expression to what is going on in the artist’s soul. The urgency and need to free himself of the burden is clearly transferred; it is quite evident that these paintings were born out of a great deal of pain, but they enabled the artist to free himself of his dreams and nightmares.
The end of the Metamorphosis storms enables Givati to again cope with the figure of man in his environment, but it appears that now his approach is more introverted, accepting and philosophical. He paints a black path and next to it a grey stone wall; a figure is on the path, perhaps standing, possibly walking. It is dressed or entirely covered in white fabric – a hidden, anonymous, mysterious figure, standing alone with no purpose on a path that crosses the canvas. The picture symbolizes the loneliness of man, or perhaps that of the artist. It is a penetrating picture, introverted and restrained, a picture with no illusions, one of acceptance and reflection. This interpretation is reinforced by a series of paintings from the same year, and particularly one of them, which is painted entirely in reddish-brown. A mummy is lying in its sarcophagus buried in the ground; the items in the earth surrounding it, which accompany the dead, are dispersed. The mummy is covered in fabric, and is reminiscent of the figure on the black path. Since he painted Trees Die Tall the subject of death does not leave Givati. Perhaps it would be true to say that the subject of the path leading from birth to the final station is what preoccupies him. In the description of the sarcophagus and the mummy he confronts the picture of the final station, and at this opportunity copes with thoughts about eternity; as the body can be preserved after death, the artist can leave the body of his work which he created in his lifetime after his disappearance, thus guaranteeing his own eternity.
I would like to mention two other paintings from 2006, which deal with ancient and charged symbols: the Star of David and the Cross. The Star of David is first and foremost an attempt to cope with a rigid geometric form which challenges an artist, who, like Givati, recently approached shape with extreme caution, its appearance being generally only intimated, at times it is in a process of coming into being or falling apart. He positions the lower line of the Star of David on a blue horizontal line that crosses the picture, and draws a black vertical line at its right. A small black circle and square are positioned on the picture’s light blue background, so that the three basic geometric shapes are presented in it. The artist manages to distance the Star of David from its basic symmetry and transforms it into something else, into an object that has undergone a metamorphosis. The Star of David is alive and has undergone changes and distortion: various parts have been emphasized in both color and shape, which have accorded it a new identity. It now plays a central role in the picture’s composition and no longer its original symbolic one. The so familiar collective symbol has become an individual image that belongs to Givati’s painting. It is somewhat tragic, which makes it all the more true than any standard Star of David, because instead of the cold beauty of geometric perfection it now expresses pain and suffering, destruction and disaster.
This is also true of the picture of the Cross . The Cross occupies the entire height of the canvas whose background is red-brown. The cross is constructed of a complex drawing in black and white. The dense drawing alludes to bizarre, albeit unidentified, images as if they have emerged from a nightmare. The cross is like a three-dimensional organic mass of compressed bodies and symbolizes the pain of the world, the way of human suffering from life to death. Both symbols have become paintings that forcefully symbolize the reflections of the artist at this stage of his life and work.
Givati reached maximal reduction in his work, reduction in his color spectrum, in forms and in composition, in order to reach a more spiritual expression. The bulk of his reduction is perhaps in content which deals mainly with life and death, and there is no doubt that he is an artist with a statement, an ability for renewal, depth and sensitivity, an artist who focuses on his work and surprises us each time anew. Givati has gone a long way along a path which is tortuous at times, from the abstract to the figurative and back again. Ultimately he discovered that the two paths lead to the same place, to his painting on canvas. Both perceptions exist in Givati’s work simultaneously over the years, without a clear-cut separation between them, unlike, for example, Gerhard Richter, who in advance separated the two paths. There is no fundamental importance to this division today, since the perception of the avant-garde changed and we are living in a period devoid of any dominant or leading style. We are living in an era that no longer believes in the utopia of progress but rather in the ability of the individual to shape his or her own unique way of expression.
At the beginning of his artistic way Givati belonged to Israel’s artistic avant-garde of the 1960s. In the 1970s he moved to the United States, broke the rules of the game and decided to live his own life. When he returned in the 1980s to the Israeli art world, he no longer found his place, and in the 1990s he removed himself from it entirely. His detachment also involved a lack of commitment and opened free space for his work that developed into new directions at the same time. Throughout this period he felt no stylistic, ideological, social or commercial commitment. However, he underwent a period of numerous crises that made him seek new paths in art which would express inner changes. Givati’s return to the arena constitutes a most fascinating phenomenon and for the first time its viewers will be exposed to his impressive body of work from the last decade.
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