Tova Berlinski: Composition 70s / Israeli Jewish Polish Abstract Expressionism

Description: Tova Berlinski 1915, Oswiecim, Poland - 1922, Israel, Jerusalem Abstract Composition, 1970s Original Hand-Signed Graphite & Oil Pastels Chalks Painting Artist Name: Tova Berlinski Title: Abstract Composition, 1970s Signature Description: Hand-signed in Hebrew lower right Technique: Graphite and oil pastels chalks on paper Size: 35 x 50 cm / 13.78" x 19.69" inch Frame: The painting is unframed Condition: Good condition with no tears, rips, repairs, wear, paint peelings or losses, light aging spots (hardly visible) consistent with the age and use, minor wrinkle at the lower right corner. Artist's Biography: Tova Berlinski, Israeli painter, born 1915, in Oswiecim, Poland Berlinski was born as Gusta Wolf to Samuel and Gizela (nee Horowitz), who owned a furniture shop, the eldest of 6 children. Tova’s family was Hasidic and lived on 13 Zaborska St. In 1932 the family moved to Krakow, and right before the war they settled in Sosnowiec, where Tova married Eliash Berliński. During 1934-36 she lived in Paris, France, then returned to Poland. Both were involved in the Revisionist party of the Zionist movement and they decided to leave for Palestine. Almost all of her family who stayed in Poland were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Traveling via Italy, Tova and Eliash managed to get to Palestine in September 1938. They initially lived in Netanya, then for two years in the Betar Pioneer Platoon in Rosh Pina in the Galilee, later in Herzliya and finally settled in Tel Aviv. Tova worked in a factory producing labels and as a waitress, and Eliash was a construction worker and later employed in a fur dying factory. Eliash joined the army during the War of Independence and Tova started working for the Ministry of Defense. Later, Eliash received a law degree and worked in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, eventually starting his own legal practice. Gradually Tova developed her artistic skills. She attended drama school at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, performed at the Cameri Theater, as well as studied painting in Paris and at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts, in Jerusalem. She was honored with numerous awards, including the Jerusalem Prize (1963) and the Mordechai Ish-Shalom Prize for her unique contribution to art (2000). In 1974- became a member of ''Aklim' Group; 1982-84- was a member of the Radius Group, lives in Jerusalem. Lived and worked in Jerusalem. Tova Berlinski passed away in 2022. Despite her age, she never misses a chance to visit Oświęcim and meet with many of her friends. Education 1940's Studied drama with Miriam Bernstein-Cohen Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, evening class with Shlomo Vitkin 1957-58 Studied painting in Paris, France, with Andre Lhote and Henri-Bernard Goetz. 1959-61 Hebrew University, Jerusalem, History of Art, with Moshe Barash 1961-62 advanced studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Teaching 1965-84 The Popular University, Beit Haam Bezalel for adults, Lecturer, Jerusalem Awards and Prizes 1963 Jerusalem Prize in Art and Sculpture, Municipality of Jerusalem, Erest Prize 2000 The Shoshana and Mordechai Ish-Shalom Prize, Jerusalem Municipality, for Life's work and unique contribution to the art. Her work Between 1960-1973 she continued to paint in abstract style with the impact of children's drawings, and tended to the abstract style with contrasting colors and black outlines. In her paintings from this period there also appear vague shapes allude to her family perished in the Holocaust. But only in the 1970s she began to deal directly with the Holocaust. Her paintings became more abstract and they showed larger areas of color. In the 1970s, due to the effect of the Yom Kippur War, the colors became more moderate and monochromatic, but patches of color grew and spread to every area of the painting. Berlinski often drew closed windows and views that are visible through the closed shutters. Landscapes look burned and smoked, soaked with atmosphere of depression and death. In 1982, with the start of the first Lebanon War, the human figure returned to her paintings. In 1984, Berlinski returned to Poland for the first time to deal with the Auschwitz of the concentration camps, and since then, she says, she has not painted landscapes anymore. Nevertheless, in the 1990s she painted a series of Jerusalem landscapes with pastels, including cypress trees, typical of the cemeteries in Jerusalem and symbolizing sadness and grief. She also painted prominent colorful flowers on a monochrome background. In another series she painted cypress trees growing out of scorched earth and rocks that look like gravestones, inspired by the Arab-Israeli conflict. Back then she drew flowers vases and landscapes, sort of a time-out from painful issues, and between 1995-2002 she painted portraits of her family members who perished in the Holocaust. Tova Berlinski has exhibited in Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands. In January 2006, for the first time in Poland, her works were presented at the exhibition "Love and Death" at Pozan City Gallery. In the same year, they were on display in the Auschwitz Jewish Center and the Center for Jewish Culture in Krakow. In 2006, Tova Berlinski gave the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum one of her works: an untitled depiction of a single gray flower in a glass vase. Solo exhibitions 1961 San Diego, California, Jewish Community Center. 1963 Artists House, Jerusalem Rina Gallery, Jerusalem 1965 Paris, “Galerie de l’Université” Amsterdam, “De Drai Hendriken” 1967 Chemerinsky Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 1970 Haifa Museum of New Art 1973 London, Ben Uri Gallery 1976 Debel Gallery, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem 1977 Debel Gallery, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem 1979 Mabat Gallery, Tel Aviv 1986 Sarah Levy Gallery Tel Aviv 1991 Tova Berlinski - Pastel on Paper, Sarah Levy Gallery Tel Aviv 1992 Tova Berlinski - Oil Paintings, Jerusalem Artists House 1995 Tova Berlinski - Black Flowers, Israel Museum, Jerusalem Herzliya Museum of Art 1999 Recent Works, Artspace Gallery, Jerusalem 2002 Retrospective, Jerusalem Artists House 2006 Black Flowers,Poznan, Poland 2009 In the Light of the Hour After the Flowering, The Jerusalem Artists’ House Group exhibitions 1960 / 61 / 63 / 1965 General Exhibition, Art in Israel , Tel Aviv Museum 1962 Artists' House, Jerusalem 1964 Rina Gallery, Jerusalem 1966 General Exhibition - Jerusalem Artists, Artists' House, Jerusalem 1967 Artists in Israel for the Defense, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion Margot Lange-Aschheim - Drawings; Tova Berlinski - Oils and Drawings; Schmuel Tepler - Oil Paintings, Artists' House, Jerusalem 1968 Artists' Day: Exhibition of Paintings Jerusalem Drawings Exhibition, Art Gallery, Holon 1969 Israel on Paper, San Francisco Museum of Art Art Festival, Painting & Sculpture in Israel, The Exhibition Grounds, Tel Aviv A Leap of Faith, An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures from Israel, State University of NY, Albany, New York, USA 1972 Winter Exhibition, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv Summer 72, Tel Aviv Artists' Pavillion 1973 Exhibition of Landscapes, The Little Gallery 2, Jerusalem Jerusalem Artists - Exhibition and Proceeds to the Voluntary War Loan, Artists' House, Jerusalem 1974 Aclim (Climate), Artists' House, Jerusalem + Fredric R. Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv + Museum for Modern Art, Haifa 1975 Pastel, Debel Gallery, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem 1976 Works from the Collection of the Museum, Haifa Museum of Modern Art 1983 Landscapes, Traveling Exhibition, Israel 1984 Personal Choice, Radius, Tel Aviv 1985 Exposition des Artistes de Jérusalem, Grand Palais, Paris 1986 The Hot and the Cool in Israel Art: The ''Hot'', Haifa Museum of Modern Art Black and White, Artists' House, Jerusalem Self Portrait, Artists' House, Jerusalem 1987 Maimad Visual Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 1988 Modern Drawing - New Approaches, Haifa Museum of Modern Art 1989 Portrait, Traveling Exhibition, Israel 1990 Israel Art Month, Jerusalem Theater Panda - No Rules!, Yad Labanim Museum, Petach Tikva 1991 The Secret of the Color Reduction, Yad Labanim Museum, Petach Tikva Spring Exhibition 1991, David Gallery, Jerusalem 1992 Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem Tel Aviv Artists' Studios, Tel Aviv 1993 Feeback - Painting / Sculpture / Print, Jerusalem Print Workshop 1994 Art Focus - Identity, Artist, Location, Artists' House, Jerusalem 1995 Pleasant to Look At : Imagery and Reality, Arad Museum, Arad 1998 In the Name of the Land, In the Name of the Lord - Art and Realities in Jerusalem, The Artists House, Jerusalem Women Artists in Israeli Art - The 80's, Haifa Museum of Modern Art 2003 The Golden Brush, Shoham Gallery, Pardess Hannah 2004 Salute to Jerusalem Artists, Municipal Art Gallery, Jerusalem 2006 Inter-Generational Dialogue (with Anat Manor), Ella Gallery, Jerusalem 2008 Artist Mentors Artist - a Joint Exhibit (with Rina Peled), Antea - a Space for Women's Art at Kol Ha-Isha, Jerusalem 2010 Espace Dix, ESPACE 10, Jerusalem, Israel 2018 Painting Landscape, Zaritsky Artists House, Tel Aviv Additional Information: The 'grande dame' of Jerusalem The Jerusalem Post By LAUREN GELFOND FELDINGER \ 05/29/2008 Veteran painter and teacher Tova Berlinski has a first exhibition with a former student, as she considers the role of artist and memory and artist and mentor. In the 55 years since she first picked up a paintbrush, Tova Berlinski can't stop seeing flowers. She is not painting about nature or beauty. Flowers are what she remembers of her hometown, which would later become a concentration camp, where her parents and four of her five siblings were killed. History and death are entwined in her memory with images of color and growth. She is still struggling to make sense of it. "The flowers are angry," Berlinski explains of her floral period, a small selection of which is now showing with works of former student, Rina Peled, at Jerusalem's Kol Ha-Isha Women's Center. As a young woman in 1938, Berlinski sailed from Poland to Palestine, leaving behind her hometown Oswiecim locked in her memory as a small garden village splashed with colorful flowers and friendly relations between Jewish and Christian and German and Polish neighbors. Unlike most of the local survivors, Berlinski never saw the Auschwitz camp going up a kilometer away from the town or her neighbors being transported there. She never encountered the Nazi guards, and never saw or smelled the acrid smoke spilling across the sky. Leaving Poland before the war not only saved her life, she says, but has largely defined who she is as an artist, captivated by disparate images of beauty and pain. After seven visits to Poland since 1984, what haunts her is that there are no graves for the loved ones she left behind, and nowhere for her to leave memorial flowers. "The colors express my pain; my rage," she says. In the 1990s, Berlinski spent several years painting flowers as memorials and commentary, including her black period of solitary flowers, scratched aggressively in black and gray pencil and chalk on paper, one of which was donated in 2006 to the museum at Auschwitz. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Herzliya Museum featured works from this period in solo exhibitions in 1995. Galleries in Poland also showed the works in 2002 and 2006. Unlike the fertile, seductive and optimistic flowers of Georgia O'Keefe, Berlinski's oversized flowers look backward in history and tremble in horror, but without forgoing their corporeal or spiritual aesthetic. It is this attitude - not the flowers themselves - that better describes her and her six-decade art career. After performing in musical theater as an actress and soprano at Tel Aviv's Cameri Theater while in her 20s, she studied drawing and painting in 1953 at Bezalel, where she was especially inspired by teacher Shlomo Vitkin. From 1957-59 she and her husband lived in Paris, where she continued to study and paint, influenced by such abstract expressionists as Willem DeKooning and figurative color field painters like Milton Avery. Even in her more abstract works during her early years, Berlinksi's images always alluded or hid figurative references and ideas related to her past. Later, trying to express her grief more directly, she tackled family portraits. A painting of the artist's father shows him looking quiet, while part of his face fades into geometric pattern. The portrait of her middle brother is further abstracted, with the face fading in and out of geometric fields and patterns. Her mother, she says, was the hardest and most emotional to paint. A young and petite, but stylish and independent-looking woman in a dress stares elusively forward, while she fades softly in and out of focus, as if trying to escape a desert mirage. Berlinski frequently sits in her living room armchair, speaking silently to the family portraits adorning her walls. A group family portrait was donated to Yad Vashem. She also paints through the eyes of a veteran Jerusalemite. During the first Palestinian uprising, Berlinski painted a series on stones as she was moved at their sudden transformation from images of local historical reference to weapons. Either in painterly, thick strokes or flat color fields, she has also pictured the landscape and people of the town that has become her second home for more than half a century. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for Art in 1963, the same year that she had her first solo exhibition at the Jerusalem Artists House; the Teddy Kollek Citizen of Honor in 1993; and the Ish-Shalom mayoral prize for art in 2000. Her works have also been shown across the country, including in a solo exhibition at the Haifa Museum in 1970. Antea Gallery co-curator Rita Mendes-Flohr calls Berlinski "the grande dame of Jerusalem painting." Mendes-Flohr and co-curator Nomi Tannhauser tracked Berlinski down to participate in the gallery's second exhibition on the subject of mentor-artist relationships because of her reputation as a teacher of artists in Jerusalem since the early 1960s. "She is a good painter [with] her own style; and is very known, loved, and appreciated as a teacher," says Meira Perry-Lehmann, a senior curator at the Israel Museum. "Just two weeks ago I visited an artist in her studio who was talking about her." "It is inevitable," says Berlinski, "that a teacher will influence her students. But the teacher must also know to encourage independence, and when to let go." Rina Peled , who shares the current exhibition, began her Jerusalem art studies with Berlinski in 1974. "When I met her the first time, I was taken by her excitement, her passion," says Peled. "She was so beautiful, so impressive - even her house was impressive; I remember every door was painted a different color. She had a huge impact on me." Berlinski taught Peled how to draw with pencil and pastels and to paint with watercolor, acrylic and oil paints. "She gave me the technical foundations, but also freedom. This is rare. Hirsch [a later teacher] was philosophical and domineering. She wasn't like that. Around 1986 she said to me, 'You don't need to study with me anymore; you can study independently and work on your own," says Peled. Berlinski has remained a close friend and mentor. She would also encourage, such as curating Peled's first public exhibition at the Jerusalem Artists House. "That she believed in me gave me confidence," says Peled. "Today when I am going to show my work, I always turn to her first, to get her blessing." Berlinski also blessed Peled's latest "Sky" series, that hangs with her own flower paintings, saying she could feel the evening dusk when looking at them. "I can feel precisely what a person feels when they are standing on the beach looking up at the sky at the time when the sun goes down," she says. Peled's fascination with the ever-changing light and movement, from the technical and metaphoric point of view, directs her landscapes, that, like some of Berlinski's work, hover somewhere between decorative and moody. "My works are not sad or angry [though]," explains Peled. "Minimalism and monochromatic color are just my forms of expression. The sky is very impressionistic. But more than that, it's mystical, hopeful." Still, for the last 35 years, says Peled, "the way she taught me to use color and composition, and the artists she loved and taught me to love - Cezanne, Picasso, Milton Avery and Ori Reisman - are in my work." Peled, like Berlinski, also paints metaphors about the Holocaust, but from a pure Israeli rather than personal perspective. The golden but muted graphic images, etched as if with barbed wire, developed from the typical experience of a high school student who watched the Eichmann trial on television, she explains: "I'm not from a family of Holocaust survivors; I'm Mizrahi. But from early childhood, the Holocaust was part of the collective atmosphere." Peled, who teaches modern European history and art history at Hebrew University's pre-academic school and at the Alma College in Tel Aviv, went on to get her doctorate in 2002, with a Holocaust-referenced dissertation, "The New Man of the Zionist Revolution: Hashomer Hatza'ir and Its European Roots." After visiting concentration camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia during this time, Peled uses details of her photos for references of composition, light and darkness, in her works. "Even in the camps, I looked for the light," she says. A show of the concentration-camp series, "Far Away from the Sun," is showing now through June 27 at the Yair Gallery in Tel Aviv. Peled, who says her landscapes have been influenced by painters from the traditional, like William Turner, to the more modernist, like Paul Klee, says one of the greatest inspirations she got was from Berlinski, who despite living a life marked by tragedy and loss, continues to be continually nurturing and positive. "In the end, you have to work on your own. She gave me the biggest gift - to trust myself and to be part of the world." Payment Methods: PayPal, Credit Card (Visa, Master Card), Bank Cheque. If you wish to send a personal cheque, please note that the item will not be shipped until the cheque clears. Shipping&Handling: All items are sent through registered mail or by E.M.S. Fast delivery service (up to 3-4 business days), depends on the weight and measures of the purchased item. You may add insurance for the item with an additional fee. Please e-mail us for other shipping methods. 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Price: 260 USD

Location: Tel Aviv

End Time: 2025-02-03T17:59:34.000Z

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