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Mordechai Ardon (Max Bronstein) (1896 Poland - 1992)
One of the giants of Israeli art who was also a major European artist.
Trained at the Bauhaus, he began exhibiting with the Berlin November Group
in 1928. Among his teachers had been Klee, Kandinsky and Feininger. Ardon
arrived in Palestine in 1933 and became one of the later directors of
the Bezalel School in Jerusalem. Beginning with pictures of the Judean
hills, he progressed to tragic figurative symbolism evoked by the Holocaust
then to surrealistic metaphysical symbolism based on Midrash and Kabbala.
His response to the Holocaust was philosophical rather than expressionistic
and his dramatic canvases are organised by meticulously rational composition.
From Rembrandt he took the use of "hidden light" which he identified
with the mystical light of Jerusalem. The watches (his father had been
a watchmaker), torn parchments, letters, playing cards, ladders, children's
drawings, Kabbalistic symbols are fused into a microcosm of apocalypse
and salvation.
Shtetl / Screenprint
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