Mordecai Ardon

Mr. and Mrs. Norbert Schimmel, New York
Passedoit Gallery, New York

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Mordecai Ardon - Landscapes of Infinity, February-July 2003, p. 82, no. 16, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

Michele Vishny, Mordecai Ardon, New York, 1973, illus. no. 65

Oil on board. Some of the extreme edges of the board have been knicked. Picture surface in generally good condition. At the extreme edges there are small knicks and losses and very minor frame abrasions. Under UV light, there are no apparent inpaints visible. Framed.
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This early depiction of Jerusalem is a beautiful example of Ardon’s transcendental relationship with the holy city. Upon arriving in the land of Israel in 1933, the artist immediately became fascinated with Jerusalem and its surrounding hills. His early landscapes of the hills of Judea, the Kidron Valley, the Valley of the Cross and the Mount of Olives from the 1930s are well known and are characterized by a detailed portrayal of the land which occupies almost the whole canvas. During the 1940s, the artist’s landscapes became less figurative and more abstract with predominance given to colors rather than to the actual landscape (for example Red Landscape and Yellow Landscape both from 1946). In Jerusalem at Night, an exquisite balance is achieved by the artist through his rendering of an emotional, romantic turbulence in the blue-grey sky rising above the rectangular, almost spire-like icons of the buildings of this sacred city.

Arturo Schwartz discusses Ardon's landscapes of Jerusalem and this work specifically and notes: “The city of Jerusalem made a profound and lasting impression on Ardon: he was certainly not impervious to the aura of sacredness with which it had been endowed by Jewish tradition. While its “mountain of myrrh,” Mount Moriah, was considered the center of the world which, in Jacob’s dream, his ladder reached the sky, Jerusalem was the center of the center, the holiest place (makom) on earth, where Solomon built the Temple. Accordingly, when capturing even its most trivial aspect, Ardon succeeded in evoking the distinctive atmosphere of the “princess among the cities” (Lamentations 1:1) – Perfect in beauty, joy of all the earth (ibid., 2:15)… Jerusalem at Night, 1947 (cat. N o. 16, p. 82), is seen through Ardon’s window, whose frame runs along the left border of the painting. Here the treatment is more abstract, although, in the city’s architecture, David’s tower can still be recognized. Here, Ardon beautifully interprets the subtle variations of its bluish light, when silence has settled on its slumbering inhabitants.” (Arturo Schwartz, Mordecai Ardon: The Colors of Time, Israel, 2003, p. 31)

Avram Kampf refers to Ardon’s abstracted landscape compositions as follows: “Ardon gives pictorial form to dawn and twilight, to the nocturnal, shadowy and lunar. Through his use of colour and abstract forms he suggests a higher, more mysterious order of nature than the eye perceives. It is the image of the sky which concerns him… the feeling of a clear night, a vast cosmic creation, which is evoked by the pictorial construction itself.” (Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj, Jewish Experience in 20^th Century Art, London, 1990, p. 154).