Mordecai Ardon

Mr. Chascel Bronstein (the artist's brother)
Ms. Ellen Bronstein, Rio de Janiero (daughter of the above)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Michele Vishny, Mordecai Ardon, New York, 1974, no. 15, listed p. 222

Oil on canvas, not lined. Canvas is slightly slack on the stretcher. Surface in fair condition, aside from a thin, fine web of craquelure and pigment separation visible throughout the canvas. Some small, scattered areas of loss visible in lower right quadrant and upper right. Under UV light: scattered inpainting and uneven varnish visible.
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In 1933 Mordechai Bronstein (Ardon, since 1936) arrived from Nazi Berlin to Palestine and settled in the Kiryat-Anavim Kibbutz, near Jerusalem. Here he worked for two years as a beekeeper and painted rarely. Only in 1935, with the establishment of the “New Bezalel” and his appointment to a teaching position in the institution, did he return to create enthusiastically. Ardon’s early Eretz-Israel paintings were primarily portraits, and only after 1938 he began to dedicate his work mainly to views of Jerusalem, while making an effort to convert the northern, dark, cold light, carried with him from Germany and his troubled past, into the strong, bright, warm middle-eastern light. The years 1935-1938 were therefore the period where he created the Yemenite Laundress, Rikuda (in several versions), Woman Sitting, Portrait of Menachem Ussishkin, etc., and moreover – at least six self-portraits. The work offered here is from this rare and important group of works. It seems that Ardon, feeling alienation as a refugee who just landed in an unfamiliar reality, is clinging onto his self-identity, and attempts to look inward at himself, to confirm his new identity. Not coincidentally, in the midst of creating this series of self-portraits the artist will change his name from Bronstein to Ardon. Most of the self-portraits focus on the head: obscured eyes (even covered with dark glasses in a 1938 painting), occasionally with a brimmed hat. Three of the self-portraits are related to the very act of painting in the studio: in one (a self-portrait from the collection of theIsraelMuseum, 1938) Ardon positions his upper body (with an apron at his waist) in the center of the canvas, and to his left – the painting. In another work (also from 1938), we mostly see his head, covered with a brimmed hat, looking directly at the viewer from the left of a frame. In this current painting from the same year – we again see Ardon’s upper body, as he stands to the left of a painting, wearing a work coat and hat, holding a paintbrush. These self-portraits therefore reaffirm a change which began with an existential-emotional introspection and was completed with his return to painting. This process was characterized by a dark, gloomy light, from which flickering gold shades remind us of the works of Rembrandt, his self-portraits in particular. The dramatic light of Rembrandt and El-Greco was extremely appealing to Ardon at that time, as it was appealing in the 1930’s to so many Jewish painters from Paris and Eretz-Israel, annexing these two Christian artists to Jewish art. Ardon, a graduate of the “Bauhaus” in Dessau, arrived in Israel exactly during a time of great admiration for the artists of the “Ecole de Paris”, and it seems that in his self-portraits Ardon tends toward this movement. In this painting the black still swallows the painter and his eyes, but an inner light seeks to remove the heavy sediments of a refugee reflecting on his position in the world and begins to claim his place in the studio. The red paintbrush reaffirms new life.

We are grateful to Gideon Ofrat for the above catalogue note.