Menashe Kadishman

Private Collection, New York (possible acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above

Pierre Restany, Kadishman, Tel Aviv, 1996, illustration of another cast pp. 68-69
Jacob Baal-Teshuva, ed., Menashe Kadishman, New York, 2007, illustrations of additional casts pp. 22-23

This sculpture is being sold in situ. To request a condition report or schedule a viewing please contact the department at 212 606 7916.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Anyone who arrives at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem immediately notices it at the entrance, standing in a pool of water: a steel sculpture, painted yellow – a horizontal beam resting on a curved form (a sort of fragment of a mill-stone) protruding from a square base resembling an altar. Like magic, the upper beam doesn’t fall to the ground, despite extending beyond the sculpture’s supporting base as it barely touches the form supporting from below. The earliest stage of “Suspense” is a stone sculpture from 1964 – carved stone blocks only partially hewn, placed one upon the other in the spirit of the primordial sculptures of Shamai Haber, creating a wondrous balance. The sculpture “In Suspense,” as it was titled (two meters tall), was introduced in 1965 in Kadishman’s first solo exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery in London. In its next phase, the yellow version of the sculpture was commissioned by the Israel Museum in 1966, followed by the rusted steel sculpture offered here from 1968, which stood for many years in the Annmarie Sculpture Garden, as part of the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. Additionally, there is another version in blue-painted steel.

Kadishman, who began his journey as a sculptor at the end of the 1950s with rough stone sculptures of “altars” (inspired by the his work on the archeological excavations at Tel-Hazor in the Galilee – an experience that will influence the artist towards archaic stone sculptures inspired by the English “Stonehenge”), fashioned the altar through the abstract-geometric language he absorbed in the classes of Anthony Caro at the Saint Martin’s art school, London (1960-61). Both the dense weight and the suspension – the two sensations the sculpture arouses – have a strong physical effect, while both bear strong religious meanings, so many years before Kadishman devoted himself to the subject of the altar of Abraham, who bound his son, and was stopped by an angel from heaven. These elements can already be detected in “Suspense.”  Here stems the dichotomy of death (sacrifice) and life, or the earth and the heavens, that exists in the depth of the sculpture. Therefore, this modernist sculpture, autonomous in its abstract forms, is still a sculpture of an ancient ritual. And here, the dialectics of Israeli identity that unify the conflicts of the past and the future, the ancient and the progressive, the local and the universal. This is one of Menashe Kadishman’s most important sculptures.

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