Art
Ardon
By HUGH GRAHAM
FEW modern art historians would risk a theme like Roger Fry's `Characteristics of French Art.' An impartial account of a nation's artistic achievement is bound to record the frequent merely of style but of the artist's entire attitude to life itself. So, if it is perilous to generalise about the art of a single race, it is doubly danger- ous to do so when the race in question was, until recently, not only not in a land of its own but prohibited by the laws of its religion from depict- ing humanity. I mean the art of the Jews.
The temptation, however, is considerable. There have not been so many important Jewish painters and sculptors that it would appear an impossible task to seek for a highest common denominator among them. Nor have they been active in widely separate cultural periods. Except for Pissarro and Liebermann, it is only since the birth of modern art that Jewish artists have emerged at all. They have had to choose their styles from a chaotic variety; but at least they have worked in the same cosmopolitan age, and wherever they worked similar alternatives have been open to them all.
What strikes one immediately is that all the best Jewish artists since 1900 have been strongly emotional or symbolic : Soutine, Chagall, Ben Shahn, Epstein. Even Modigliani, whose predicament was similar to Pissarro's and Liebermann's in that he was part of a vigorous and confident culture, filled his subjects with a wistfulness and pathos remarkable in Post- Impressionist painting. It is as if the Jewish artist, liberated from his age-old veto, has felt obliged on the one hand to imbue his subject- matter with emotions more easily expressed through literature, and on the other to give to pattern and ornament the significance of hier- oglyphs and cabbalistic signs. At the risk, there- fore, of unhistorical generalisation, would say that the characteristics of Jewish art are these : at its best, strong emotional involvement, mastery of symbol and illustration, and a marked sense of tragedy; at its worst, over-emphasis, obscurantism and anecdotalism, and a pathos amounting to sentimental blackmail.
Ardon, now exhibiting at the Marlborough Fine Art in Old Bond Street, is a Jewish artist, and an excellent one. He might 'prefer to be called 'an artist' tout court, and that would be true also. But he is so conspicuously Hebraic that it would be as misleading to detach him from his faith and background as to analyse Fra Angelico without reference to his training as a Florentine and a Dominican. It is no contradiction to add that he is also highly cosmopolitan. Before the creation of the Israeli State no Jewish artist could have been otherwise. Born Mordecai Bronstein in Poland in 1896, he was trained in Berlin during the First World War and at the Bauhaus in its early Weimar days, when Klee was his closest friend and strongest influence. Little of his early work survives apart from the drawing with which he gained admission to the Bauhaus (Steeple at Midnight, 1920), and an oil, Man Leaning on his Elbow (1930). The first is myster- ious, poetic, a little whimsical, the second brood- ing, melancholy, and indebted to the early portraits of Picasso and Chagall—a curious amalgam of structural analysis and romantic intuition. All the other exhibits date from after 1944, by which date Ardon had already been living in Jerusalem for eleven years.
With The Gates of Light (1944) Ardon's mature style first shows itself. This fantasy of shimmering geometrical forms floating in a green sky above a chorus of watching birds owes some- thing to Ernst. It is nevertheless typical of all his later work in its exquisitely attractive colour modulations, tidy craftsmanship and use of complex symbolism—a symbolism which I sus- pect owes little to psychoanalysis and much to Jewish lore: the largest of the floating forms recurs almost exactly on the right wing of the huge triptych, Missa Dura (1958-1960) which is not a private but a universal allegory of recent Jewish history. The influences of Klee, Kandin- sky, the young Chagall, Feininger and Ernst recur again and again in Ardon's later work. But he is always recognisably himself, a learned artist but not a plagiarist.
Missa Dura is certainly his most important painting, and in both size and intention one of the most ambitious modern paintings, compar- able only to the political compositions of Picasso and Orozco. Such obscurity as it possesses is probably due only to our ignorance of Jewish symbolism and not to deliberate obscurantism on the artist's part. Most of the references are per- fectly intelligible to the educated Westerner—for example the hands in the central panel which are lifted from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, the falling ninepins, the small armoured figure of Hitler, the burnt-out candles. This is an enor- mously effective picture which demands even more space than the entire wall which it occupies at Marlborough Fine Art. But it is also almost too neat, too painstakingly contrived. Good as it is, it would be unfair to judge Ardon by this and not by his more typical smaller works.
In these, his fastidious craftsmanship, lyrical colouring and delicate fantasy combine to create pictures of extraordinary charm. Some- times they are a little cloying, and when his imagery is perfectly straightforward, as in the Marionette (1960) which is not only a puppet but a Pagliacci-type self-portrait, he can even be sentimental. But all in all, he is a most accom- plished and pleasing artist, a poetic symbolist who may turn out to be if not a Jewish Klee then a Jewish Redon—a good omen for Israeli painting.
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