David Sharir's Imaginings
Tassel, Janet Quinn
DAVID SHARK'S IMAGININGS JANET QUINN TASSEL Just how familiar David Sharir's art has become in this country was illustrated recently at a reception after a performance of Hansel and Greiet. A...
...You see, for me faith is art...
...In my house there is a great respect for Jewish tradition, but I don't think Jewish tradition has to be connected with a strong belief in God...
...The conceptions of the tree trunk, of endless circles, and of Peer as a performer-archetype coalesced into the design of an amphitheater, made of rings circling one into the other "from down to up...
...And the animals: Dr...
...For Hansel and Gretel he revisited his private, tutelary neighborhood: "You know, the forest is something which is basically a part of the heritage of every European...
...That sounds like Wagner...
...It's true...
...For there are numbers of these little ones, with their characteristic pale cheek-patches, abroad in the land, in homes, galleries, and museums...
...This is true of his relationship with the miniaturists, of whom he was unaware when he began painting as a child (in a style which he claims remains in its essentials unchanged), and it is true of his stage design...
...Sarah called me in the middle of the night last summer to ask me to do this...
...To be sure, there are identifiable flora (such as the pomegranate trees in The Blue Courtyard and in Shabbat Shalom), but Sharir's trees more often are on the order of chalices, fans, kazoos, spears, semaphores, or lollipops: they can be antler-branched, mosaicked, blue-leaved, or flame-stitched...
...Many of the male figures in Sharir's paintings and graphics, from his lepidopterous angels to the humble watchman of the town, are tiny black-bearded replicas of their creator...
...And this is a terrible superstition, because every sailor is afraid that maybe he too will never leave the sea...
...the year before, the Schiller Theater came with Beckett's Waiting for Godot—in German...
...Opera is like the Promised Land for an artist like me...
...My father noticed it immediately, but I had forgotten...
...But look...
...So I made my first sketches and brought them to Sarah, along with certain visual ideas...
...And yet, I think I am a very fine Jew...
...His larger neighborhood is of course Israel...
...her ingenuity and audacity in inventing new worlds for the stage, her brooding over a barren Janet Quinn Tassel, a free-lance writer, is on the English faculty at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts...
...Like the miniaturists, Sharir makes extensive use of the peacock, traditional symbol of love, but the old Rajput master might be forgiven for scratching his head, bewildered, over some of Sharir's variant peacocks...
...It is this "neighborhood" which makes him a natural set designer...
...However, the craft of the architect is notable in the masonry, domes, cupolas, arches, and pagodas of his pictures—and no less so in his stage designs...
...I just needed to be exposed to my own self...
...I was lucky—I got the right piece...
...It's the only place where things can be done—totally...
...Jews own bars, even bordellos in Germany, and I haven't seen any demonstrations outside the German embassy in Tel Aviv...
...Do you know what faith is...
...I believe these people have full hearts and they are sincere...
...And now The Flying Dutchman...
...And this idea immediately dictated a permanent proscenium frame which is naught else but a section of the hull of the ship...
...If they play Orff, why not Wagner...
...In a recent conversation, he described how My Sister...
...Well, things that you have not, you have to invent...
...Actually, the ushpizin shouldn't visit my sukkah, because I am not religious...
...I paint all of them not because I believe in the appearance of the spirits, but because the legend of the appearance of the ushpizin is so dear to me...
...But I love the idea of who they are and that they might come...
...One aspect of this "something" he described to an interviewer ten years ago: "I researched the marriage contracts of Jewish tribes and based my set on a large gate which would represent the Garden of Love...
...I can visualize ideas in three dimensions, and then see them move and sing...
...I have very warm memories of these stories, as told to me in my childhood, as shown to me in pictures, from games I played when I was a boy...
...But of the many pieces for which Sharir has designed the scenery he singles out three which not only enabled him to do the real work of his life—inventing—but which contributed to his art, paralleling his artistic method, and were thus especially seminal for him...
...Regarded from the architectural point of view and from the scenic point of view, this is wonderful stimulation for an artist...
...you can start to use your imagination...
...This is not to speak of the enormously successful greeting cards, based on about a dozen works, which have made Sharir's style—and his little men— almost subliminally familiar to a huge public...
...So 1 began to research, as with My Sister...
...It is very exciting to be able to do this in the theater...
...They were involved in the third of the theater pieces so germane to his art—Hansel and Gretel...
...It's not so well known, but he left many letters showing what an anti-Semite he was...
...My Sister, My Bride and Boston's Hansel and Gretel...
...Now, I'm not an atheist, because an atheist is someone who says 'Davka...
...Of course...
...No wonder his friends have been trying for years to get him together with Sarah Caldwell...
...But I honestly believe that if I have a dream, a good dream, it will come true...
...Listen...
...For me this is one of the most beautiful festivals because, first of all, there is something I have to construct—the sukkah...
...Broadway...
...His imaginative scenery and costumes for the Sarah Caldwell/ Opera Company of Boston production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel (on tour in 1978 and in Boston in December, 1979) and of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in April, 1980 have brought him the renown and (in the case of Dutchman) the spirited controversy which follow him in Israel...
...The ship will always be there, even during the Spinning Scene...
...you cannot imitate a piece of embroidery that a woman has been working on for ten years in a few days' work in the studio...
...He looks," she said, "like the little men in his pictures...
...And if there is something that can symbolize kol ?israel achim...
...Listen...
...I'm not a mystic or a fatalist— no, really...
...There were also numerous ballets, including, in 1978, his provocative mounting of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps for Valery Panov at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, a production which remains part of their repertory and still causes debate...
...The claim of resemblance founders, too, against Sharir's height and slenderness, his youthful 42 years, his heavy-rimmed spectacles, and the constantly shifting expressions which play across his face, so unlike the impassive masks of his little people...
...And it was like that with Sarah...
...Those old ships were magnificent constructions...
...When people told me who Sarah Caldwell was, I knew that I would some day work with her...
...the Jewish fraternity, it is an experience like that...
...And it was wonderful...
...Sharir, perhaps the best-known Israeli artist in the United States, has returned to these shores...
...A good part of all my artistic activity, in fact, is coming back to my childhood estate...
...Sharir studied architecture in Rome until 1965, but never got his degree—which was fortunate, he says, because "to be just another frustrated architect would be my punishment...
...So I recreate myself when I create the Bible stories in art...
...The renown— and probably the controversy—will widen when the Dutchman's massive vessel moors in June at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C., where Sarah Caldwell will recreate the Boston production...
...I don't need a siddur to say "thank you" to God—nobody needs a siddur for that...
...Of course 1 did not refuse...
...Now observe the paradox of Sharir's imagination calling forth (rather uncannily) not only a reality categorically his own, but an existing actuality: "I had never seen any Norwegian architecture...
...He might have added that many critics consider his Peer Gynt the most visually perfect production ever done in Israel...
...as if a curtain rose on myself, better than any psychotherapy...
...Seuss may be Sharir's single rival for benign grotesqucrie, humor, and virtuosity...
...Any suggestions...
...In a recent conversation, Sharir was asked about the sources of his visionary artistic and theatrical fancies...
...And what is more, Israel and Germany have a very close cultural relationship...
...Really...
...Oh, opera is really marvelous, especially with someone like Sarah—she takes my crazy ideas and gives them life...
...For another, my world became wider . . . because many new elements came into it...
...I am extremely sympathetic to the small minority of people in Israel (and they are a very small minority) who won't let Wagner be heard in the concert halls or on the radio...
...Sarah and I will be working together, but nothing to report yet...
...How to classify the little Sharirs painted before their maker grew his beard is another matter, one better left to the Talmudists...
...And I knew exactly what I was going to do—the Tower of Babel—although it took me a year to finish...
...And I am of course aware of the historical roots of the Jewish people's animosity toward Wagner...
...Has there ever been a bestiary, medieval or modern, to compare with the collection in Paradise or on the ark (Onto the Ark), or in Angels, Men and Birds'] Americans attending Sharir exhibits are struck, too, by Sharir's inspired use of color, above all his blues—lapis lazuli and cerulean, turquoise and deep violet-navy, royal, and Canton...
...and this is what a religious Jew or Brahmin or Buddhist or Christian or Muslim has to be: a slave who worships his god, to be commanded and to be maneuvered by certain laws which he did not invent...
...The real "religious" person is a slave of his god...
...You have to make compromises...
...But so far, it is the art—the tiny bearded fellows—that Americans have generally associated with Sharir's name...
...when I arrived at the opportunity to paint a house as a plant or man as a bird or insect, I really started to understand my own world better...
...When Sharir speaks to this question, he often invokes his "neighborhood...
...After all, many of them still have the number here [indicating his inner arm...
...Last year the Deutsche Oper of Berlin came to Caesarea with Nabucco and Panov brought their corps de ballet...
...Camera Thatter, ? Mutt Fvf AS Staioru...
...I'll make them angry.'] No, I'm not l'hachis...
...I don't seem to get hired for modest little pieces...
...He continues: "Hansel and Gretel was a wonderful opportunity—a very rare and dear moment—for a tendency in the theater and a tendency in my heart to come together and be perfectly matched...
...They'd be nothing...
...Joseph, Aaron, and David the King...
...Against the luminous skies and seas are set his custardy and chalcedonous off-whites, his brick and lacquered reds, his mottled sandstones and shadings of ochre, sepia, and umber, the smoky jades, the velvety purples...
...I just returned to the painting of my childhood...
...His "visual ideas" were based upon lore he had gathered in his private neighborhood: "I was taken with the conception that the story of the Flying Dutchman is a superstition, part of the belief of every sailor...
...The three are Esther the Queen...
...So when the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Professor Lazar, invited me, five years ago, to do a mural and asked me which wall I would choose, I didn't have to hesitate...
...We have theatrical troupes, musical ensembles, and choirs from places like DOsseldorf and Hanover...
...And why perform Chopin...
...But in Israel we have no forests...
...I knew I had to do theater design...
...Now in the guise of Jonah or Solomon or Noah...
...Israelis today buy Volkswagens and Mercedes, German goods of all kinds...
...Until now all of my good dreams have come true...
...it makes my life better...
...Funny...
...That's what happened with the mural at the Mexico Building at the University of Tel Aviv...
...I know about his writings, his attacks on Meyerbeer and others, and about how the Nazis loved him...
...I dreamed that I was going to do this mural for years, and I even knew that 1 would do it on a certain wall...
...Future plans...
...it is a self-contribution...
...I am a Jewish boy from j Israel: my parents were from J Russia...
...Every child in Boston has seen the Constitution and the Tea Party reenactment, but in Israel we have never seen old sailing ships...
...And can such a creator, strictly speaking, be called religious...
...The gnarled woods, the rough furniture (oversized and frightening to the children, but switching to scale for the parents' scene), the dancing pots and dishes, the sumptuous candy-Jw^kie "housekin/^te bizarre crit^ ters peeping out of the forest, the mannikin mother (like the furniture, oversized at first to represent the children's perspective), the flamboyant costume for Rosina the witch, and the celebrated angel-marionettes descending one at a time to watch over the children— these were what Sharir calls "configurations from my own vision...
...The performance was not "authentic"—it's impossible to copy folklore on stage...
...Air, Neshomeh...
...I really think that one production a year is all I should do, because I love to do it so much that it takes quite a lot of time and energy...
...or less loftily, perhaps as a soldier, a peeping Tom, a lover, or a ping-pong player, they figure prominently in the sixty oils, watercolors, and acrylics, the ten 78" by 58" tapestries (executed in Aubusson), and the hundreds of serigraphs or lithographs purchased by Americans...
...His parents emigrated there from Russia in 1924...
...To illustrate: when he worked on Ibsen's Peer Gynt in 1970-71 with Yossi Israeli for Habima, Israel's national theater, he was, he says, "stimulated by the idea that Peer Gynt endlessly wanders in circles," an idea that he deals with again in his current Dutchman...
...This neighborhood, narrow-streeted, Oriental, crowded, has contributed to his art the flat, sun-dazed perspective and the architectural types of the East—as well as the amused tolerance of packed-together people...
...It opened my horizons...
...The creator of a new reality, Sharir was asked, is he not an upstart God...
...The idea of circles led him to the image of a tree trunk, in which both space and time are configured by rings...
...I was never taken to synagogue by my parents, I didn't do a bar mitzvah, I don't fast on Yom Kippur (in fact, I prefer to be away from Israel on this day...
...I was expected to do scenery and costumes which were full of fantasy, with a lot of colors, full of little details and ornamentation— and this is actually what I am doing now...
...Sometimes I'm painting on the sets myself late at night and on weekends...
...And the many Americans who are acquainted with Sharir's art instantly identify the worlds surrounding these figures, worlds only marginally connected to reality, worlds created of animals that no jungle ever held, and of plants that no botanist ever catalogued...
...This is a wonderful thing for the painter...
...Sharir is at work now on an album of the Seven Festivals.] The festivals for me combine beautiful legends, traditions, and nature's own cyclical stories...
...What I'm really looking for right now is another opera that calls for a big ship...
...And Sharir was finally asked how he felt, as an Israeli and a Jew, about "collaborating" with Wagner, the notorious anti-Semite...
...And people who like my art relate to this kind of Jewishness...
...Oh yes, I liked Sweeney Todd...
...Sure," he smiled, "I'm always prepared to take the curses with the cream...
...I didn't foresee that it would be Hansel and Gretel or The Flying Dutchman, but I knew...
...The Dutchman's ship always stays, a frame for everything...
...But David Sharir has an even more comprehensive neighborhood, a vast secret world to which no one else has access: the private world of his imagination...
...Yet, it's true...
...as artistically: "In my research into the customs and costumes of North Africa, I found a definite relationship, a great deal of familization—is there such a word?—with me, myself...
...I look forward to a real participation of the audience— orchestra and balcony, too—in all this machinery, because the thing is huge—twenty-two meters—and it will be close to almost everyone...
...My Bride had affected him personally as wel...
...And invent he did...
...So my idea was that I don't have to bring the Flying Dutchman's vessel onstage, because the vessel is always there—in the heart of each mariner...
...His neighborhood, he says, has contributed, has breathed its life into his art, so he in turn restores to it the gift of his art...
...which is to say he is an atheist...
...every European boy—and every boy in Massachusetts, I suppose—knows what a forest is...
...The sets for the Dutchman they can make...
...But looking at the books, I found a lot of old sketches, drawings by ship-builders, with instructions for building...
...A woman who had not previously met Sharir picked him out immediately...
...And when I create a sukkah in art, there is not the slightest hint of 'religion.' But the sukkah is visited by the ushpizin, the seven guests who are the souls of the fathers of our nation: Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaacov, Mosheh...
...He always had to cancel...
...chaos and seven shoestrings later bringing forth a Gan Eden, make her the perfect colleague for Sharir...
...One of the ballets Sharir designed—and which he counts second among the three pieces most significant for his art—was the famous production he did for Inbal ten years ago, My Sister, My Bride...
...But when I was researching for Inbal, 1 had a very strange, very deep feeling that 1 had been there once...
...maybe the misfortune of the Flying Dutchman will be his misfortune...
...All . .. [those] fantastic plants in Song of Songs came ^in after my interpretation for the Inbal performance because there are so many phrases for the bride as perfumed plants, and the Bible mentions many plants that we do not know at all except by their botanical names...
...Sharir designed several theatrical pieces after the end of his studies in Italy fifteen years ago, when he returned to Israel bearing with him sketches for Hamlet, Brecht's Galileo, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges and others, "done not for any special performances, just for my pleasure...
...through art, I express my gratitude and all that I call my Self...
...Do you see how I identify myself through my art...
...Let me tell you about being religious...
...If my hands and eyes didn't configure them, they wouldn't be anything...
...All Sharir's theatrical pieces have borne the impress of a man whose visions are suprarealistic...
...My father is an epicoirus...
...Sometimes I think Wagner has come to be the sair I'azazel [scapegoat] for all the mistakes we've ever made, like taking restitution money from the Germans, for the loss of so many of our pioneering ideals, and for all our problems...
...Among his first productions was Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War for HaOhell, another huge, expensive failure...
...But because the scenery was happily received, the production led to others for Sharir—among them, for the Cameri, Shaw's The Millionairess and Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons...
...Sure, why not...
...I studied a lot, and one day all the elements I was reading about mixed with my personal ideas...
...Incredible...
...It is saying "thank you" to God, for the good and for the bad...
...Davka rhachis.' ['I'll show them...
...by Mul* ft Hirun>[> Sharir's "deep feelings" have been remarkable signals throughout his career...
...No imitator of reality, then, Sharir invents his own...
...The great paradox is that this unique neighborhood establishes for him what might be called a prescient relationship with the "real" world...
...That is my way to find my real conception as a Jew, as an Israeli, as a mentsch...
...His use of color, though intensely personal, when considered together with his use of gilt (as well as his thematic preoccupations, his use of flat perspective and cross-section, and his intricacy of design), moves Sharir into the tradition of the manuscript illuminators, and of the Persian and Indian miniaturists...
...Whenever Zubin Mehta tried to schedule a Wagner prelude, he got anonymous (and not so anonymous) letters that there would be bombs and riots...
...Singer's Yentl at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv (a design involving a transparent wall between the audience and the actors, and a dominant "ramshackle structure"), that it evokes the atmosphere of fable, creating "a framework within which anything can happen...
...That's part of the adventure of working in the theater...
...One critic praised my building as 'an abstract structure that immediately recalled the timbered houses in Norway.' This year when I was in Oslo in connection with the Dutchman designs, I saw those timbered houses for the first time, and yes, somehow or other, I had it right...
...Then, suddenly, as in Family at the Studio, everything may go talcum-pastel...
...The sukkah is a miniature of my house, actually a miniature of my emotions...
...They relate to my love of Bible stories, for instance...
...And I reject the idea that someone else has invented ways for me to say thanks...
...Does this make sense...
...Carl Orff actually collaborated with the Nazis...
...He acknowledged himself armed for criticism...
...you have to ask...
...Here again, I knew nothing about sailing ships before, I had to start from zero...
...The improbable plants and animals often blend with architecture, as in City of Angels, about which he has stated...
...Of course I could do scenery like that...
...Some grow into and out of animals, so that where one begins and the other ends is undiscernible...
...Do you know what I did, without realizing it...
...But the moment I paint them, they take form...
...They relate, for example, to my love of the festivals...
...Literally, his neighborhood is Jaffa, which he loves, where he has lived and worked since his marriage in 1966, and where his three children were born...
...from his head he summons the data of material reality about which he consciously knows nothing...
...The action takes place in Persia, so I naturally had to do scenery that related to Persia...
...pholagnpr...
...In opera I can realize all my dreams...
...The opera in Tel Aviv performed Carl Orffs Carmina Burana several years ago...
...Laughing at the choice of word, he said that he felt it "illogical to mix art and nationalism...
...Its artistic effect on him was twofold: "For one thing, I created a new interpretation of the folklore...
...Now that I know so much about ships it's a pity to spend it all on one piece...
...But just let the Israel Philharmonic try to play Wagner or Strauss...
...Here we are with an open market in Germany and everyone owning German things, but still you can't hear Wagner...
...One looks in vain, incidentally, among these latest angels for our little blackbeard, although there— on stage and in the serigraph inspired by the production—suspended upside down, is the whelk-bodied angel reminiscent of the two guarding Paradise...
...Such activity is a self-actualization, giving form to my memories—especially of childhood, just as I said of the Bible stories...
...So I invent...
...And yet [here he claps his hands], I did a Norwegian timbered church exactly...
...I haven't been invited yet...
...For this ballet, based on the Song of Songs, Sharir immersed himself in the study of North African folklore, particularly wedding customs...
...I invent such statements for myself...
...Esther the Queen (1966), a biblical musical extravaganza written by Natan Altermann, and the biggest, most expensive failure in Israel's theatrical history, nevertheless "contributed more to my painting than anything else I have ever done in the theater...
...the music they can't hear...
...This is the one area where nationalism and politics should not be allowed to have influence...
...And other motifs that occupy me appeal to Jewish (and non-Jewish) collectors...
...My Bride—only there is not so much material on old sailing vessels in Israel...
...Now, however, he is wearing the hat of the stage designer, standard apparel for Sharir in Israel, where he is recognized primarily for his set designs...
...Take Sukkot...
...My attitude in life has always been to invent things, so maybe my ideas are the result of my doing...
...In the last moment of the performance, the gate closed and became a contract of marriage with all the traditional phrases and classical ornamentation interpreted in my own style...
...for example, the Jerusalem Post says of his design for this year's stage adaptation of I.B...
...so instead of making compromises, you create something...
...But I did not look for original Persian pieces...
Vol. 5 • May 1980 • No. 5
