JAKOB STEINHARDT: DEAN OF ISRAELI ARTISTS

...He studied painting first with the great Lovis Corinth, in the German capital, and then with an even more celebrated master, Henri Matisse in Paris...

...His books include "Ernst Barlach" and "Modigliani the Sculptor...

...Steinhardt has changed little in his long life...

...A successful career in the Weimar Republic came to a sudden end in 1933 when the Nazis uprooted the world of German Jewry...

...Whereas in Europe, and in Israel, abstract and non-abstract art can co-exist peacefully, the Western Hemisphere tends to overrate experiment, newness, and sensationalism at the expense of art forms that are still linked with age-old tradition and no less significant for being based on slow evolution rather than on heedless leaps into the unknown...

...As a maker of woodcuts, he enjoys these contrasts, as well as the shades and gradations between them...

...The most important came to him in 1955, at the bi-annual exhibition of Sao Paulo, Brazil, when he was awarded the First International Prize for Graphic Art...

...Nor can there be doubt about Steinhardt's serious and sturdy philosophy of life which enables him to produce works that remain valid and worth looking at after forty and even fifty years, whereas so much that is produced today promises to appear terribly dated four or five years hence...

...It is, perhaps, no coincidence that he chose the woodcut...

...Overwhelmed and intoxicated by huge color explosions, we have become deafened to the spiritual splendors to be derived from prints, which are usually small and, for the most part, devoid of rich, loud color...

...He is more at home in silent narrow alleys, with their inconspicuous low houses, which he remembers from his native Zerkow, from the Lithuanian villages he saw as a German soldier, and from his many trips to the Old City of Jerusalem...

...For Steinhardt is the dean of Israeli artists and has done more, perhaps, than any of his colleagues to gain prestige for his country in the art centers of the world...

...Steinhardt was born in 1887 in a small town, Zerkow, some miles to the east of Berlin...

...Few artists in black and white make us realize as fully as Steinhardt does that white can be a stark, cruel color, or a tender and lyrical one, and that black can be either soft or dramatic...

...Although Steinhardt has done some painting, his fame rests chiefly on his approximately 500 woodcuts and other graphic work, mostly drypoints—the term refers to a method of engraving in which the graver is used directly on the plate without the benefit of an acid...

...The woodcut, foremost art expression of the late Middle Ages, had been neglected in modern times until Twentieth Century artists, with sharp instruments, dug their visions out of woodblocks...

...It was in 1911 that he, with two other fervent young men, Ludwig Meidner and Richard Janthur, formed a trio called Die Pathetiker...

...Steinhardt is, of course, known to nearly every Israeli and, as the result of recent one-man shows in a dozen German cities, to art lovers in the Bonn Republic...

...inanimate objects become symbols by which to dramatize plastically what he feels...

...Luckily, the damage was not extensive...

...In the first World War, he served as a soldier of the German Imperial Army...

...Those who are not seduced by fads are likely to realize, after studying Steinhardt's works in the print rooms of many American museums, or in the albums issued here by the Jewish Publication Society of America, that he is a master who combines the greatest skill with the deepest humanity, a narrator who can dramatize an episode and express a feeling by a few lines and in a few areas of black and white...

...It reminds me of the praise which the humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, bestowed upon his friend, the print-maker Albrecht Duerer...

...At the height of his career, Steinhardt slightly expanded his program by learning the difficult and rather time-consuming technique of the color woodcut...

...What does he [Duerer]not express in monochromes, that is, in black lines...

...Light, shade, splendor, eminences, depressions, and, although they derive from one single printing, several aspects are presented to the eye of the spectator...

...he even depicts that which cannot be depicted...

...Janthur did not live long enough to ripen his talent...

...But his favorite teachers were print-makers: Hermann Struck, a German Jew like himself, and the Swiss-born Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, who had settled in the French capital...

...General mobilization had started...

...Steinhardt's art is strictly representational, addicted to the form of man as a carrier of emotion...

...they were young idealists who sympathized with the disinherited, the poor...

...One may question the wisdom of nostalgia, but this nostalgia is not really absurd in a country where past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined in a skein from which not a single thread can be removed without destroying the divine unity...

...Yet I, for one, prefer his work in black and white...

...Significantly, when Steinhardt and his wife settled in Jerusalem, they did not select one of the modern dwellings but took over an aged fairy-tale house, separated from the street by a high wall of hewn stone which encloses a lush Oriental garden...

...He has always liked to sketch humble people—especially the simple Jews whom, in his youth, he had seen walking to the local synagogue...

...They were a sub-group of the school called Expressionists, all of them artists eager to reveal their deep emotional experiences rather than to paint landscapes objectively and study surface phenomena...

...He does not believe in unnecessary "hurry" for hurry's sake...

...When Herwarth Walden, the versatile writer, painter, poet, composer, and impresario saw their paintings (Steinhardt's switch to the graphic arts came later) he gave them a show in his controversial "Sturm" Gallery, Berlin's liveliest place of artistic activity...

...Israel may, in the near future, explode an atomic bomb, yet there are some who maintain that the "explosion" on Mount Sinai, thousands of years ago, had far wider reverberations than the most powerful H-bomb could have...

...Steinhardt's life has not been marred by personal tragedies, but was shaped by world events...

...A richly illustrated book about him, with text by Rudolf Pfefferkorn, has recently been published in Berlin...

...While as a teacher he has allowed each student to find his own aesthetic solutions, and while he often generously praises artists whose approaches and aims are different from his own, he does not hide his worry about the over-stressing of experiment, about cerebral activity without sufficient stress on emotion and intuition—in short, the "hurry" he so often notices among Israel's artists forty or fifty years younger than himself...

...Luckily for himself, Steinhardt did not succumb to the illusion that Nazism might be a transient phenomenon...

...Professor Cassou added: "I am glad that this prize has been given to the son of a nation which is the oldest and youngest of the world...

...The many students Steinhardt had trained and encouraged in a thirty years' association with Jerusalem's famous Bezalel Academy of Art had no opportunity to call personally at 3 Bezalel Street to wish the great pedagogue "many happy returns," for practically all men, and many women, under fifty were involved in the war effort somewhere along the small state's fantastically long frontier...

...Without delay, he moved to Tel Aviv, and subsequently settled in Jerusalem...

...After spending the week of travail with their daughter and her family at the small town of Nahariya, the Steinhardts could return to Jerusalem unscathed...

...He was intrigued not by the new edifices, created by graduates of the Weimar Bauhaus, but by the ancient quarters where the sunburned old houses are separated by velvety black narrow lanes...

...A claim that he is widely known in the United States would be exaggerated, though his work has been shown here on several occasions...

...While Steinhardt can be soft and lyrical, he also has the strength to be adamant and firm, and to ask all the earnest metaphysical questions the thoughtful artist must raise, always searching beneath the surface, looking for the essential in human beings no less than in everyday objects, for the unseen, the unseeable, in our visible world...

...These things he places before the eye in the most pertinent lines—black ones, yet so that if you should spread on pigments you would injure the work...

...the prophets and seers who were mostly "simple" men, too, although they were driven by an ardent thirst for freedom, peace, and social justice...

...Steinhardt freely adapts the forms and facts of life around him to express an inner conception...

...Pathetiker" derives from the Greek term pathos which includes both suffering and passion...

...Steinhardt is one...

...Steinhardt's subjects are the homely folk who sit around the Sabbath table, with candles, wine, fish, and hallah...

...the denizens of the East European ghettos for whom this exceptional German soldier felt a profound sympathy, and the orthodox of Jerusalem...

...Like several other German Expressionists he felt that a metaphysical message should be presented like a piece of writing, in black and white, to avoid distortion by the impact of color...

...Meidner died recently in Germany at the age of eighty-two, leaving remarkable work as a painter as well as a poet...

...Bestowing the prize, Jean Cas-sou, president of the jury, explained that it was granted the artist "because of his extraordinary technique, the clarity of his ideas, and because he possesses a soul in whose depths shines a creative light reflected in his works...

...Using color, Steinhardt has, in recent decades, produced pictures lighter and more playful than his earlier ones, prints reminiscent of fantastic medieval imagery, but also of the Baroque style, with its many flourishes and curves...

...ALFRED WERNER, art critic and lecturer, is art editor of the fifteen-volume "Encyclopedia Judaica" now in preparation as well as an editor of Arts Magazine and Art Voices...

...Steinhardt, though he lived in Berlin for thirty-seven years, rarely draws scenes of modern urban life...

...His work offers nourishment to those living robot lives in the stone canyons of the metropolis...

...About Steinhardt's solid craftsmanship, there can be no doubt...

...Those who applaud Picasso, who belongs to Steinhardt's generation, for coming up with something entirely new, radically different, every two years or so, may reject what others will praise as the stability and solidity of Steinhardt's personality and work...

...The medium imposed certain limitations upon the artist, but it also allowed great emotional tensions through the contrasts between heavy blacks and stark whites...

...Although he is a quiet, modest man who does not pursue recognition, he has been showered with awards...

...the pious ones engaged in endless discussions in the shul...

...Steinhardt had found his Weltanschauung and the style to express it adequately by the time he was about twenty-four...

...His early paintings—vaguely reminiscent of those of El Greco—forecast the prints which were to become his chief medium of self-expression...

...For Steinhardt, as for others, the woodcut also represented a revolt against the vague formlessness into which Impressionist art had degenerated...

...While Steinhardt himself is a sophisticated modern man, well read and well traveled and intellectually in agreement with progressives who stress the importance of democracy and technocracy, pictorially he prefers the old, bearded scholars, in fur caps or broad-rimmed hats and long gabardines, to the husky, sun-browned halutzim who, overnight, became the modern Maccabees of an efficient army...

...it demanded, and afforded, severity and clarity through a direct and simple statement...

...Steinhardt and his friends were, indeed, passionate young men who saw, behind the glittering facade of a basically prosperous world still at peace, only the rapid preparation for war...

...If Steinhardt's work were more widely known in this country, I believe many who are bored with "art" that merely echoes the aseptic look of our "machines for living" might find emotional solace and aesthetic pleasure in Steinhardt's nostalgic renderings of a world on the verge of extinction...

...And is it not more wonderful to accomplish without the blandishment of colors what Apelles [the Greek painter] accomplished with their aid...

...Any birthday celebrations planned for May 27, 1967, were quickly canceled by political and military events...

...Steinhardt's solidity and stability permit him not only to hold up little mirrors of this era of great tensions, of the maladjustment of man enmeshed in a mechanized, materialistic civilization, but also to lead his viewer towards contemplation, to show him the solitude of lanes and the cornfields of the Bible, lush and yellow under a benign sun...

...All museums and galleries were closed and all major art treasures had been rushed to safety...

...When the six-day war was over, it turned out that Steinhardt's home and studio had been damaged by artillery fire from the Jordanian side...