New Jewish Artists in the Holy Land

Ira Jan

It is my task to introduce to the readers of Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future) to an extraordinary Jewish woman, and it is hard to tell whether she is a greater writer or artist. Those who say that Ira Jan is more significant as an artist are forgetting that her art is nourished from the rich fountain of her poetic soul that continuously bubbles up in her work, fills it with life and light. In fact, she is a thinker, a deep and sensitive poet who, for the sake of variety, occasionally uses a paintbrush or pencil to express herself artistically. Conversely, inspiration to her writing frequently comes from a painting she began to work on; in this case she throws away the paintbrush and takes off to poetic heights straight from the platform of the canvas. Thus, she breathed the first scene of her latest theatrical piece, called At the Wall of Wailings, onto the canvas before the idea of writing a play even occurred to her. But the painting inspired her and she immersed herself in the topic and let the power of words take over.

Either way, Ira Jan is a rare phenomenon in the history of Jewish art. Even if she were the only one of the many important figures in Jewish cultural life in Palestine that I was fortunate to be acquainted with, I could still be satisfied with my trip to the East.

My editor assigned me a very difficult task when he asked me to deliver a “short article” with “many illustrations.” I could fill an entire volume writing about the rich material provided by this woman’s personality, and if it were up to me, I would not bring even one [halftone] photocopy as illustration because I think that photographing her extremely subtle material amounts to profanity. What I would really like to do is to load her entire studio onto a ship and take it to Budapest. For the time being, however, I must obey the instructions, so I will help myself by summarizing her biography in three lines, leaving me more space to write about her work.

She started in Moscow. Her masters were [Vasily] Polenov, Vladimir [Makovsky], and [Illarion] Pryanishnikov. From there she went to Paris to Raphaël Collin, then to Munich and back to Russia where she lived through the days of the Kiev [sic] pogrom.¹ Afterwards she moved to Palestine where she found a burgeoning Jewish society in the process of reviving Hebrew culture. This determined her stand on the Jewish question once and for all . . .

“I don’t care what her stand is,” I can hear some people telling me. “Talk about her art!”

“Right, that’s exactly what I wanted to say, that the soil from which Ira Jan’s art grew was fertilized by the Jewish tragedy and the Jewish ideal; that’s what raised her to the heights of artistic awareness.”

“Oh, please! Just say that this is what made her a national painter.”

“I must protest against this in Ira Jan’s name; her art wasn’t conceived under the sign of exclusivity at all. All I wanted to say is that Ira Jan is not one to engage in servile copying of forms. She thinks that the art of the form, or, rather, art that is only concerned with form, is not the highest level of art. And she is right.”

“What? Are you saying that the Greeks . . . ”

“Oh yes, I was sure you would come at me with the Greeks. You, too, believe, that Greek art was the art of the fine form exclusively, don’t you? This is not true. The external essence of Greek art mirrors the ideals of the ancient Greeks: strength, calm, and human dignity. For this ideal they corrected all the forms that were not expressive enough, even falsifying nature. The incorrect view that Greek art was the art of pure form is the fault of the pseudo-classics. The Greeks were fighting for artistic formalism in a historical period ruled by a completely different psychology, ideals, and aspirations; but when the spirit that created the form is dead, the form becomes lifeless, too. This cult of the form—which, as we know, has gone off to a lethal path—is far from Ira Jan; but the ‘spiritual beauty’ expressed in her art does not come at the expense of the form.”

Oh, how many galleries have I visited before I arrived to Ira Jan’s studio in Tel Aviv! How many portraits of town councilors, millionaires, counts, princes, and baronesses have I seen who have surely been long dead and forgotten; how many paintings of bridges, churches, and street views have I seen that have long been torn down or blown up! How many “faithful” copies, how many embarrassingly pedantic but soulless photographs! Exhausted from these bleak pools of paint, how refreshing it was to see the immense depth of Ira Jan’s art! Already among her school work there is one that stops us: The First Doubts. The painting shows a young man who had been raised on dogmatic principles; he just got hold of some scientific, “profane” books, and, having secretly read them, he is shocked to realize that everything he learned from these books is in direct opposition with what he had been taught until now. The picture immortalizes this moment, and it signals the path the artist is going to set out on. The painting entitled Marriage of Children whose topic is taken from the lives of Russian Jews is from this period, too. A later painting of hers, Gone, Like a Dream, that was exhibited in Moscow became the property of Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand. The whole painting is interwoven with the fine thread of poetry: it depicts just an old woman who accidentally stumbled upon the silk veil she had worn when she was a bride.

Her painting called Idealism and Realism deserves a study of its own. It depicts a figure symbolizing materialism and its flippant superiority over idealism, and the fact that the two actually complete each other. As the two are confronted, the figure personifying idealism does not despise or reject materialism but rather faces him calmly, thinking, trying to understand him. He doesn’t sympathize with him, but doesn’t push him away, either—he wants to understand him. Ira Jan is occasionally touched by the past, too, ([see] Song without Words), but the Jewish future invites her to even greater artistic challenges; her painting entitled At the Wall of Wailings symbolizes the old and the new society: the old society is symbolized by elderly people praying at the Wailing Wall, and the new society by the smiling children who are looking forward to the future. And could she have picked a more powerful, moving, and expressive landmark between the past and the future than the Western Wall?

Unfortunately we don’t have enough space to describe every picture adequately. Let us at least mention that she made the illustration for the festive editions of the works of Y. L. Peretz and Bialik. We are showcasing some of these, e.g., Ayech (Where Are You?), Metei midbar (The Dead of the Desert), Megillat ha-esh (The Scroll of Fire). She also has pictures depicting the Russian revolution and life in Siberia.

Ira Jan is currently the head of the Art School in Tel Aviv. Until its own building is built, instruction is taking place in a temporary, rented space. Nowadays she barely works [on her own art] because the construction of the school building absorbs all her time. If Múlt és Jövő could provide a way to exhibit Ira Jan’s works in Budapest, it would earn great merit for Jewish art.