Shepherd with Lamb
Naftali Bezem
1997
Image
Bezem (d. 2018)’s art, which once gave expression to his immigration to Palestine, the loss of his parents in the Holocaust, and his sense of rebirth in Israel, was dramatically transformed after his son was killed in a terrorist attack in 1975. Bezem left Jerusalem and moved to Tel Aviv before spending periods abroad. Here, as in many of his later works, his self-portrait appears: now as a bearded shepherd walking in the fields with a lamb under his arm (perhaps a reference to his dead son), with a huge vase on his shoulders filled with burning plants.
Credits
Photo by Andy Abrahamson. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, www.puckergallery.com.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10.
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