Tomb of an Israeli Soldier I

Mikhail Grobman

1963

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Painting featuring a large menorah towering over a tomb in front of hills, with crescent and full moon in the sky. — Tomb of an Israeli Soldier I was one of a series of works painted by Michail Grobman at a time when any sympathetic gesture toward Israel was, for Soviet Jews, an act of defiance. Grobman’s very style was a protest against socialist realism, the only style sanctioned by the Soviet state. He had begun to formulate an approach to art that came to be known as “magical symbolism,” which used biblical and kabbalistic symbols to assert a connection with a world of the past that the Soviets rejected and sought to eradicate. On the tomb he added two Hebrew words meaning “Say to God.”

Credits

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Mikhail Grobman

b. 1939

Mikhail Grobman is an artist and poet. He was born in Moscow and came to Israel in 1971. In Moscow during the early 1960s, he was among the originators of the second Russian avant-garde, and in 1975, he founded the Leviathan group of artists in Jerusalem, publishing a Russian-language newspaper of that name and seeking to combine contemporary art with Judaism and mysticism.

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