Shepherd with Lamb

Naftali Bezem

1997

Abstract painting featuring shepherd with head turned up and planter overlaid on his face, holding lamb with mountains in background.
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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Creator Bio

Naftali Bezem

1924–2018

German-born painter, muralist, and sculptor Naftali Bezem was sent to Palestine on Youth Aliyah by his family in 1939. He studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and at the Centre d’Arts Sacré in Paris. He is best known for two of his commissioned works, the metal relief at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the ceiling painting in the president’s residence in Jerusalem.

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