BY RICHARD McBEE
THE JEWISH PRESS MAGAZINE
JUNE 29, 2001
One of the conceits of Modernism is that it claims that Art can be solely about itself, devoid of polluting references to the world of daily life and human foibles. One refuge of the artist is landscape painting where the subjects themselves, land, trees and sky, are sufficiently independent of complex and tainted subject matter. I would take issue with this understanding and simply state that all human action, and especially Art, is colored by human conceptions and ideas. The choices artists make as to what to paint, where and how, are reflections of underlying ideologies and understandings. Simply put, artists as social beings and as creators are always enmeshed in meanings even when painting the most elementary subjects.
I believe that this becomes clear upon viewing the elegant and insightful paintings of the Land of Israel by Anne Peretz, currently at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. There are 16 landscape paintings exhibited here, all of which but four are the product of a recent four-month trip to Israel. The other paintings are all wonderful evocations of misty tree-lined ponds and seaside cliffs depicting landscapes of Cape Cod.
Even before you check the titles, you immediately know that these four are almost certainly not from Israel. While Israel has many diverse types of landscapes, these would have been totally atypical of the Middle East. And in exactly the same way, the remaining landscapes and additional scenes from Jaffa and Jerusalem are absolutely Israel.
The Israeli landscapes are simply of rocky hillsides, with or without hilltop villages. Each painting evokes a very specific Israeli type of landscape. The light is intense even though the sky is overcast in all the paintings. In two small paintings, “Ayalon Park I” and “Ayalon Park II,” the sand colored hills are dotted with dull-green brush and white boulders. These hills, simple, rugged and un-picturesque, are outlined against the cool grayish blues of distant hills. These are classic naturalistic Israeli landscapes.
“Gabel-Mukaber” is a diptych (a two panel painting meant to be seen together). This painting continues the theme of the rugged Judean landscape with the addition of a small village of white houses rising majestically on the crest of the hill. In the larger left panel, the effect of the houses, slightly too large for the overall scale of the olive trees further down the slope, gives an enhanced sense of physical presence and emotional scale to this panel. Meanwhile, the right panel beautifully depicts the pure landscape as it continues down the hill, into orchards, terraced fields and more distant hills. The contrast of near and far in conjunction with inhabited and uninhabited landscape creates a narrative tension emphasized by the split image. Why did the artist choose to split this scene? Simply visual interest?
Perhaps we can take this diptych at face value as a painting of a land divided; divided between habitation and nature, that which is claimed and occupied and that which is counter-claimed. These contrasts and divisions are played out in the depictions between the cool valley with cypress trees and irrigated fields and the aloof, hot white and cream colored houses that survey the surrounding landscape from the top of the hill.
These themes of division and contrasts are further developed in the second room of the gallery containing exclusively Israeli landscapes.
Here there is a view, from above, of an Arab village. The squat square houses are barely distinguished from the rocky land. This painting has a very high horizon line, only allowing us a small glimpse of faint blue sky in the upper right hand corner of the painting.
A larger painting, “Ayalon Park III” (60” X 70”) commands the room. This powerful painting of the foothills of the Judean Mountains emphasizes the rocky arid land with thick paint roughly applied. It is hard and unforgiving, much like the land itself. And similar to the other paintings in this exhibition, it must be experienced in person to fully appreciate the raw strength of paint on canvas that evokes the primal and desolate landscape. The hillside is populated with boulders, white and light gray, that sit massively, some of them out-cropping from the dusty earth, others clearly on the surface. The only relief in this hard scene is the occasionally sage-colored bush that helps to delineate the contours of the hill as it rises to meet the more distant hills beyond.
The full meaning of the exhibition is finally revealed upon viewing “On the Road to Jerusalem,” another large diptych (78” X 78”). Here the land is seen in its most elemental form, rising up in a violent surge to become rocky ridges of white rocks interspersed with the green brush. The horizon is high, softly meeting the purplish range in the distance, and again the scene is divided with the more distant landscape depicted on the right panel, while the left panel is very close and imposing. In spite of these distinctions, the two sides are so similar, both uninhabited and wild, that we immediately wonder why divide the painting at all. In contrast to “Gabel Mukaber” from the next room, the division of this scene becomes an issue unto itself.
Whether she intended it or not, the artist has produced a quiet and yet penetrating commentary on the Land of Israel. The diptych, “On the Road to Jerusalem,” speaks about how the beautiful, whole and complete land is divided by different perspectives imposed by different politics and different ideologies. This meaning is arrived at only in the context of her other paintings. “Avalon Park III” is so consumed with the rockiness of the land; the literal presence of these big white boulders strewn on the rough hillside, it immediately relates to the first diptych we saw, “Gabel Mukaber” in which the white boulders have become the collected white houses on the hilltop. Israel is a land in which the habitations are as rooted as the very stones themselves. Yet the land is divided by lines arbitrarily drawn in the midst of competing claims.
Anne Peretz has painted not only powerful and evocative paintings of Israel, but also evoked, by the relationships between individual paintings and by dividing some of these paintings into two panels, an enormous love and concern for the Land of Israel. She has also shown just how much meaning can be sustained in a few simple landscapes of rocky hills that happen to be one people’s homeland.
