“When thou art made desolate, what wilt thou do?” These are the words of the prophet Jeremiah, addresses to Jerusalem on the eve of its Babylonian destruction.  The Jerusalem Studio School is modern-day Israel’s only classically oriented institution where teaching is based on drawing from casts, from life and – in summer expeditions to Certosa, Italy – in the Tuscan campagna.  It suddenly found itself earlier this year on the brink of fiscal apocalypse.

Founder-director Israel Hershberg discovered, over the summer, that not only had the school’s executive director disappeared (he was soon discovered to have suffered a breakdown and to have been placed under hospital care) but that the school – a relatively modest operation headquartered in an industrial estate in the vicinity of the city’s railway station – suddenly had a deficit of $450,000.  They had never been in the red before. As recently as March the director of the board, who has since resigned, assured Hershberg that the soon-to-abscond officer was “saving the school” with his innovative leadership.

In name the Jerusalem Studio School, founded in 1998, recalls the New York Studio School but shares its stylistically and pedagogically more traditionalist outlook with the New York Academy of Fine Art.  Within its short history it has already graduated a significant number of accomplished painters with international reputations, the most illustrious probably being the Romanian realist, Victor Man.

The school offers a traditionalist alternative to Israel’s mainstream, established art academies such as Bezalel, also in Jerusalem; the art faculty of the Holon Institute of Technology outside of Tel Aviv; or the teacher training college in Ramat Hasharon.   Hershberg – whose own serene landscapes and intense portraits of trees are strongly evocative of Corot – places insistence on rigorous, exacting study of the old masters.  He has earned himself the reputation of a charismatic educator.  Visiting Americans who have taught alongside him include Lennart Anderson, John Dubrow, Diana Horowitz, Ken Kewley, Ruth Miller, Stuart Shils, Kelly Wilson and Jennifer Riley.  The School is also a magnet of distinguished visiting lecturers, attracting Philip Pearlstein recently in a packed event.

The fight back against financial oblivion is well under way, according to Hershberg, who managed to raise a significant portion of the funds needed to allow the school to begin its academic year after the Jewish holidays this October.

And now a group of American supporters have plans under way for a benefit event to be held at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York City.  The benefit is scheduled for November 22 with an auction, with online bidding opening ahead of the event.  Artists who have donated to the auction so far include Philip Pearlstein, whose lecture at the Jerusalem school was reported at artcritical earlier this year, as well as Stanley Lewis, Sangram Majumdar, Kyle Staver, Ruth Miller and her late husband, Andrew Forge, E.M. Saniga, Kurt Knobelsdorf, Gideon Bok, Ken Kewley, Paul Resika, Stuart Shils, Janice Nowinski, and Lennart Anderson.

Hopefully, next time artcritical reports on this story the article will open with a quote from the Song of Songs and not the Book of Lamentations.

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On view as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, “From Afar,” which opens Thursday at Marlborough Chelsea (alongside the sculptural installation of artcritical’s September “logo artist” Will Ryman).  The title of Hershberg’s show alludes both to the long distances from which he paints his panoramas (click the image to see the full “cinescope” format of his eight foot-wide canvas) and to the fact that in Hebrew, “afar” also means “dust.” “All that dust in the aria hangs over everything, defining a seemingly endless nothingness into a measured and felt diaphanous volume of ether that starts where the eye begins to see,” the artist has written.  Many of Hershberg’s vistas revisit vantage points of Corot paintings, what he calls the C-spots, which presumably is a painter’s equivalent of hitting a landscape’s G-spot?  Hershberg is the founder of theJerusalem Studio School, an academy that fosters a traditional approach to painting, and which runs a summer program in Umbria.  A gala for the School will take place at Andrea Meislin Gallery on September 16.

This was an artcritical PIC in September 2009.

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This review was first published in The New York Sun, August 26, 2004

In August, galleries hang casual fare for accidental tourists, put their feet up and wait for fall. All the more reason, then, to applaud Forum Gallery for a vigorous selection of contemporary landscapes. Each of its twenty-plus paintings, drawings and watercolors is worth the viewing.

Go first to Israel Hershberg’s “City Center, Jerusalem” (1990-91). Painted from a hi-rise window, the view drops precipitously in the foreground, gradually fanning outward toward surrounding hills. Color intensity accumulates at the base of the vantage point, gradually dimming into the myriad indescribable neutrals of a sustained haze. The painting is saturated with mood and the fragility of its moment.

Hershberg makes no secret of his admiration for Antonio L¢pez-Garc¡a, the great contemporary Spanish realist. Hershberg’s composition paraphrases L¢pez-Garc¡a’s
“Madrid desde Torres Blancas” (1976-82); his sense of light derives from the same contemplative patience and austerity. More than a professional nod, Hershberg’s cityscape expresses the reverence of a painter who recognizes his own soul in the sensibility and work of another. Such empathy, expressed on an almost preternatural level of achievement, is rare in contemporary painting.

Robert Bauer’s small landscape of southern Spain and three gossamer drawings make a fine accompaniment. They share Hershberg’s humility before the visual world and his unconcern with fashion. Bauer’s landscape drawings are particularly compelling for their receptivity to the abstract mysteries of depiction. Silvery hatchings in hard pencil travel lightly over the paper, caressing the subject more than describing it. Sudden dark notes, made by the sharpened point of a softer lead, tether near-immaterial marks to the singularities of a locale.

Craig McPherson’s haunting monochrome pastel on canvas is based on Edgar Thompson’s historic photos of American steel works. Points of light punctuate the atmospheric sfumato of manufacture rising from clustered smoke stacks. Think of Seurat descending into Pittsburgh at its industrial height. Certain persuasions might interpret this as a sulfurous vision of hell; to me, it is elegiac and poignant.

Joseph McNamara frames the haze of sundown through the strict geometry of a dry dock. Fading light in the distance is captured in pale pinks and violets that weave, deepened and enriched, through the bedarkened greens and blues of the foreground structure. It is a more sophisticated excursion into the uses of color than the bravura exuberance of Brian Rutenberg’s “Until 2” (2002) that hangs nearby. For all its palette-knifed dash, Rutenberg’s kaleidoscopic charm is ultimately less satisfying than McNamara’s quieter, more deliberate analysis of his motif.

Davis Cone’s meticulous, brashly colored Art Deco picture houses strike the right balance between homage to cultural artifacts and wry recognition of the transience of Style Moderne. (Have fun finding his signature, hidden Where’s-Waldo style within the image.) Tula Telfair ‘s “Early Utopian Ideals” (2003) is lovely to look at and a good choice for anyone who prefers the idea of landscape-their own mental image of the sublime-to the disconcerting specifics of real places. Based on reproductions of 19th century American landscape painting, it has a bookish feel to it. But that is fine if you love books, too.

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