Two famous artists with nothing in common spoke about their work to invited audiences in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and both were happy with their audiences. “You couldn’t get 200 people like that in New York,” Philip Pearlstein told a friend after his talk at the Jerusalem Studio School, where he found himself surrounded by fans. Packed audiences are a regular occurrence for William Kentridge, who spoke at the preview of ‘Five Themes’, his exhibition that opened at MoMA a year ago and is now at the Israel Museum – but he said he really enjoyed the responsiveness of this audience.

As a fellow South African, I am familiar with Kentridge’s Johannesburg, but I have an outsider’s view of Pearlstein’s New York. Listening to Pearlstein, and later talking with his wife Dorothy, also a painter, threw light on a few mysteries – which could all be covered by one question: What makes Pearlstein closer as an artist to his old friend Andy Warhol than to the painter with whom he is usually compared – Lucien Freud? In other words, what is so different about painting in New York and London?

Asked how he relates to Freud, Pearlstein said: “I don’t know anything about him but when we went to London in the 1970s, someone said ‘Why do we need Pearlstein when we’ve got Freud?’ “ Then he said with a smile: ” All I know is, since MoMA bought Freud, my work is in storage.”

Dorothy Pearlstein used the word ‘pragmatic’ about the American approach to art. And she said that for Pearlstein it is very important not to “leave a bit of himself on the canvas” – brush marks, fingerprints, or lumps of paint, in the way of European expressionism.

Pearlstein’s decision to make huge paintings was pragmatic from the start – he had to, he said, or they wouldn’t be noticed. His interest in the gleaming nudes that he paints, with the translucent light and shadow moving over them, is unashamedly skin deep. And yet Pearlstein speaks about the people he paints with pride and admiration for their achievements – off the canvas.

He creates a smooth, impeccable, impenetrable surface that removes all evidence of the artist from the work and keeps the viewer at a distance. Elizabeth Taylor’s projected image comes to mind: seamless glamour devoid of irony, simplistic to the point of hick. But it’s New York hick, that moves easily from hick to cool to very sophisticated, and seems so enviable and unattainable to non-New Yorkers

For Kentridge, art is not about making an object to be treasured. His theatricality and love of trickery give a feeling of circus entertainment to his show. He made his audience rock with laughter at a split screen film interview between himself as two competing personae of the artist: the fumbling creative side and the scornful self-critic – while also expressing some of the most pertinent comments about the making and viewing of art.

Self-portraiture is at the heart of Kentridge’s work – a dramatised, evolving self-portrait that he uses in rather the same manner as an author like Philip Roth, where the main protagonist is not exactly him but reflects him; and where real life intertwines with fiction. In his early videos, based on charcoal drawings, Kentridge depicts himself in a pinstriped suit, or vulnerably naked, taking the part of two characters whose names, he says, came to him in a dream. Felix is a romantic lover and Soho is a heartless tycoon, but both are lonely figures in an unreliable world. The charcoal itself is vulnerable, smudgy and ephemeral, adding its own sense of romance and nostalgia.

At the preview, Kentridge repeated the remarkable speech he gave when he received the Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy in November 2010, in which he expressed his strong feelings for Johannesburg, the city where he was born, and where he still lives and works. He has made his home and main studio in the graceful colonial family house where he grew up, on the crest of a hill overlooking the leafy suburbs. There is a buzz of creativity in Johannesburg, embattled though it has always been by politics or crime – but free, gutsy and self-ironical in terms of its people and its culture. Kentridge plugs into this creativity, working with local artists and musicians, and capturing and expressing the fun as well as the toughness of it in his work.

What does link Pearlstein and Kentridge – apart from being hard working, ambitious and impeccably professional – is that both communicate their enjoyment of making art.

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The impetus for the renovation project was to provide better circulation through the many modernist buildings dotting the campus—which had grown from 50,000 to 500,000 square feet of built space since the museum opened in 1965—and offer visitors a more logical route through its three major collection wings devoted to the archeology of the region, Jewish culture, and fine arts. In a way, the three artists turned that linear coherence upside down by pulling works from different time periods, geographies, and media and using them to support narratives formed from their own associations. This is underscored by having no labels in the galleries next to the art, leading viewers to approach the objects unfiltered and look at each room more as a whole (maps with captions are provided outside the exhibition, which are informative but encumbering). Yet the shows ultimately reinforce the interconnectedness of world cultures—one of the fundamental messages of the Israel Museum which houses everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to art of the present, in a city where the crossroads of history and cultures play such an immediate role in contemporary life. This message is embodied in the new monumental stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor commissioned as part of the campus renewal for the highest point of the museum’s outdoor promenade. Shaped like an hourglass, the sculpture inverts the reflection of the Jerusalem skyline, which starts at the tapered center of the piece and levitates to the top as the viewer approaches. It’s a lovely metaphor for the sands of time not running out but continually filling to the brim.

Susan Hiller, a U.S.-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, hewed closest to standard curatorial practice by drawing 34 works from one timeframe—modern and contemporary—but created a more dense and visceral installation than typically encountered at a museum. Depending on the day viewers come, they’re greeted by either a brilliant burst of 2000 red gerberas pressed behind three large panels of glass or else the flowers in some form of rot and stench in the piece “Preserve Beauty” (1991) by Anya Gallacio. It’s tapestry-like visual effect and themes of life and death, memory and loss, are echoed in Christian Boltanski’s “Reserve (Storeroom) (1989), a long wall hung ceiling-to-floor with limp used clothing. Two floor pieces carpeting large areas—Erez Israeli’s “Field of Flowers” (2005), a bed of artificial red blooms, and Dina Shenhav’s “City” (1997), a charred gray topographical model of architectural ruins—ripple associatively with the others around the ideas of beauty and decay.

Yinka Shonibare, who grew up in Nigeria and is now based in London, selected of more than 200 objects from across time and installed them in dynamic, geometric configurations on four square platforms organized around the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Each is punctuated with one of Shonibare’s trademark figures in Victorian-era clothes made from African fabrics that personify the four elements and were made especially for the show. On the “earth” platform, with Shonibare’s dandy that has a globe for a head and looks to be charging out into the world in animated stride, the artist has juxtaposed a contemporary Andres Serrano photograph of a black Christ with an assortment of prehistoric tools, an Egyptian funerary mask, a South African fertility doll, and a color image of an 18^th-century synagogue from Suriname among others, pressing viewers to consider elemental relationships and the cross-pollination between cultures.

While Shonibare’s platforms suggest the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities” using a very modernist-looking installation approach, Zvi Goldstein’s floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 400 objects on antiquated shelving overtly referenced those 16^th- and 17^th-century wonder cabinets of odd and precious items collected by noblemen that preceded the concept of a modern museum. A Romanian artist based in Jerusalem who combines objects with text, Goldstein here crowded commonplace objects he found in the museum’s offices and recesses—including old typewriters, eyeglass cases, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a urinal not by Duchamp—together with photos by Harold Edgerton, Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Le Corbusier, and Japanese screens in a visually dramatic, non-hierarchical presentation. He was inspired by a hallucination he had of being haunted by objects, which he alludes to in 62 poems he wrote about the experience that hang on the walls amidst the shelves of objects. Some poems and items on the shelves are so high up they are impossible to really see or read, akin to the way memories can be tantalizingly out of reach while others remain vivid. Of the three shows, Goldstein’s most successfully transcends the individual objects and becomes an artwork in its own right.

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