“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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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.

The post The Pleasures of the Pursuit: Talks by William Kentridge and Philip Pearlstein in Jerusalem appeared first on artcritical.

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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