Heard at the Galleries

Bezalel Schatz, whose painting Gloucester Fisherman from the one-man show at the Carroll Carstairs Gallery is reproduced on page 27, is a native Palestinian and the son of the late Boris Schatz who founded the first school of arts and crafts in Palestine. Bezalel (he was named after the first sculptor mentioned in the bible) grew up in an art atmosphere and apparently was something of a child prodigy, for he taught at his father’s art school at the age of fourteen. He worked in the academic tradition until a visit to America in 1930, and several years of work in Paris, changed his outlook and direction toward the bolder colors and more intense rhythms of the modern school. In 1937 Bezalel Schatz held his first one-man show in Paris, and the French critic Claude Roger-Marx said at the time: "Your work reveals our western culture of art, yet it shows definite Oriental tendencies. These tendencies are not Persian, Chinese, or Japanese, which I am accustomed to seeing, but something else. Knowing now that you are a born Palestinian, I can see that it must be the influence of the air and surroundings of your life there.”

The paintings in the current exhibition, however, disclose no Oriental tendencies or influences. They were painted during the past two summers in Santa Fe and Gloucester, and are spiritually more related to the post-war modernists of Munich and Paris. But the verve and intensity of the color is something that evolved out of years of searching by this artist for a personal form of expression in paint.