Around the Art Galleries

A really powerful painter is showing his work these days at the San Francisco Museum of Art. His name is Bezalel Schatz. His father is Professor Boris .Schatz of Palestine, whose paintings are far from unknown in this country, but this is, if I am not mistaken, the first one-man show by the son to be circulated in this country.

Only one of the pictures in Bezalel Schatz' exhibition provides evidence that the artist owns a paintbrush. The paint on most of his canvasses is squeezed direct from the tube and spread with a plank, rolling pin or palette knife. He does not mix his colors; he crushes them together, wherefore they give off a high, radiant luminosity more than a little like some things by Klee.

Schatz is an extreme expressionist. The parallel to Rouault in some of his figures and heads is obvious enough, but there is more rhapsody and flight and less solid dignity. He is likely to paint a figure as a tense, electric network of gleaming threads rather than as a blocky monument, a la Rouault, and his landscapes roar and swirl with light. To be sure, the general tone of this exhibition is somber, for expressionism and gayety are almost mutually exclusive things, but Schatz nevertheless does exhibit a delicacy, and a delight in color for its own sake, that are rather rare among painters of this type. His color scarcely seems obtained with ordinary pigments. One would not be surprised to learn that he works with an emulsion of powdered garnets, emeralds and aquamarines. The whole thing has a rich inwardness and a moving, thoughtful depth that command one’s utmost respect. Schatz is the genuine article.

A.F.

San Francisco Chronicle