The Local Galleries In Brief Review

Written by: Alfred Frankenstein

Black and white reproduction was never made to serve the paintings of Bezalel Schatz. His exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art exploits color at its highest point of brilliance and intensity. Color is dropped, squeezed and flung upon the canvas; it is driven furiously across the picture surface; there is color on color on color, and it is often scratched or hatched through to reveal the chromatic perspectives below.

Schatz’s handling of textures is somewhat similar. It ranges from the glassy and radiant to the rugose and shadow-cast. But they all hang together—these exceedingly free colors and free handled tactile qualities—to produce continuous stimulation and variety.

It is curious how little this artist’s subjects register as such. His pictures are full of human figures, masks, and rather Chagalesque fishes and birds, while elements of landscape occasionally make their appearance. The drawing of these things is quite clear and powerful, but they convey almost no representational or psychological implications at all. They are simply a means of differentiating one canvas from another, and they achieve this purpose most admirably. There is no repetition or monotony. Each work is a joyous expression and a highly pleasurable experience.

Schatz was born, raised and trained in Palestine, and there may be some resemblance, in its unrestrained chromaticism, between his work and that of such self-consciously Jewish artists as Hyman Bloom and Abraham Rattner; the hint of Chagall has already been suggested. But Schatz lacks Rattner’s moral preoccupations or the interest in folk lore characteristic of Bloom and Chagall. He is devoted to his own expressionistic, expansive and monumental lightheartedness, and in that he is altogether unique among painters, Jewish or otherwise.

San Francisco Chronicle