Autobiographical Excerpt - Edited by "B'ne Bezalel"
Although I got to Paris with very limited means, and weighed with the responsibility for my wife and my old father who had no one else to depend upon, — I persisted in my original programme and entered the academy of Cormon. I chose the latter because I felt that sculpture alone was not wide enough to express what I intended to do. I was obliged to combine intensive study with working for a living, but things went rather well. I was in good physical shape, my mind saw clearly the road before me, and my heart was at rest. With me my faithful friend, the source of much needed courage and strength.
The necessity of earning a living took me to various places. A good deal of the time I worked for Antokolsky, and did models for the famous ceramic factory of Dreyfus. The latter caused me to become interested and to study decorative art, which I later got to like very much. In the early years of my stay in Paris I sought in my work the solution of purely technical problems, and had not even the desire to reproduce some conception of thought. I lived under the spell of the great French masters, which robbed me of all individual effort, fascinating me by the beauty, the virtuosity, the genius of their creations. The life and people around me remained strange, I had no time for observation. I knew man from paintings, from statues, or else from the living models in our classrooms, where to me he was no less an appearance, and artistic problem. Neither did I see nature, except for the neatly trimmed artificially planted and arranged rows of trees, and the smoothly-mown grass of the public parks. I used to pay less to those than to the statues that were placed nearby. At the academy I succeeded admirably, and was soon singled out as the only student granted a free tuition. At the end of the first year I received a second standing in drawing. And yet I had no luck with my painting. It was colourful enough, but it was characterized by a certain hardness of outline remindful of sculpture, by a dryness of time which Mr. Cormon used to call “sour”. He advised me to go south, where colours were bright, airy and tuneful, where an object would call forth not so much the idea of shape as of a symphony of colours, which combine into something like a perfect chord of music... I accordingly left for the Mediterranean coast. There in the little French town of Banules, on the Spanish boundary, I worked for six months. To this trip I owe not alone my understanding of colour but to a great extent my personality as artist and man... If it be true that such of my work as “The Shadchen”, “The Rebbe’s Blessing”, “Havdalah”, “Saturday Eve”, “A Jewish Mother”, “Grannie and Grandson” etc. are characteristic of my childhood reminiscences, and are in the words of Dr. Erenpreiss “The Poetry of Golus” — then it is equally true, that all the works conceived in Banules are no longer the “wistful smiles through tears” but “the mighty song of a brave and liberated Jew, who sings of the glorious past that is gone, and the hopes for the future that is to come” ... I conceived my pictures, or it would be more accurate to say — actually perceived them while roaming in the lonely grandeur of the Pyrenean Mountains. Stopping in the rocky caverns, listening to the murmur of the sea: I perceived a stately old man, with the youthful heroic heart of a Maccabee, sounding the trumpet call to battle, gathering to his side the last surviving handful of liberty-loving Jews, who would rather meet death as freedom than continue their life as slaves .... I saw the martyr prophet Jeremiah, persecuted by his own people who, incapable of understanding his desire to save them, shut him up in prison. The people who were deaf to his voice, are gone to their doom, and he, alone in the desert bemoans the fate of his people, composes “The song of tears”, “Megilas Eicho”, the saddest song ever written... I saw the greatest genius whose light illuminated mankind in its cradle, and is burning brightly to this very day — our great teacher Moses. So imposing was his personality, so superhuman his deeds that not only they lose nothing (as do so many other legendary figures) when the misty curtain of myth is lifted, but on the contrary, they gain in greatness under the bright searchlight of science. His wonderous life pressed before me the tiny basket afloat on the Nile, to his lonely old age in the desert mountains... I modeled several sketches for five groups with numerous bas-reliefs, which were to comprise a series under the name of “The life of Moses”. I have not quite finished it yet, being still engaged in collecting the material and the necessary data. I intend to devote myself to its completion upon my arrival in Palestine. And then if faith finally relents and grants me the possibility of realizing in peace all I have conceived, I shall be able to say before I die: “I know why I have lived and suffered and died”.
The peaceful grandeur of the spot brought me close to nature once more, taught me once again to love and understand her. There, for the first time, I beheld myself and others as small and insignificant as grains of sand, in comparison to the greatness and the divinity of Nature. I understood the ecstasy of being close to it, of embracing, of understanding it.
Originally published: 01/01/1925
Autobiographical Excerpt - Edited by "B'ne Bezalel"
Although I got to Paris with very limited means, and weighed with the responsibility for my wife and my old father who had no one else to depend upon, — I persisted in my original programme and entered the academy of Cormon. I chose the latter because I felt that sculpture alone was not wide enough to express what I intended to do. I was obliged to combine intensive study with working for a living, but things went rather well. I was in good physical shape, my mind saw clearly the road before me, and my heart was at rest. With me my faithful friend, the source of much needed courage and strength.
The necessity of earning a living took me to various places. A good deal of the time I worked for Antokolsky, and did models for the famous ceramic factory of Dreyfus. The latter caused me to become interested and to study decorative art, which I later got to like very much. In the early years of my stay in Paris I sought in my work the solution of purely technical problems, and had not even the desire to reproduce some conception of thought. I lived under the spell of the great French masters, which robbed me of all individual effort, fascinating me by the beauty, the virtuosity, the genius of their creations. The life and people around me remained strange, I had no time for observation. I knew man from paintings, from statues, or else from the living models in our classrooms, where to me he was no less an appearance, and artistic problem. Neither did I see nature, except for the neatly trimmed artificially planted and arranged rows of trees, and the smoothly-mown grass of the public parks. I used to pay less to those than to the statues that were placed nearby. At the academy I succeeded admirably, and was soon singled out as the only student granted a free tuition. At the end of the first year I received a second standing in drawing. And yet I had no luck with my painting. It was colourful enough, but it was characterized by a certain hardness of outline remindful of sculpture, by a dryness of time which Mr. Cormon used to call “sour”. He advised me to go south, where colours were bright, airy and tuneful, where an object would call forth not so much the idea of shape as of a symphony of colours, which combine into something like a perfect chord of music... I accordingly left for the Mediterranean coast. There in the little French town of Banules, on the Spanish boundary, I worked for six months. To this trip I owe not alone my understanding of colour but to a great extent my personality as artist and man... If it be true that such of my work as “The Shadchen”, “The Rebbe’s Blessing”, “Havdalah”, “Saturday Eve”, “A Jewish Mother”, “Grannie and Grandson” etc. are characteristic of my childhood reminiscences, and are in the words of Dr. Erenpreiss “The Poetry of Golus” — then it is equally true, that all the works conceived in Banules are no longer the “wistful smiles through tears” but “the mighty song of a brave and liberated Jew, who sings of the glorious past that is gone, and the hopes for the future that is to come” ... I conceived my pictures, or it would be more accurate to say — actually perceived them while roaming in the lonely grandeur of the Pyrenean Mountains. Stopping in the rocky caverns, listening to the murmur of the sea: I perceived a stately old man, with the youthful heroic heart of a Maccabee, sounding the trumpet call to battle, gathering to his side the last surviving handful of liberty-loving Jews, who would rather meet death as freedom than continue their life as slaves .... I saw the martyr prophet Jeremiah, persecuted by his own people who, incapable of understanding his desire to save them, shut him up in prison. The people who were deaf to his voice, are gone to their doom, and he, alone in the desert bemoans the fate of his people, composes “The song of tears”, “Megilas Eicho”, the saddest song ever written... I saw the greatest genius whose light illuminated mankind in its cradle, and is burning brightly to this very day — our great teacher Moses. So imposing was his personality, so superhuman his deeds that not only they lose nothing (as do so many other legendary figures) when the misty curtain of myth is lifted, but on the contrary, they gain in greatness under the bright searchlight of science. His wonderous life pressed before me the tiny basket afloat on the Nile, to his lonely old age in the desert mountains... I modeled several sketches for five groups with numerous bas-reliefs, which were to comprise a series under the name of “The life of Moses”. I have not quite finished it yet, being still engaged in collecting the material and the necessary data. I intend to devote myself to its completion upon my arrival in Palestine. And then if faith finally relents and grants me the possibility of realizing in peace all I have conceived, I shall be able to say before I die: “I know why I have lived and suffered and died”.
The peaceful grandeur of the spot brought me close to nature once more, taught me once again to love and understand her. There, for the first time, I beheld myself and others as small and insignificant as grains of sand, in comparison to the greatness and the divinity of Nature. I understood the ecstasy of being close to it, of embracing, of understanding it.
Originally published: 01/01/1925