Professor Boris Schatz
Written By: Bezalel Schatz
It was ten years ago. After a magnificent trip, driving from Los Angeles through the vast, powerful and resonant landscape of the West, we, my father and I, arrived in Denver. There on the hill top near the hospital where he was to be brought to health he spoke the words which were to be his last to me: “Make the exhibition a beautiful manifestation of our Palestine and our art, let my illness serve as the dead lion served Samson to find honey, ‘for from hard came forth sweet.’ ” Now, too, I hear these words as if answering my hesitation to write, for indeed it is hard to write of one’s own father.
Born in Vorna, a small village in the province of Vilna, Russia, his childhood surroundings were completely devoid of anything which may be called even a show of art. As a boy he carved in wood, believing that he discovered the art of sculpture. It is, indeed, remarkable that already then he portrayed our biblical prophets and figures. All this led to his running away from home, for my ancestors were simple, strong Jews, and I may add very stubborn. They would have none of this thing called sculpture.
He was only 13 years old when he arrived in Vilna. The following: fifteen years in Vilna and Paris consisted of a chain of hardships, and struggles within to find his true artistic self and struggles for material existence. He would have, undoubtedly, succumbed under the desperate heavy hand of life if not for his fantastic optimism and spiritual and physical health. However, the reward came; he received a medal for his statue of an old woman in the Grand Salon in Paris in 1887, to be followed by a Belgian decoration for a monument. The following years brought artistic recognition which reached its height when he was invited to Sofia, Bulgaria, as the King’s sculptor in 1896. When visiting Sofia a few years ago fulfilling an invitation by the King to bring a memorial exhibition of my father’s work, I was amazed to find that the name Boris Schatz stood in Bulgaria for the man who was the founder of their national art, of their Art Academy and National Museum in the capital Sofia.
Through all these years there existed an ideal which like a permanent light never died within his heart: to create among his people the beauty of our spiritual greatness and shape it into new forms and in a pure style for a foundation stone of a renaissance of Hebrew art.
In Paris, my father saw how deeply his teacher, the great Russian sculptor Antokolsky, suffered because of his Jewishness from which there was no escape. In Sofia, he realized his own capability to create for a nation. He then found the only answer to his dream—Palestine. There would be the living spirit of the Bible, our prophets, and above all, the birth of a national home.
He was right. In 1906, he founded, in Jerusalem, the “Bezalel” School, named after the first artist in the Bible; it grew fast as a flame, its light reflecting the four corners of the world. The products of the “Bezalel” in silver, ivory, carpets, wood, porcelain, marble, cameo, and in twenty other mediums, bore a truly original and beautiful style, pure and Hebraic in its decorativeness. The King of England, Queen of Holland, the Khadiv of Egypt and scores of museums purchased these objects as representing the first fruits of a decorative Hebrew art.
In 1913, my father brought an exhibition to Madison Square Garden in New York, the first of his work and that of the “Bezalel.” Since then hundreds of exhibitions have been held throughout the country.
Boris Schatz expressed himself in practically all mediums: painted, carved in ivory, in wood, and marble, hammered in brass and did many decorative objects in silver and wood, wrote, and, in addition, arranged the first concert in Palestine, founded clubs, a theatre, and sports organizations. Of greatest artistic value are his low relief sculptures. The “Prophet Jeremiah” is strong, bitter and suffering, yet full of the deepest love for his people.
“Havdalah” and “Candle Blessing” possess the holy peacefulness of the Sabbath. There is infinite delicacy and Jewish nobility to his “Scribe.” The details, which he completed to the last, serve to deepen the expressiveness of his subject. He portrayed our prophets, our heroes, festivals of gayety and days of mourning.
I find no truer words than those which Ludwig Lewisohn wrote of Boris Schatz: “He was a man of power in an age of men with little or no power. They have graces and subtleties, these others, which he may have lacked. He had power in the Michelangelesque sense. His hand grasped with a large grasp the material of the world and re-shaped it into a gesture of noble energy and of Jewish energy. And in that respect he has and has not had any competitor. In creative Jewish power he stands alone . . .”
As to the spirit which moved my father to create, his own words tell us: “To the execution of my work I devote little time, like the musician to his concert after years of preparation—but to their creation I devoted all my life. All this lives within me as a son of my people... I seek particularly to express the soul of our people, felt in our prophets, in our festivals, in our customs, our rejoicing and our mourning ... I presented the subjects as they appear in my mind— in the same warm light that pours into and fills my heavy heart. May every Jew look upon them in the same way. ‘That which pours forth from the heart enters into the heart.’ ”
In 1932, he toured the United States searching new fields for his “Bezalel”—it was closed at that time. He feared lest he might not succeed to find the funds to reopen the school.
Often it was said jokingly: “Schatz and the ‘Bezalel’ could never be separated.” He died in Denver that year, his name will live as the father of the renaissance of Hebrew art.
'The Jewish Layman'
Professor Boris Schatz
Written By: Bezalel Schatz
It was ten years ago. After a magnificent trip, driving from Los Angeles through the vast, powerful and resonant landscape of the West, we, my father and I, arrived in Denver. There on the hill top near the hospital where he was to be brought to health he spoke the words which were to be his last to me: “Make the exhibition a beautiful manifestation of our Palestine and our art, let my illness serve as the dead lion served Samson to find honey, ‘for from hard came forth sweet.’ ” Now, too, I hear these words as if answering my hesitation to write, for indeed it is hard to write of one’s own father.
Born in Vorna, a small village in the province of Vilna, Russia, his childhood surroundings were completely devoid of anything which may be called even a show of art. As a boy he carved in wood, believing that he discovered the art of sculpture. It is, indeed, remarkable that already then he portrayed our biblical prophets and figures. All this led to his running away from home, for my ancestors were simple, strong Jews, and I may add very stubborn. They would have none of this thing called sculpture.
He was only 13 years old when he arrived in Vilna. The following: fifteen years in Vilna and Paris consisted of a chain of hardships, and struggles within to find his true artistic self and struggles for material existence. He would have, undoubtedly, succumbed under the desperate heavy hand of life if not for his fantastic optimism and spiritual and physical health. However, the reward came; he received a medal for his statue of an old woman in the Grand Salon in Paris in 1887, to be followed by a Belgian decoration for a monument. The following years brought artistic recognition which reached its height when he was invited to Sofia, Bulgaria, as the King’s sculptor in 1896. When visiting Sofia a few years ago fulfilling an invitation by the King to bring a memorial exhibition of my father’s work, I was amazed to find that the name Boris Schatz stood in Bulgaria for the man who was the founder of their national art, of their Art Academy and National Museum in the capital Sofia.
Through all these years there existed an ideal which like a permanent light never died within his heart: to create among his people the beauty of our spiritual greatness and shape it into new forms and in a pure style for a foundation stone of a renaissance of Hebrew art.
In Paris, my father saw how deeply his teacher, the great Russian sculptor Antokolsky, suffered because of his Jewishness from which there was no escape. In Sofia, he realized his own capability to create for a nation. He then found the only answer to his dream—Palestine. There would be the living spirit of the Bible, our prophets, and above all, the birth of a national home.
He was right. In 1906, he founded, in Jerusalem, the “Bezalel” School, named after the first artist in the Bible; it grew fast as a flame, its light reflecting the four corners of the world. The products of the “Bezalel” in silver, ivory, carpets, wood, porcelain, marble, cameo, and in twenty other mediums, bore a truly original and beautiful style, pure and Hebraic in its decorativeness. The King of England, Queen of Holland, the Khadiv of Egypt and scores of museums purchased these objects as representing the first fruits of a decorative Hebrew art.
In 1913, my father brought an exhibition to Madison Square Garden in New York, the first of his work and that of the “Bezalel.” Since then hundreds of exhibitions have been held throughout the country.
Boris Schatz expressed himself in practically all mediums: painted, carved in ivory, in wood, and marble, hammered in brass and did many decorative objects in silver and wood, wrote, and, in addition, arranged the first concert in Palestine, founded clubs, a theatre, and sports organizations. Of greatest artistic value are his low relief sculptures. The “Prophet Jeremiah” is strong, bitter and suffering, yet full of the deepest love for his people.
“Havdalah” and “Candle Blessing” possess the holy peacefulness of the Sabbath. There is infinite delicacy and Jewish nobility to his “Scribe.” The details, which he completed to the last, serve to deepen the expressiveness of his subject. He portrayed our prophets, our heroes, festivals of gayety and days of mourning.
I find no truer words than those which Ludwig Lewisohn wrote of Boris Schatz: “He was a man of power in an age of men with little or no power. They have graces and subtleties, these others, which he may have lacked. He had power in the Michelangelesque sense. His hand grasped with a large grasp the material of the world and re-shaped it into a gesture of noble energy and of Jewish energy. And in that respect he has and has not had any competitor. In creative Jewish power he stands alone . . .”
As to the spirit which moved my father to create, his own words tell us: “To the execution of my work I devote little time, like the musician to his concert after years of preparation—but to their creation I devoted all my life. All this lives within me as a son of my people... I seek particularly to express the soul of our people, felt in our prophets, in our festivals, in our customs, our rejoicing and our mourning ... I presented the subjects as they appear in my mind— in the same warm light that pours into and fills my heavy heart. May every Jew look upon them in the same way. ‘That which pours forth from the heart enters into the heart.’ ”
In 1932, he toured the United States searching new fields for his “Bezalel”—it was closed at that time. He feared lest he might not succeed to find the funds to reopen the school.
Often it was said jokingly: “Schatz and the ‘Bezalel’ could never be separated.” He died in Denver that year, his name will live as the father of the renaissance of Hebrew art.
'The Jewish Layman'