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Three Gazes / Yoav Dagon
"I When I have a feeling of abundance, of the raison d'etre - I express it in writing or in painting." Nahum Gutman
Nahum Gutman once said about his practice and preoccupation with painting, illustration and writing: "This person (myself) occupies himself, as it were, in two lines of work, but in truth only does what his heart desires, namely, one." Indeed his multi-faceted oevre, whose various components complement one another rendering perfection, can be said to stem, first and foremost, from the artist's curious, astounded, loving gaze.
His first gaze, from the inside out, utilized the window as a frame through which Nahum Gutman the child observed the world, probing, domesticating and committing it to paper. Later on he defined the significance of the window. In reference to that window belonging to the past, he said "From the window in my father's study, a room furnished with a desk and a chair with armrests, I would see the yard. I used to sit by that window for hours, looking out." Even though it was this gaze that spawned his first painting, Gutman said about that chapter in his life that: "There, in Odessa, I felt trapped sitting by the window."
After immigration to Eretz-Israel in 1905, the artist found "another window" through which a virgin landscape was revealed. "I looked out of the window, and at once discovered, as on a movie screen, the wonders of a strange new world; a world I had never read nor heard about, a world which henceforth captivated me and won my heart for good."
During those years, until moving to Jerusalem in 1913 around the age of fifteen, Nahum Gutman's inner world was crystallized and his awareness of the natural landscape and the human landscape around him was heightened. These introverted imaged would later become the colorful, formal raw materials from which he would draw the figures populating his canvases. (Jaffa Gardens, 1928; Prchads in Jaffa, 1926; Women on the Balcony 1926; Jaffa Beach, 1926; to name but a few).
Recalling his "first contact" with the Orient, prior to his arrival in Eretz-Israel, Gutman said: "…I think that moment opened the door to everything I wished to manifest in my paintings. Throughout the years thereafter I endeavoured to express my love for the unique, indrawn oriental beauty that enchanted me in this passion…"
During the 1910s and 1920s the Arab inhabitants of the land became the protagonists of Eretz-Israeli literature and art. This image was shattered as a result of conflicts between the country's Jewish and Arab inhabitants, which culminated in the Riots of 1921 and 1929. Gutman's response to the Riots of 1929, articulated in a book of caustic satirical caricatures, was not incongruent with his adherence to the image of the Arab and with his numerous works, even in the late 1920s, depicting pastoral scened which protagonists were Arab.
A unique chapter in Nahum Gutman's life and art was influenced by the emergence of the Ahuzat Bayit neighborhood (the initial nucleus of today's Tel Aviv), to which the Gutmans moved in 1910. Tel Aviv was, for him, the "other magic", and he often tied the story of his adolescence with the city's infancy. Even though Gutman began painting and narrating Tel Aviv only in the 1930s, the scenes and memories were already assembled between 1910-1913. It was during that time that the artist's unique affinity to the city, whose emblem he designed in 1925 was kindled.
During the bezalel School period, Nahum Gutman was exposed to the second type of gaze, a gaze from the outside to the outside. Relinquishing the window frame - a point of view that focused the artist's attention on the boundary between the protective frame of life, namely the home, and that which lies beyond the familiar area - marks a step in his self-determination both as a person and as an artist. His severance from the familiar world of his father's home, writer S. Ben-Zionn, and from the newly founded Tel Aviv, opened up new horizons.
At Betzalel he turned to the landscape, therefrom attempting to mold a coveted mental picture. As he himself related:" We all wanted to portray the local colors, the light that joins objects together and that which shatters them with its shadows… We felt like heroes going out to conquer nature as it is, not as we were taught." In his painting from the Bezalel period, and subsequently in those perpetuating his service in the Jewish Legion, the wondrous graphic capabilities so typical of Gutman in his later drawings and illustrations can already be detected. Short brush strokes, strong coloration and expressive lines characterize the artist's periods of studies, which had not ended upon his graduation from Bezalel; it continued with his sojourns in Vienna, Berlin and Paris between 1920-1925, journeys that allowed him to expend his artistic education and acquire further proficiency in fields such as sculpture, lithography and engraving.
In 1923, while in Berlin, Gutman created a series of engravings on the theme of Job. The series was produced in an edition of 50 copies, some in black and some in brown ink. During the 1920s probably in Vienna, he also created his wooden sculpture Man and Donkey, inspired by his teacher, Prof. Barwig, who was well-known for his wood-craved animal figures. We know of another sculpture on the theme of job, executed either in plaster or in clay (its whereabouts unknown), as well as a portrait of poet Esther Raab cast in plaster.
During this period he also executed his first illustrations for poems by Bialik, Saul Tchernichhowsky and for the literary works of his father, writer S. Ben-Zion. Nahum Gutman devoted his talent, first and foremost, to illustration, shaping a distinctive Eretz-Israeli image. He became one of the founding fathers of illustration in Israel, illustrating scores of books, some of which are considered the classics of illustrated Hebrew literature. His impact on the field was most notable in his capacity as the inhouse illustrator of the weekly children's magazine Davar Li'yeladimm for more than thirty years.
One should note that Gutman's travels, including his journey to South Africa (1934-1935), did not alter his artistic perception nor affect his devotion to the task he set out for himself as an artist.
Upon his return to Eretz-Israel, from 1926 on, Nahum Gutman participated in all the major exhibitions organized locally, alongside a group of artists who made their marks on the local art scene, being the precursors of Modernism and the formulators of a language dubbed "the Eretz-Israeli Style in painting" (among them Arye Lubin, Pinchas Litvinovsky, Israell Paldi, Reuven Rubin, and Tzion Taggar). As Gutman himself maintains: "All my years in Vienna, Berlin and Paris were a preparation. In fact, I emerged as a unique artist only after my return from Europe to Eretz-Israel. I knew this was the first chapter of my painterly cosmos: the renewed encounter with the same Orientalism - the the sense of light, color and plastic values - that I saw during my childhood in the streets of Neve Shalom and Neve Zedek and Jaffa, and in Jerusalem."
During the 1930s, Gutman painted landscapes, still-lifes and figures, among them many paintings depicting Dora whom he married in 1928. among Dora's portraits one should mention Dora with a Hat,1933, where Gutman's skill as a painter, capable of capturing the nuances of expression and atmosphere is revealed.
During this period he strove to incorporate pure painterly aspects with his need to express his inner world though the model and the landscape. He internalized the mental images and henceforth his gaze is directed from the outside in, so to speak.
His paintings, and mainly the numerous portraits, indicated a change in his color palette. The tones grew darker and more turbid, and the yellow and blue hues that characterized his early and later works, seem to have been pushed to the margins. This view, from the outside in, led Gutman to the depths of his memory, from which he extracted Tel Avivian scenes whose vividness retains the unaffected gaze of a child. These works gracefully conjured up the landmarks of the city's emergence from the sands.
During these years, the artist depicted the figure of his grandmother, who was the dominant female figure in his childhood. To quote Gutman: "Every sound made by my grandmother - the rustle of her slippers in the early morning hours, the first to get up, the lids' knocking on the pots during lunch time, and the sound of the chair being brought into the house at nightfall. Followed by the creaking of the lock being closed up for the night - all these sounds associated with her made us feel secure, inspiring the confident air of normal everyday life." (Shvil Klipot Ha-Tzpuzimm ['Path of the Orange Peels'], p. 21).
Similarly, the portrait of his father, writer S. Ben-Zion (undatted), was probably painted after his passing, in the late 1930s; his figure too may have been "conjured up" from the artist's past in a period when he could better cope with his memories.
In 1931 Gutman began illustrating for the children's supplement of the daily newspaper Davar, which later became an independent magazine, Davar Li'yeladim. His illustrations attested to his remarkable drawing skill, the ability to encapsulate a theme, and a profound understanding of the new spirit that informed the shaping of the Eretz-Israeli child. That child was the antithesis of the Diasporal image of the Jewish child, whose world was exhaustively described in the stories of Gutman's father, S. Ben-Zion.
Landscapes and portraits continued to be the focal point of his work in the 1940s and 1950s too. During those years, the human figure became more stylized. It lost the material rigidity that typified it in the 1920s, as well as the identifying singularity and psychological insight that characterized the portrait paintings in the 1930s. Gutman assimilated the human figure into the landscape and adapted the figures to the perception of the airiness underlying the "festive" landscape.
During the 1950s, alongside the country's landscapes, Gutman was preoccupied with a series of works inspired by the construction book, works which may echo his memories of construction scenes in Tel Aviv's early days. (in his book Ir Ketannah va-Anashim ba Me'at ['A Little City and Few Men Within It'] Gutman dedicates several illustrations to the builders of Tel Aviv).
During those years the artist returned to the theme of the sea. His journey to Erez-Israel on board a ship left an indelible impression on Nahum Gutman the boy, and the sea itself was a doorway to a legendary world. The ship's arrival at the shore of Jaffa and the disembarkation made a great impact on him: "When we arrived at the shore of Jaffa the sea hit us with big waves and the foam of the waves nearly reached the deck. The ship came to a halt away from the port. I saw boats going up and down in the sea, rising and disappearing amid the waves, until they approached the ship's rope ladder dropped down into the water… Lightheartedly I threw myself into the outstretched arms of a sailor, and a wide mouth with white teeth and a pointed mustache above the upper lip, gaped at me. I felt as though I was diving for the first time into a magical world, stranger that any I had ever encountered." The mature artist retrieved the materials which the perspective of time passed now enabled him to use anew.
The sea paintings inspire a sense of joy. They strong colors are like an invitation to peek into the boy's "first gaze" through the eyes of the mellow artist. Gutman had not lost his initial vitality and his paintings are constructed in balanced compositions where the diversity of shapes and colors merge into one confident statement. The country's landscapes as well as various themes imprinted in Gutman's eye and soul provided him with the raw materials for his painting for the rest of his life. Clinging to the sights of the past, the country in its virginity continually furnished him with the visions from which his canvases were created with ink.
The permanent exhibition of the museum dedicated to Nahum Gutmans' oevre allows us to draw fine "brush strokes" without purporting to shed light on one specific aspect of his work in depth. Between the somewhat hesitant drawings executed during his studies at Bezalel and his last paintings created during the late 1970s, there is a long temporal gap, some parts of which remain as yet unexplored. To these we will dedicate separate exhibitions in the future. No doubt, Nahum Gutman's place is secure among the creators of a unique language in Eretz-Israeli painting. The opening of the museum on Israel's 50th Jubilee and Gutman's Centenary was a completion of a circle, opening the door to a new acquaintance with an artist whose work reflects the historical events that transpired in the geographical realm of Eretz-Israel and the formation of Hebrew culture in the country; and Artists who self-attested: "When I have a felling of abundance, of the raison d'etre - I express it in writing or painting.
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