Ben-Gurion: His Many Faces

About three years before Andy Warhol published his series “Flash” (1963) – an artistic investigation of the Kennedy assassination and the Kennedy family in general – and two years before he presented the “Marilyn Diptych” (1962), the famous print in which 50 portraits of Marilyn Monroe were placed side by side, half colored and half in black and white, the artist Pinchas Litvinovsky first unveiled his series of portraits of the national founder of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion. Like Warhol, who repeatedly painted presidents and political or cultural figures, Litvinovsky also returns to the same iconic figure time and time again. And as with Warhol, the viewer stands before the work with a certain sense of discomfort. Is this series intended to glorify the figure or rather to mock it? Is it an obsession? If so, what kind?
“Litvinovsky’s gaze is not a nostalgic gaze,” says exhibition curator Amichai Chasson. “Ben-Gurion was serving as prime minister at the time the portraits were painted, in the 1950s, and even when the artist exhibited thirteen of them in his solo exhibition in 1960. Litvinovsky, a notorious interview refuser, refrained from explaining the reason for the repetition of this figure in particular. Is this an attempt to create an iconization of the father of the nation out of recognition of his greatness? Or was it precisely Ben-Gurion’s dominance that aroused the artist’s individualistic senses as he sought to express artistic protest through the leader’s changes in form?”

From realism to abstraction

The series of Ben-Gurion portraits ranges from images in a meticulous, detailed realistic style to almost complete abstractions, which leave Ben-Gurion’s face with only a few characteristic contours. Chasson explains: “Through these works, Litvinovsky demonstrates not only the different faces of Ben-Gurion, but mainly his ability as a painter who evolved from the academic-realist style towards playful experiments in the spread of color spots and the decomposition of shapes and lines.”

Litvinovsky became famous as an impressive and well-known portrait painter, painting Golda Meir, Chaim Weizmann, US presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, HaRav Kook, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Hanna Rovina, various Hasidic rabbis and many others. In fact, Litvinovsky became known as the “national portrait painter” and his portraits were commissioned by state institutions as gifts for important guests. But none of this can explain the dozens (!) of portraits of Ben-Gurion that he painted. These portraits present many facets of Israel’s first prime minister: serious, mischievous, old, wise, amusing.

In her article “Litvinovsky: A Modernist Master,” which appears in the exhibition catalog, Batsheva Goldman-Ida suggests that Litvinovsky’s choice to return to the image of Ben-Gurion can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between Zionism and modernism: “Litvinovsky rarely dealt with issues of Zionism. But his numerous portraits of political figures, which sometimes appear – as in the case of the Ben-Gurion portraits – as a series, express his desire to bridge the gap between modernist expression and Zionist ideals.”

A man of the world

Litvinovsky came to Israel twice. He was born into a religious Jewish family of merchants in 1894 in the city of Novogeorgievsk (at that time the Russian Empire, now Ukraine). In 1912, he received a scholarship to study at the Academy of Arts in Odessa, where he met Boris Schatz, who suggested that he move to study at Bezalel in Jerusalem. Following the meeting, Litvinovsky immigrated to Israel, but dropped out of his studies shortly after. Upon his return to Russia, he began studying at the Academy of Arts in Petrograd. Later on, in 1919, Litvinovsky returned to Israel aboard the ship “Ruslan”, which brought with it one of the most important waves of the Third Aliyah, to the point that it was later called the “Zionist Mayflower.”

Litvinovsky lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, but he was also a man of the world. He spent a lot of time in Europe and the United States, where he encountered the works of Georges Roux, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, and the painters of the School of Paris. Under their influence, his artistic style underwent transformations over the years: from Constructivism and Russian Impressionism at the beginning, through modernist and expressive trends, to formal and colorful abstraction in the last period of his life.
Litvinovsky used to let his work speak for him. He never named his paintings, and their division into series was done retrospectively by the curators of the exhibitions and catalogs. His attitude to Zionism also found colorful and fascinating expression through his works. In addition to the rich and fascinating Ben-Gurion series, he painted the landscape of Palestine in many series, repeatedly examining the motif of the camel and the donkey, the Jews and the Arabs and their colorful clothes, the rabbis, the Hebrew letters, Jewish music and Jewish symbolism.

After his death, Pinchas Litvinovsky’s estate consisted of over 6,000 works held in his studio in Jerusalem. The estate went through many hardships over the years, culminating in massive destruction that reduced the thousands of works to a few hundred selected ones. The gap between his rich work and his relative silence regarding his work and its interpretations forces us as viewers to deal with art on its own terms, to confront the colorful impressions, sometimes soft and sometimes feverish, and to let Litvinovsky’s young Israel speak for itself, in a language of form and color. And that is also the case with Litvinovky’s impressive collection of portraits of Ben-Gurion.

Visit the Exhibition “You Must Choose Life – That Is Art: Pinchas Litvinovsky”.

For more about Litvinovsky, read David Rozenson’s series “Rediscovering the Past, Empowering the Future”.

Audio guide tour on portraits of Ben-Gurion at the Beit Avi Chai gallery.

This article was originally published in Hebrew.

Main Photo: Ben-Gurion portrait \ Pinchas Litvinovsky