"Sensuality and the Exotic" / Works by Mane-Katz"

"Sensuality and the Exotic" / Works by Mane-Katz

Curator: Dr. Irit Miller

This exhibition focuses on the sensual, the erotic, the instinctual, at times the tempestuous and even hedonistic aspect of Mané-Katz's art. This aspect is reflected in the themes he chose, but mostly in the painterly characteristics of his works. The exhibition includes a selection of landscapes and some of the colorful flower carts typical of Paris, paintings and sketches of female nudes, horses with their Arab riders and seductive Oriental women, alongside the charms of the circus, entertainment scenes and music. 

Mané-Katz is among the leading Jewish artists in the School of Paris (École de Paris) of the first half of the twentieth century. Arriving from Eastern Europe, he settled in Paris, like many of his Jewish artist colleagues, including Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, Chana Orloff, and Michel Kikoine. In Paris he experienced freedom and a sense of equal opportunity and was released from the restraints and burdens of the religious tradition in which he had been raised in the Ukraine. The encounter with the metropolis and the exposure to its artistic wealth brought about a personal transformation, expressed mostly in the artist's adaptation to the modern lifestyle and assimilation into Western culture. Although the work of Mané-Katz is identified mostly with the memory of the Jewish shtetl and its figures, like many artists arriving in Paris he found his place in modern art. In his oeuvre he addressed universal genres and themes characteristic of modernist painting, such as landscape, nudity, interior, still-life and portraiture.

In this exhibition we chose to focus on the sensual, the erotic, the instinctual, at times the tempestuous and even hedonistic aspect of Mané-Katz's art. This aspect is sometimes reflected in the themes he chose, but mostly in the painterly characteristics of his works. Each of the museum's four halls is devoted to a different sphere: landscapes and a selection of the colorful flower carts typical of Paris in his period; erotica and female nudity; the exoticism and mystery of the East, with Arab horsemen and seductive Eastern women, alongside the charms of the circus and entertainment scenes; and music, with its emotional qualities, expressed mostly in the figures of klezmorim (Jewish musicians).

In his paintings, Mané-Katz implemented Expressionist characteristics – a style in early twentieth-century art that aimed for emotional emphasis using distortions of color, form, and space. Expressionism is associated with the Jewish life experience and is common in the works of the School of Paris artists. In Mané-Katz's paintings from the 1930s onward, the emotional expression is evident in the intensification of the sentiment-conducting painterly elements: his charged, powerful brush strokes, violent, quivering, and distorted shapes, and variegated, liberated, daring, and palpable coloration. The vitality of color is also revealed in the tense contrasts between color areas, the surprising relations between figure and ground, and the sharp, thick outlines.

In the catalogue of Mané-Katz's first exhibition in Israel, held at the Tel Aviv Museum at the height of the War of Independence in 1948, Haim Gamzu, the museum's director and curator, wrote: "He then fell prey to the conflict between two equally powerful instincts: on the one hand he was haunted by the catastrophe which had befallen our people […] but on the other hand there was his joie de vivre, the charm of color and the dizziness of movement." This exhibition celebrates the victory of Eros over Thanatos.