Art

Item Description

Print

Ink on wooden panel

Framed: 13 ½ x 11 ½ 

Unframed: 6 ½ x 4 ¾ 

Year: ?

Title: Tekiyah (appears in Hebrew on label, back)

Description:  Image of man blowing shofar, surrounded by abstract elements.  Black ink printed on wooden panel, mounted on fabric coated board with wooden frame.  Labeled # 4 on label, back of frame.  Print is signed in bottom right corner. Smaller version of artist’s signature appears in left-hand corner.  

Noted artist, Nathaniel Jacobson, painted murals for several hotels and nightclubs in Miami Beach, including The Tiffany, The Dempsey-Vanderbilt, The Latin Quarter, Gant-Gaither Theatre, and The Cuban Casino. His exhibits appeared in the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Macbeth Gallery in New York City, and The Arts Club of Chicago.

In 1956, Jacobson's life changed when he went to Jerusalem to visit his father, who had left Roxbury, Mass., to spend his last years in the Holy City. The visit to Israel was a revelation. For the first time since the war he saw a vision of a bright future for the Jewish people. “Israel is the negation of the ghetto,” he wrote. “The ghetto confined the body in the most degrading manner. … When Chagall portrayed his figures floating above the housetops, he was pointing up … the evasion of drab reality. But one can express oneself through Israel, without the necessity to escape.”

What really shattered the gloom of the early years of the Holocaust was the Middle Eastern sunshine, both literal and metaphoric. “I found I could renew myself by the fountainhead of being in Israel. Israel opened up ideas of color and light to me. … There I found the extraordinary challenge of the brilliant light and how I could fit that into paint. My response to the light of Israel, and especially to the Negev, required a renovation of my palette. The light was abstract. The truth of it was the brilliance, and the fact that there was color only in the shadows.”

Jacobson came back from Israel a changed man. His suitcase was full of sketches waiting to be developed into canvases. He had grown a beard, perhaps a manifestation of his bohemian nature, perhaps of his Jewish identity, no longer confined. He had added to his résumé a one-man show at the Artist’s House (Bet Ha-aman) in Jerusalem. He was like a man reborn, bursting with energy and optimism. His paintings of Israel were bold, drenched with sunlight, blinding whites and bold colors. In 1958 he had one-man shows at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts and the Jewish Museum in New York. Dorothy Adlow reviewed the De Cordova exhibit for in The Christian Science Monitor. “These pictures of Israel express almost spectacularly the painter’s reaction to the country and the people … Sometimes the colors run to a ravishing brilliance … Mr. Jacobson has painted the mountains in swathes of gold, the Negev at night in purplish tones; and the olive trees of Jerusalem are depicted with a vital sense of urgency … Here is a genuinely exalted communication.”

Item Special Note

Item may be picked up in Newton.