A Brilliant Eclectic

This is the most beautifully printed and sumptuously made art book ever produced here, a massive coffee table monument to one of Israel’s most colorful modernists. With it, art book production of the highest international standards has now arrived here.

Piotr (Pinhas) Litvinovsky (1894-1985), universally known as Litvi, started out, in his native Ukraine, as an acolyte of narrative painter Ilya Repin, and his journeys to and from Palestine and his development as an artist and colleague of painters and writers in Russia, France and Eretz Israel are well documented by historian Gideon Efrat.

Litvi first came here in 1912 at the invitation of Boris Schatz, but, disenchanted with the kitschy aspects of the early Bezalel School, returned to study at the academy of St. Petersburg. Following the Russian Revolution, he and his young family made their way back here in 1919, their home in Jerusalem serving as the hub of early bohemian society.

Litvi was associated with many of the early shows and groups here, from the Tower of David exhibitions to the Egged Group (no connection with buses) of Tel Aviv modernist naives. His Arab With Flower, 1925 (in the Tel Aviv Museum), possibly his best composition, is a local landmark, but also perfectly in tune with oils by many other Tel Aviv painters of the period who idealized Arabs, notably Gutman and Rubin. This was possibly his best year, for in 1925 he also painted his truly fine early portrait of Ahad Haam, in the prevailing Tel Aviv School style of the 20's; it has some affinities with early Mokady.

Incidentally, it recently occurred to me that that the source of the Arab With Flower may have been a painting of a girl by Kees van Dongen made back in 1908. The sweep of the arm and the use of the single red flower forms the schwerpunkt of both paintings.

Litvi was always a facile draftsman, and his very facility and cannibalizing of every modernist he saw both here and abroad became part of his downfall.

One of his earliest influences was Chagall, but others followed. Compulsively prolific, he successively painted genre scenes, “naive” Jewish folklore watercolors, gloomy Jewish School of Paris oils, figurative portraits and later pot-boilers of local politicians and famous figures, painted from photographs in oils on cardboard.

By the 50's Litvi had devoured Picasso and Miro, never to leave the former, making ever more reductive works that expressed joy of color - which he had in abundance - rather than deep thought. His hands had a mind of their own and he gave them his head. To Litvi, less became more, to the extent that less eventually became very little indeed.

Most of Litvi’s late paintings and pastels are enormous fun, but nevertheless slight, often unrelated to the negative spaces on the paper. Each successive solution, usually a frothy mixture of instinctive, lively line and flat mass, looked like a great idea for a less hurried work that would carry matters further. It never happened.

Most of the photographs in this quite magnificent book are by Ronny David, who also had a hand in its design. Texts and captions are in Hebrew and English, with just a few hiccups in the translation. Hannah Rovina appears throughout as Robina, and Joan Miro as Juan. One would have appreciated an index and more accurate dating of the pictures. It’s critical to know when Litvi painted or drew certain works resembling the early styles of others. Perhaps some were also influenced by him? Just listing dates as “the 20's” is not good enough.