12th January to 24th April
2011
The Land of Light and Promise
50 Years Painting Jerusalem
and Beyond
Ludwig Blum (1891–1974)
 For the first time since being exhibited in London at the Royal
Academy and the Fine Art Society in 1938, Ben Uri brings the art of Ludwig Blum
to the United Kingdom for his first European Museum
survey.
The exhibition traces the career of the
Czech born Israeli topographical artist Ludwig Blum, who immigrated to Palestine
in 1923 and settled in Jerusalem at the age of 32. He was classically trained;
first as a young talent under David Khon in Vienna and then, after serving in
the First World War, from 1919 at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague.
This exhibition of some 35 works traces
Blum’s consistent representation of ‘the real’ over half a
century of painting the Holy Land and beyond. Jerusalem was ‘his’
city and he never ceased to find inspiration in its architecture, holy places,
markets, peoples and the extraordinary changes of light and shadow, which bathes
its buildings each day of each season.
Blum’s European persona and
academic practice never changed in the heat and heart of this very different
continent. He is recognised not only as a distinguished artist of the classic
mould but also as the finest topographical artist of his time working in the
Levant. His was a unique period in history being the 25 years before and after
the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. He travelled extensively and
often across borders to Iran and Iraq, and his work chronicles in realistic and
archival fashion the characteristics of different societies during those
times.
The exhibition brings together a
remarkable body of Blum’s work not seen in London since he exhibited at
the Wertheim Gallery in 1933, Ben Uri, The Fine Art Society and The Royal
Academy in 1938. Included are ten remarkable views of Jerusalem, its
landscape and peoples, providing a unique historical glimpse of this majestic
and holy city over half a century alongside rare views of building sites during
the construction of Tel Aviv. Other subjects covered from his travels show
scenes in Iran and Iraq in 1930, pioneering Kibbutzim settlements Kiryat Anavim
west of Jerusalem from 1932 and Degania on the Sea of Galilee from 1934, the
1948 War of Independence, farming and new industrial developments contrasting
with city life in the '50s and
beyond.
Blum’s style and palette, his
concerns with space and colour, his swift brushwork and sophisticated conveying
of the effects of light bring him close to the landscapes of Palestine by London
based American painter John Singer Sargent.
The same can be said when comparing
Blum’s 1920s panoramas of Jerusalem with those of British artist David
Bomberg, who similarly arrived in Jerusalem in May 1923 and painted his now
celebrated series between 1923 and 1927. Given that Blum was in London in the
early twenties before immigrating to Palestine, they were both Europeans living
and painting in a new and completely different city and climate, and they
painted from similar viewpoints and in similar styles, it is perfectly likely
they knew each
other.
Blum’s work is immediately
recognisable whether portrait or still life, landscapes of Nazareth or
Jerusalem, Amsterdam or Rome, early or late. He maintained and refined his
classic and distinctive manner throughout his long and distinguished
career.
Ben Uri is proud to provide the
opportunity to London and European audiences to discover the majesty of
Blum’s practice and travel with him on an extraordinary topographical
journey some 73 years after his works were last seen
here.
“Blum is an accomplished painter
with a sweeping Sargentesque style … His power of conveying the sense of
glare and heat is astonishing.” The Scotsman,
1933
“When everything changes (and not
always for the best) Blum’s style is an exceptional phenomenon ... almost
a rare ‘nature reserve’ – the academic naturalist style, a
kind of last century version, par excellence.” Art historian and critic
Avraham Rosen,
1960s
Exhibition curator: Dr. Dalia
Manor
Illustrated: Jerusalem,
Inside the walls, Looking East,
1926.
Further Images: Jerusalem,
View from Mount Scopus, Camels in the
Judean Desert, Jerusalem
Snow and Tel Aviv
Tayelet.
For further information and a complete
range of images please contact anna@benuri.org.uk
12 January – 24 April
2011
Open Mon–Thurs 10–5.30pm;
Friday 10–3.30pm; Sunday
12–4pm
Adults £5; Concessions £4;
Museum friends, Art Fund members and visitors 16 and under are Free
Further Notes for
Editors:
The
historical context is also interesting as the immigrant artists from Europe,
particularly Germany and Austria to Palestine in the first decade of the century
tended to be more established and congregated or taught with Boris Schatz at the
Bezalel School of Art and Crafts which he founded in Jerusalem in
1906.
By
contrast, during the first half of the twenties a wave of younger, emerging
émigré artists arrived in Israel, amongst them Blum. Although of
the same generation, their backgrounds were diverse. In 1919 the artist Pinchas
Litvinovski (age 26) arrived from the Ukraine. Mordecai Levanon (20)
arrived in Jerusalem in 1921 from Transylvania. 1922 saw Reuven Rubin (29) from
Romania and Hermann Struck (36) from Berlin return and settle. In the same year
as Blum’s arrival, in 1923, Ukrainian painter Yosef Zaritsky (32) and
Polish sculptor Zeev Ben-Zvi (33) arrived and 1924 saw artist Chaim Glicksberg
(20) arrive from Moscow and Leopold Krakauer (34) from Vienna. This was the
first generation that embraced and developed European style modernism in the
Middle
East.
There
was then (as could be argued now) a cultural divide between Jerusalem and Tel
Aviv. Blum, living in and wholly engaged with Jerusalem, was one of the few from
his peer group who chose not to ally himself with the modernist movements
developing around Tel Aviv or later within the artist colonies in Safed founded
in 1948 or Ein Hod founded by the Romanian Dada artist Marcel Janco in
1953.
Blum
remained true to his convictions and was comfortable being aloof and outside of
the new mainstream of modernism that evolved through the engagement with the
Jewish School of the L’Ecole de Paris in the thirties and Social Realism
and the New Horizons Movements that followed.
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Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road, off Abbey Road, St Johns Wood, London NW8
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