Artists as Mystics: Kabbalistic Self-Portraits of Contemporary Jewish Artists in Israel

This lecture will bring together three Israeli artists: David Rakia (1928-2012), Michael S’gan-Cohen (1944-1999), and David Louis (b. 1949), who operate in direct and indirect interaction with spiritual trends that developed in the US and Europe around the 1960’s.

The lecture will show how these artists have transmuted New Age rhetoric in its broader, universal sense, into a particular, Jewish-Kabbalistic preoccupation, and how that preoccupation is manifest in their artistic world. In their attempt to construct a language that expresses transcendental concepts, on one hand, they connected to broader trends in contemporary art, and on the other, via the use of Jewish-Kabbalistic iconography and symbolic, they created unique Jewish art. The lecture will feature an examination of a series of self-portraits by these artists, and will show how they portray themselves as artists addressing practices from the Kabbalah`s world - as Kabbalists themselves. The works will be discussed in comparison to the alchemistic model in general art history as a visual model parallel to the role of the Kabbalist; quotations from art history will be addressed alongside personal interpretations and messages of conscience in dialectic interaction with their environment.

In the background lies the fact that the art world in general and Israeli art in particular, have established themselves as Western, secular fields that all but ignore the religious and spiritual dimension. This lecture seeks to propose a new reading of the spiritual aspects of Israeli art, and thus to offer a prism for Jewish visionary and Kabbalistic art genre.