News Highlights The Rhythm of Israeli Art and History on Display in Newton
In honor of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Hebrew College presents a cultural moment in the country’s history with “Syncopation: Lyrical Abstraction in Israeli Art (1970s).” In a recent article for JewishBoston, Judy Bolton-Fasman featured the exhibit and interviewed both Deborah Feinstein, founding chair of the Hebrew College Arts Initiative, and acclaimed painter Joshua Meyer about the exhibit.
Moshe Hoffmann was born in Budapest in 1938 and lived in Red Cross buildings and then Budapest’s Jewish ghetto for the duration of the war. He and his family immigrated to Israel shortly after the Holocaust. Hoffman worked as a woodcut artist and was also a sculptor, painter and poet… In one of Hoffman’s paintings, chaos is rendered in window shutters randomly opened and twisted, and in crooked patios and terraces. All of the objects are encircled in what appears to be barbed wire. However, when ambiguity takes over, one can see the artist painted a vine. [Joshua] Meyer observed: “It’s as if you’re on a balcony looking out at a landscape, and the hills in the distance with vines coming through. But the piece is also steeped in Hoffman’s personal history and feels like barbed wire.”
– Judy Bolton-Fasman, JewishBoston