Meir Pichhhdze – art as autobiography

Meir Pichhadze – art as autobiography

Prof. Mordechai Omer

Following a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Artist's Studios in 1994, an exhibition which, in many respects was tantamount to an interim conclusion, Meir Pichhadze dedicated to explore his sense of detachment alienation in reference to other immigrant artists – those based in New York. Meir Pichhadze  intended to spend a prolonged sojourn in a large studio in Soho. It was in the metropolis of all places and quite unexpectedly. However, that instead of being swept away by the great flux of New York's artistic and cultural life, he creating very small paintings after old family photographs from his childhood album he carries with him on long trips. Meir Pichhadze embarked on a journey back in time, primarily from his memory. As time passed, he became more and more absorbed in his album. The illness of his daughter Lauri, brought him back to Israel to donate a kidney

; After the operation he stayed and worked in a studio in south Tel Aviv. In March 1997 a body of works from this period was featured in Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv.Meir  Pichhadze described these paintings as "a black box whose full contents will never be exposed."

That exhibition presented the paintings created after family photos alongside paintings after photographs in which the artist staged himself carrying suitcases. One of the pivotal works in that series was dedicated to his sister, Makavalla, who is portrayed in Georgian shepherd's dress, an early version of a painting featured in the that show, "this is her earliest photograph", says Meir Pichhadze about the painting of her in the shepherd's dress, "she's four years old. My uncle photographed   her in a shepherd's costume, a black garment that reaches the ankles. It serves shepherds as a tent, a blanket and a mattress. It is a multi-purpose garment that, in time of storm, can provide you with shelter; you can stand underneath it for hours and be well protected. Several years ago someone wanted to sell such a garment, but I wasn't interested. Recently the man came back from Georgia and again made the offer, this time I bought it   and it helped me with the paintings, it lay on the bad for 3 months, waiting for me to do something with it. I was going to photograph myself with it, it's time will come, I thought, like the suitcases. In my childhood that garment was one of the scariest things. I saw a movie than, with a scene of a child being kidnapped, he was hidden under a strange garment, and the kidnapper sat on a horse. There was always something scary in Makavalla's photograph too, because of the coat."

In Meir Pichhadze's "black box", Makavalla's story is one of the most painfull. His elder sister by five years Makavalla, was a talented artist, and it was due to her that he arrived into the world of art. His first exhibition in 1975 was a two-person show with his sister (Sokolov house, Tel Aviv). Makavalla committed a suicide in 1979, she hanged herself in her parent's badroom in Or Yehuda(heartbroken from longing for Georgia and due to a great love that shattered after three months of marriage ). She was 29. in an exhibition Meir Pichhadze  had in 2003, Makavallaappears three times: twice with Meir Pichhadze  and her sister Julieta and once again with Julieta – a painting after a 1955. the figures shift the viewer from an experience anchored in perfect and naïve childhood beauty to a pain of foreignness and loss typifying end of a path.

Meir Pichhadze first employed a photograph for himself and his two sisters in his 1984 paintings; in this large scale painting he inserted the three children into Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night, along side the cypress tree. In his letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh elucidated the meaning of the cypresses in his later works; "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts, I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. It (the cypress is as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk and the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it's one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine." Many scholars have regarded Van Gogh's "Starry Night" as an expression of yearnings for the rustic landscapes of his childhood in the Netherlands, and the painting was considered the foremost among the works eliciting "Memories of the north." According to Meyer Shapiro, these memories enabled him to embed elements of apocalyptic fantasy in the landscapes that most of all articulated the exaltation of his desire for a mystical meeting with the reality that rejected him so. Addressing the places of the cypresses in Meir Pichhdaze's early biographical paintings, Moshe Ron wrote:" There may be a dash of irreverence in the use of a canonized Van Gogh landscape as a background for one's own likeness, bur perhaps the gesture is primarily one of identification, something like the self conscious gesture of a tourist having his picture taken next to a famous monument. If there is an irony here it is a self irony, rather than one directed at the artistic mode, and it stems primarily from the classic composition of the three figures: the artist standing up and looking downwards, pontification over his two elder sisters who are sited in front of him. When the actual photograph was taken he was only four years old, but the face is grave and grown up. The three figures, in old fashion non-western dresses   , form a sort of screen, obstructing a great deal of the landscape: they are drawn with almost no volume, are covered with by   a manually –produced spray of blue and yellow which bears no relation to any figural value and overlap even the painted frame. This poverty and flatness contrast with the intense green and blue and the powerful brushstrokes in the famous Van Gogh manner. Left out of the original "Starry night" are the church spire (hidden by the figures) as well as the stars and moon, objects which may be construed as carrying spiritual transcendental value, but the heavenly bodies have not totally disappeared: their light has migrated to the figures partly blocking them from sight, where it now appears as a yellow dust (stardust?). Spiritually and transcendence, which had been naturalized by Van Gogh as part of the landscape, have here been made artificial and rarefied, so that they can no longer be read at all except as absence and obstruction. This is perhaps a clue to the frequent use by Meir  Pichhadze of this particular effect and the particular technique use in order to produce it: his version of spiritually is manifested by ethereal surfaces produced manually, but without physical contact with the canvas.

The exposed, shy figures that emerged in Meir Pichhadze's autobiographical paintings in the 1980' gave way during the second half of the 1990' to paintings that were a distinctive antithesis to the artist's relativity "frugal" language in the previous decade. Against a deep dark backdrop which recurs in the paintings, portraying a near –monochromatic greenish-blue mountainous landscape, one reveals at the top edge a sky in warm yellowish hues, possibly the colors of dawn , perhaps those of dusk. The dialectics between the figures, glued like "scraps" (chromolithographs) in a childhood album, and the landscape of their homeland is highlighted by the painting mode of the later Meir Pichhadze. The figures seemingly refuse to become fully and clearly delineated by the unraveled, swift open brush strokes, and the painterly quality refuses to yield to a tonal softness, further enhancing the sense of coldness and detachment.