The paintings of the Umm el-Fahm-born Arab Israeli artist Asim
Abu-Shakra bear a unique local significance. The rare consensus
about his work is not only a reaction to his outstanding talent and
to his tragic death from cancer in 1990 at the age of 29. There is
something in the aesthetics and conception of his art that arouses
a sense of closeness and identification in the Israeli viewer:
influences from the tradition of French painting, Giacometti's
drawings, Streichman's oil paintings, Moshe Kupferman and David
Reeb. Above all, there is an extraordinary poetic and subliminal
gift that enabled him to turn a simple motif, such as the potted
cactus (tsabar),1 into a powerful artistic statement. His talents
endow Abu-Shakra's painting with the uncommon quality of broad
emotional and intellectual accessibility.
Yet a closer look at his works and a detailed examination of their
content reveal a deep connection to Palestinian art, which is not
readily apparent, and a persistent concern with questions of
identity, conflict and foreignness. Indeed, any discussion of
Abu-Shakra's paintings must take into consideration his complex
identity as an Arab-Palestinian-Israeli which, in Azmi Bishara's [a
Palestinian Israeli MK] words, constitutes "a contradiction at the
heart of identity."2 Bishara rejects the idea of perceiving the
Arab-Israeli identity as one in which two identities coexist,
seeing it rather as a dialectic existing in an uneasy state of
constant tension: "The Palestinian and the Israeli identities are
two sides in conflict and do not live in peace with one another."3
According to Bishara, the Arab in Israel is condemned to perpetual
foreignness in a country that "is his and is not his at one and the
same time... but is in no way his homeland."4
"I have deliberately used the term 'foreignness' and not
'alienation,'" says Bishara, "because foreignness is more basic.
The liberal humanist or left-wing Israeli can be alienated from his
society. But the Arab does hot have the right to be alienated from
Israeli society, since he is not given the choice of belonging or
alienation. His state of not belonging is predetermined."5
Tsabar - Saber
The phrase "a contradiction at the heart of identity," coined by
Bishara, may relate to Abu-Shakra not only with regard to the
contradiction between his Arab and Israeli identities, but to
another inner contradiction with which he had to cope: that between
his identity as an Arab concerned with national questions and his
identity as an artist. Abu-Shakra experienced the full intensity of
this conflict precisely because he felt such a profound
identification with both identities. As a painter, he was fully
aware of the danger of making propagandistic use of art, and
fastidiously maintained the purity of his artistic statement. As an
Arab, he identified deeply with the Palestinian problem. As an Arab
artist, he had to find some way of bringing the two identities
together. Abu-Shakra's distinction among Israeli-Arab and
Palestinian artists lies in the fact that he succeeded in uniting
an artistic image with the expression of political feelings, thus
producing a clear and impressive statement.
In his article "Israeli and Palestinian Artists: Facing the
Forests,"6 Kamal Bullata, a Palestinian artist living in
Washington, outlines the development of Palestinian art,
paralleling it to early Israeli art. He stresses the unwritten
commitment of all Palestinian artists, some of them exiles in
various places throughout the world, to depict the landscapes of
Palestine and the symbols of the homeland. Among the artists
mentioned by Bullata is Walid Abu-Shakra (b. 1949), Asim's older
cousin, who lives and works in London and undoubtedly has a
decisive influence on him, at least in regard to his fundamental
decision to become a painter.
Speaking of Walid Abu-Shakra's work, Bullata writes: "The manner in
which he executes his themes is traditional and reflects the vivid
memory experienced by the native-born." What exactly does Walid
Abu-Shakra paint? "Here, in black and white, the roots of an
ancient olive tree descend into the dark ground; there, an old path
leads up a hill... and in the foreground of another print, bushes,
thistles and wildflowers still grow in the cracks of houses where
people once lived. The tsabar, yes, that same cactus plant
previously associated with the Israeli ethos... has been given a
central place in Abu-Shakra's landscape. Since the first generation
of native-born Israelis, the fruit of the tsabar has held symbolic
meaning for the Israeli; with the establishment of the State of
Israel, its roots took on symbolic meaning for the Palestinian. The
prickly exterior of the fruit, in contrast to its softness inside,
served as a symbol of the native-born Israeli. For the
Palestinians, since the ancient times the tsabar has been a
functional tool of the farmer, a means of marking the borders of
his place-names. Over the past forty years, houses have been torn
down, stones have been moved, and maps have been redrawn, but the
roots of the tsabar have proved to be the bulldozer's most stubborn
enemies. To this day, the borders of the ancient villages can be
retraced thanks to the invincible nature of the tsabar. The
Palestinian symbol of the tsabar roots took on another cultural
meaning because of the plant's name in spoken Arabic, saber, which
also means 'patience,' 'tenacity.' Here again we find an exchange
between cultural meaning and a natural phenomenon. In this process,
the native's linguistic metaphor reflects his visual sense of
'home.' Although working in his London studio and reconstructing
the codes of his childhood landscape, the artist from Umm el-Fahm
never forgets that the tsabar plant continues to grow in his
homeland, nor far from the olive tree."
Bullata's analysis of the meaning of the tsabar in Palestinian
culture, and in the context of Walid Abu-Shakra's work, casts the
potted cactus plant in Asim's paintings in a far more political
light than has generally been perceived, even presenting it as
another version of a popular traditional motif in Palestinian art.
This elucidation alters the typical reading of Abu-Shakra's
paintings by the Israeli viewer. In her comprehensive article on
the motif of the potted cactus in Asim Abu-Shakra's painting, Sarit
Shapira7 states as obvious that "the image of the tsabar is...
related to the concept that refers to the collective Israeli
prototype... This twist in the image of the tsabar plant and
self-definition is in effect a dialogue with Israeli culture and
terminology, and not with concepts of identity (whether linguistic
or formal) of the Arab-Palestinian culture... Abu-Shakra's use of
the tsabar as an emblematic motif may attest to the lack of
personal or collective identifying mark of his own." She adds: "In
this sense, Abu-Shakra's tsabar is an identifying mark of
'otherness,' since he, as an Arab, applies it to himself, while
'originally,' and in common usage, the image refers to the Israeli
Jew." Shapira, however, is mistaken in attributing authorship (the
"origin") of the image of the tsabar to Israeli culture.
Examination of its sources in Palestinian culture reveals that
here, too, a wealth of concepts exists around the image. These
interpretive factors redouble the complexity of Abu-Shakra's
tsabar: it operates as an ironic and critical image of the "stolen
identity" of the Arab who wishes to see himself as the sabra (as
Shapira shows), while at the same time remaining part of an
internal Palestinian code, symbolizing suffering and deep-rooted
tenacity.
'Foreigners in Their Homeland'
Asim Abu-Shakra's connection to Palestinian art also finds
expression in his initial choice of the landscape motif. Ganit
Ankori, who has also investigated the parallels between Palestinian
and early Israeli painting, states: "In depictions of the national
landscape, the personal impulse of the artist to portray his
immediate surroundings merges with an ideology that advocates
stressing the collective attachment to the homeland. It is
therefore not surprising that landscape painting is one of the
prevalent genres both in early Eretz Israeli art and Palestinian
art."8 Like Bullata, Ankori explains that "the motif of the plants
typical to the land and the fruit of its earth also occupies a
central place both in early Eretz Israeli art and contemporary
Palestinian art. The olive tree, with its twisted roots and
'tormented' trunk, which captivated artists such as Rubin and
Krakauer, often appears in the paintings of Palestinian artists as
a symbol of the ancient connection to their homeland and their
devotion to the land." According to Bishara, the inclination to
hold fast to the rural landscape and the fellah's tradition
compensates for the lack of a sense of a real homeland. "The
village," he claims, "has become an intimate haven, making it
possible to return to the bosom of close social relations. It is
the tangible homeland of those who are foreigners in their
homeland."9
At the start of his artistic career, when Asim Abu-Shakra first
came from Umm el-Fahm for the entrance exams to the Kalisher School
of Art in Tel Aviv (where two of his cousins also studied) he, like
the others, painted the landscapes of the village and scenes from
its daily life: women in traditional head scarfs with infants in
their arms, and similar motifs. In the course of his studies, he
abandoned the narrative scenes representing the national problem,
but did not relinquish their deeper meanings.
The recurrent motif in Abu-Shakra's painting - the potted cactus -
is repeatedly charged by his sense of not belonging, the perpetual
feeling of foreignness in Tel Aviv, in an entirely Jewish society:
the feeling that something is not in its natural setting. The
tsabar has been transplanted from the wild, tangled hedges that
appeared in his early landscapes to a small flowerpot on a
windowsill in Tel Aviv. The downsizing of the cactus hedge to a
small decorative plant, and the confinement of the earth
surrounding its roots to the measured amount needed for a house
plant, convey not just a sense of foreignness and discomfort, but
also a protest against the taming of nature, against a state of
oppression and indignity. In his early work (from his third year in
art school), Abu-Shakra painted tsabar hedges in an open landscape,
with bombers circling above - a clear expression of a political
situation in a setting imbued with threat and fear. The local
landscape, with its characteristic cactus hedges, symbolized the
state of anomaly, the violation of this natural sense of belonging
to the landscape. Bullata shows that Palestinians attribute
particular significance to the roots of the cactus as tenacious and
patient (attributions differing from the Israeli myth applied to
the fruit), and this perhaps explains Abu-Shakra's preoccupation
with the potted plant: placing the cactus in a flowerpot involves
uprooting it, detaching it from the ground - as in a state of
exile.
Abu-Shakra returned again and again to the motif of the potted
cactus, gradually changing it from a symbol with political
connotations into a source of personal identification. In his last
paintings, as his disease spread and he faced imminent death, the
exterior background slowly disappeared and the potted cactus became
a sublimated expression of severe loneliness: detached from
everything, turned entirely in on itself, mindful only of the
limited beauty it could still produce. In a conversation,
Abu-Shakra once stated: "The cactus fascinates me because of its
amazing ability to flower out of thorny death."
Solidarity and Solitude
The road by which Abu-Shakra traveled crossed a number of junctions
in Israeli art. At Kalisher, the school's tradition tended at the
time of his studies towards pure painting concerned with color,
texture and composition, placing less emphasis on conceptual
approaches. Abu-Shakra's natural propensity for lyricism and his
sensitive use of color were undoubtedly reinforced and consolidated
by his studies. He developed within a tradition of Israeli art
based on the values of the Lyrical Abstract, although he himself
never adopted a thoroughly abstract style. Paradoxically, in terms
of style, Abu-Shakra's work might be said to perpetuate the
traditions of Israeli art to a greater extent than that of other
Israeli artists of his generation. Young Israeli artists considered
certain stylistic features to be the legacy of the founding
fathers, such as Zaritsky and Streichman, from whom they sought to
free themselves in order to devise a new language of their own.
Abu-Shakra, not suffering from his "Oedipal complex," saw these
same features as a solid foundation on which to develop his own
personal version. The interiors of Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso,
Braque, Giacometti and other modernists also entered his repertoire
of influences, internalizing for him the essential principle that
the freedom and poetic quality of art have absolute priority over
any political slogan. At the same time, Abu-Shakra drew from the
modernist tradition of the artist's moral commitment to human
values, viewing art as a form of social responsibility.
For Asim Abu-Shakra, the encounter with the work of Giacometti was
a watershed. He was profoundly impressed by Giacometti's manner of
drawing and the way in which he designed the three-dimensional
space of his objects. The influence of Giacometti (whose work he
first saw in Maya Cohen-Levy's drawing class in his second year)
remained with him throughout his studies, taking on added
dimensions over time.
Under this influence, his painting acquired a large measure of
refinement and intimacy, and was drawn to the corners of rooms, to
objects, to a delineated and cultivated space rather than to
unlimited open expanses. Abu-Shakra's real affinity with Giacometti
derived not only from the esteem in which he held his pictorial
style, but also from the spirit of humanism and skepticism he found
in Giacometti's work, recognizing there the dialectic so close to
his heart: human solidarity, on the one hand, and basic solitude,
on the other. As the motif of the potted plant emerged, it proved
to be not too far from this point of departure: a single object in
a space that is both full and empty at one and the same time.
Three Israeli artists exerted important influences on Asim
Abu-Shakra's work. The first, whom he met in his second year at
Kalisher, was the painter Uri Stetner, one of his teachers. As a
result of his encounter with Stetner's work, Abu-Shakra became
concerned less with specific scenes (village women, local
landscapes, etc.) and more with painterly values: the application
of paint, the use of white in designing space and background, and
compositions of interiors and still lifes suffused with a delicate
lyrical aura. The second artist was Moshe Kupferman who led him in
the direction of expressive monochromatic reduction. Kupferman's
grays and purples, his restrained and succinct lyricism, and the
prominence of the line preferred over the blot - all these reduced
Abu-Shakra's style to a more restrained statement tending towards
monochrome. The third artist was David Reeb, one of Abu-Shakra's
teachers in his last year of studies, who was to become a close
friend. Reeb had a crucial influence on the work of Abu-Shakra, who
absorbed from him a style of flatness, decisive linearity, and the
use of ornamental patterns and black contours. The encounter with
Reeb's work led Abu-Shakra to shift in his later paintings
(particularly in the last two years of his life) from lyrical
sensitivity towards a more rigid, direct language. This language
emerged from the attempts in Israeli art to formulate more precise
plastic means for political statements than could be made through
lyrical painting. Such an attempt suited Abu-Shakra as much as it
did Reeb. Their divergent personalities have led to Reeb's image of
the potted plant in the window being commonly perceived as a real,
everyday object, while Abu-Shakra's plant perforce radiates the
poetics of symbolic solitude and an assumption of the possibility
of beauty.
It should be noted that Abu-Shakra's encounter with Reeb's concrete
realism also helped crystallize the motif of the potted cactus in
artistic rather than political terms. The source of his cactus was
an actual potted plant, small and not particularly impressive, that
stood on the ledge of one of the windows opposite his studio in the
"Red House" on Nahmani Street in Tel Aviv. Abu-Shakra's studio was
adjacent to Eitan Hillel's Wrap Gallery, the first to mount a
one-man show of his paintings. Hillel presented him to the public
out of faith in his talent and a wish to lend Abu-Shakra his full
support.
The Sumud Symbol
Abu-Shakra's short career ended abruptly. It is rare for an artist
of only 28 to achieve such a mature style in a well-formulated,
concise statement. His sketchbooks and drawings indicate directions
which were yet to find expression in his paintings: linear drawings
full of humor and the lightness of a child's point of view; rapid
sketches of everyday scenes; allegorical figures, such as Little
Red Riding Hood; virtually unknown erotic pictures, and more. One
of the last subjects he dealt with, and in which he showed great
interest, was a series of illustrations for texts by Bertholt
Brecht. For Abu-Shakra, Brecht's work was the epitome of his own
artistic principles: moral realism, uncompromising human values
expressed in a simple, direct, yet moving style. Abu-Shakra never
abandoned the artistic aspiration to arouse the viewer's feelings.
For him, feeling was an important means of raising the viewer to a
universal human level.
During the last two years of his life, aware of the little time
left him, Abu-Shakra devoted all his energies to paintings of the
potted cactus, displaying the painful process of having to grow up
too fast that resulted from the artist's deteriorating physical and
mental states. It may be said that, at least, one process was
completed: Asim Abu-Shakra succeeded in altering the course of
Palestinian art, and raising it from the status of a
nostalgic-political aesthetic to a universal art ciphering
political codes at deeper levels. Indeed, he also completed another
process: beginning as an artist in Umm el-Fahm, he passed through
major movements in Israeli art, always preserving an emotional
awareness of the state of foreignness. He did not continue the
tradition of painting olive trees which Reuven Rubin had started
and Palestinian artists of his own generation had carried on.
Rather, he dealt with the landscape tradition in a conscious
manner, without allowing the landscape to impose its significance
on him. From Palestinian art, he took the traditional symbol of the
sumud10 - an expression of tenacity and fidelity to the land - and
gave it a relevant and broader dimension, aware both of its place
in the tradition of Western art and of its meaning in the local
symbolism of both peoples. In his work, Palestinian foreignness
seems to cast its shadow on what might have been the best of
Israeli art.
Endnotes
1. The cactus plant (in Hebrew tsabar) has
different meanings in Arab and Israeli cultures: in Hebrew it
symbolizes the native-born Israeli - the sabra - whereas in Arabic
it appears as a metaphor for tenacity and patience. Cf. also p.
3.
2. Azmi Bishara, "On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in
Israel," Uri Ram, ed., Israeli Society: Critical Aspects (Tel Aviv:
Breirot, 1993), p. 205 (Hebrew).
3. Ibid., 1993, p. 204.
4. Azmi Bishara, "Israeli Palestinians: The Shadow of Foreignness,"
Hagit Gur-Ziv, ed., Statements on Silence (Tel Aviv: The Center for
Peace, December 1989), p. 72 (Hebrew).
5. Ibid., 1989, p. 71.
6. Kav, 10 (July 1990), pp. 170-175.
7. Sarit Shapira, "Cactus in a Flowerpot," Kav, 10 (July 1990), pp.
37-41.
8. Ganit Ankori, "Beyond the Wall," Kav, 10 (July 1990), pp.
163-169.
9. Bishara, 1993, p. 207.
10. Sumud - a political-mythological term familiar to the Israeli
public from the title of Raja Shehadeh's book (New York: Adama
Books, 1984), meaning "to endure, to remain firmly planted on one's
land"; see David Grossman, The Yellow Wind (New York, 1988), p.
145. The symbolic-poetic meaning of the sabra as saber - in the
sense of patience and tenacity - is similar to the political
concept of sumud. For further reading see also Doreet LeVitté
Harten, Israeli Art Around 1990, Städtische Kunsthalle,
Düsseldorf, 1990.
The original version of this essay was published in the catalogue
of the comprehensive exhibition of Abu-Shakra's work at the Tel
Aviv Museum, 1994 (curator: Ellen Ginton).
From The Jerusalem Review, No. 2, 1997. Reprinted by
permission.