Arie Aroch

Acquired directly from the artist between 1964 and 1976

Venice, Biennale, XXXII, 1964, no. 282
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Arie Aroch: Itineraries and Forms, 1976, no. 28
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Arie Aroch, 2003, no. 14, p. 195, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

Gideon Ofrat, At Arie Aroch’s Library (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 2001, p. 90, illustrated in color

Oil, pastel, graphite and canvas collage on plywood in artist's frame. Surface in generally good condition, some stable craquelure visible throughout. Canvas collage is slightly lifting from the board along extreme edges. There is a horizontal crack to the board that extends from the center right edge to the center left edge. Three pinholes visible in the corners of the work, likely due to the artist's frame. Under UV light; some areas of inpainting visible throughout.
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Between the years 1961 and 1962 Arie Aroch painted in Stockholm (where he served as the Israeli ambassador) several paintings with an arched shape floating above a painted and/or glued rectangle, frequently with a gold background surrounded by a frame within a frame. Those were abstract architectonic paintings, seemingly corresponding to the details of building facades, perhaps an arch above a window, an expression of the early steps Aroch – a member of the Israeli abstract movement "New Horizons” – took towards his unique style of "concrete abstract". However, Aroch’s "arches" are more complex than that, as they were originally connected to synagogue facades. This can be noticed in Synagogue (a grey rectangular façade under the two tablets of the 10 commandments, 1961), Jewish Motif (an arch above the two tablets with nipples on their tops, 1961), or Prayer (a yellow arch on a dotted rectangle, 1961), and others. Arie Aroch has dared to do in the beginning of the 1960s what no other Israeli artist has done – to merge formal universal-abstract values with Jewish imagery, that he carried since childhood and from his journeys around the world. This was Aroch's greatest virtue – creating pure art at its finest along with a deep commitment to his own culture. Accordingly, his paintings of floating arches expressed a religious supreme providence, resonating with the rainbow being a token of the covenant between God and Noah. Indeed, this current occupation with arches will bring Aroch in 1966 to the form of the arched firmament quoted from the scene of godly creation in the Sarajevo Haggadah (Spain, 14^th century). This is also the source for his repeated usage of gold leaves in the vein of icons (with which he became familiar during his time in Moscow at the beginning of the 1950s), a gilding which exalts the "building façade". The present painting thus implements that very gold iconic background, while the attached rectangular cloth bears an action painting of a chaotic, dark expression. The somewhat pink arch above renders a holy assurance for redemption from chaos. The inner 'framing' stabilizes and calms the "disorder" in the middle of the "icon", while a white arched patch of color at the bottom responds to the upper arch and alludes to the oval form that is about to take a center stage in Aroch's work. This is one of Aroch's "classic" paintings.

We are grateful to Gideon Ofrat for the above catalogue note.