Menashe Kadishman

Private Collection, New York (possible acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above

Kadishman: Paintings 1979-1981 (exhibition catalogue), Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, 1981, illustration of another cast p. 3 (and with the title In Suspense)
Pierre Restany, Kadishman, Tel Aviv, 1996, illustration of additional casts pp. 10, 74-75
Jacob Baal-Teshuva, ed., Menashe Kadishman, New York, 2007, illustration of another cast, p. 27

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In Tel Aviv the sculpture is called "Ascension" (1974), and it rises to a height of 15 meters next to the Habima national theater. The sculpture, one of the iconic symbols of contemporary Tel Aviv, began as a diagonal trio of granite circles, a small work, sculpted by Kadishman in London in 1964. Three years later, Kadishman created a larger version (7 meters), erected in High Park in Toronto, Canada, this time from yellow-painted iron, and called it “Three Disks.” The sculpture offered here is its “twin brother,” made from rusted steel. The geometric minimalism of the sculpture stems from that era of young English sculptors, of which Kadishman was a respected member in 1960, as a student at the Saint Martin’s School in London. Here he embraced the sculptural trend of overcoming gravity, a reaction against the sculpture of Henry Moore. In 1970 (on the occasion of Kadishman’s exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York) Eduard F. Fry wrote of “Three Disks” that “it is a work which may easily be situated historically and stylistically with the context of young English sculptures associated with St. Martins – Annesley and Tucker have both made pieces to which these cylinders may be compared.”

The diagonal “Three Disks” challenges gravity, when against all odds, it does not collapse to the ground. As such, it combines strength and instability. The rusted geometric minimalism owes a debt to the sculptural language developed by Anthony Caro, Kadishman’s teacher in London, and from the abstract American sculpture of David Smith and Richard Serra. Simultaneously (as Kadishman told Pierre Restany, who wrote a monograph on the artist in 1985), “Three Disks” was already rooted in his military service as a jeep driver in the Sinai desert, experiencing the hovering stones, extending beyond the cliffs, opposing gravity. Furthermore, the yellow-painted version in Toronto connects with the memory Kadishman carries of the color of the tractor from his time on the Maayan-Baruch Kibbutz in northern Israel in the 1950s. Kadishman’s sculpture “Three Disks” thus combines an autobiographical Israeli experience with a universal abstract language. While Eduard F. Fry was reminded by the sculpture of three locomotive wheels or giant gears, Pierre Restany saw in the diagonal bursting from the earth to the sky a symbol of the human spirit breaking through to the sky, and yet a view of the sculpture from behind creates the illusion of a beam falling towards the viewer. And here lies the struggle between the existential dilemma and the victory of the spirit.

We are grateful to Gideon Ofrat for the above catalogue note