Arie Aroch

Acquired directly from the artist between 1970 and 1976

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art Arie Aroch: Itineraries and Forms, 1976, no. 54
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Arie Aroch, 2003, no. 4, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

Gideon Ofrat, At Arie Aroch's Library (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 2001, p. 253, illustrated in color

Oil, pastel and pencil on glossy magazine paper. Surface in generally good condition with vibrant colors. Sheet is mounted to mat along the top edge. A 12 cm repaired tear runs from the center of the right edge of the paper in towards the center of the work. Inpainting along this repair is visible under UV light. There is one small circular loss to the pastel above the sitter's proper right hand, a pinhole visible in the upper right corner, and three small folds to the paper along the bottom and upper edge. The reverse of the paper has tape residue from previous framing.
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In 1966 Arie Aroch painted in oil and mixed media on wood his famed painting The High Commissioner (in the Israel Museum collection). Here, the doubling of the figure of Herbert Samuel, the first Jewish-British commissioner, appears at the left side of the canvas inside a blue-black rectangle, to which two blue and red "bands" are attached – rendering an image of a flag and a pair of ornaments. Aroch owned an Iraqi Zionist carpet from 1928, illustrating Lord Samuel in his formal uniforms, one of many Zionist expressions of admiration to the appointment of the British commissioner in 1920, a short while after the "Balfour Declaration". Aroch also remembered Lord Samuel's 1924 visit to "Bezalel", while he was a young student at the Jerusalem establishment. Here, in this oil-pastel drawing, Aroch returns to the Commissioner's figure in his formal uniforms with his cork hat on his knee, painting him above an anemone field, which also appears at the bottom of the Iraqi carpet ("Anemone" was the Hebrew nickname for the British during the national struggle since the 1940s). However, instead of the two blue-red bands he added to the right a man’s profile in red and blue. Red and blue are two significant colors in Aroch's work: they signify the emotional tension between warmth and cold, passion and rationalism, while at the same time they are popular colors among uniforms and national flags – symbols of authority. Aroch's paintings never ceased to tackle paternal authority, a dialogue the artist never solved throughout his entire life. Here the father figure has converted into the Commissioner figure, while the red-blue profile (a common motif in Aroch's work at that time) observes from above as if it were "a big brother", or better yet – "a big father". Not by chance, a later pastel painting from 1971 will return to this structure of the High Commissioner oil painting, but instead of the commissioner we will see the artist's father – Haim Niselvitz… This small painting of the High Commissioner is indeed a rare gem among Aroch's works, which also deserves notice because of the extensive pedantry and sensitivity the artist dedicated to designing the lines and the colors. In any case, if Aroch's High Commissioner paintings owe tribute to the “Pop Art” of Jasper Johns (flags) and Andy Warhol (leaders, duplications), they nevertheless reaffirm a subjective, private world that has nothing to do with undermining "culture heroes".

We are grateful to Gideon Ofrat for the above catalogue note