Michael Gross

Bertha Urdang, Rina Gallery, New York
Gifted by Mr. and Mrs. Lee Turner (acquired from the above in 1973)

New York, The Jewish Museum, Artists of Israel: 1920-1980, 1981, n.n.
Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Retrospective of Michael Gross, 1992-93, no. 150, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Oil on canvas, not lined. Surface in generally good condition, colors are bright and fresh. Some areas of craquelure visible inherent to areas of thickly applied paint. Minor surface dirt visible in whites at lower half of the picture.
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The house is a pivotal motif in the work of Michael Gross from the 1960s and 1970s, a magnificent period during which he repeatedly painted in his minimalist-abstract style the facades of House and Blue Shutter (1965), Small Window and roof (1969), Roof and Window (1970), Roof and Wall in the Sun (1971) and more. The essence of a house – a façade of a wall and a window – represented for Gross – one of Israel’s most important abstract artists who implemented a rare sensitivity with his forms and materials – an emotional return to a suppressed mental image, the painful event of losing his childhood house in Migdal, a village near the Sea of Galilee, during the “Arab riots” at the end of the 1930s: “The memory of the childhood home gets interpreted in accordance with the artist’s needs, as he rebuilds it anew time and again in order to re-enter the warmth and security it suffuses…” (Mordechai Omer, Michael Gross, 1993, page 45). This current painting, formerly included in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, belongs to the series of Jerusalem houses paintings, in which Gross is occupied with the relationship of the wall and black window, primarily throughout the religious neighborhoods of the city (Mea Shearim, Sheary Hessed, etc.). Gross resided in Jerusalem between 1936 and 1940, during which time his childhood house was burnt (1936) and his father died (1939). This Jerusalem, to which he returned in his paintings since the 1960s, bore, apart from the gloomy echo of loss, the memories of synagogues and the transcendentalism of the spirit and the secret – all silently reflected in the relations between the forms and colors of the paintings of facades. One of these paintings is the work Roof and Window (from the Israel Museum collection) – a vertical paintings divided in two parts: its upper part is covered with orange and its lower part contains a black rectangular window, slightly arched, in the middle of a white surface. While in most of this series the Mondrianesque tension between the rectangular window and the square wall prevails, this painting offered here of a façade in no-man’s land suggest a different formal tension, which is “a further stage in the voiding of the narrative elements from the picture […]. The window […] turns into a severe and violent brush-stroke which grows out of the vertical line (the line where the roof and the wall meet) and stops, leaving the quivering of the brush-strokes exposed to all eyes. This painting […] constitutes an artistic-spiritual  summation of the picture of the situation in Jerusalem, which Gross elevated and abstracted to the status of “the sublime of the terrible” (ibid, page 42). This remarkable painting is one of Gross’ most important works.

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