Naftali Bezem (1924-2018) – Lion of Judah / Candle-Lighting – Oil on Canvas

Naftali Bezem (1924-2018) – Lion of Judah / Candle-Lighting – Oil on Canvas
Naftali Bezem (1924-2918), Lion of Judah / Candle-Lighting.
Oil on canvas. Signed.
40.5X23 cm. Good condition.
Naftali Bezem (1924-2018), born in Essen, Germany, immigrated to Palestine in 1939 with the "Youth Aliyah" and during the years 1943-1946 studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art. His parents, who had remained in Germany, perished in the Holocaust. After graduating from Bezalel, he taught art at the detention camps in Cyprus. Then he lived several years in Paris, and upon his return to Israel, in 1952, worked as an artist of the Kibbutz Movement. Many of his works over the years dealt with the Holocaust, Aliyah and the revival of Israel, examining the Israeli public, social and political spheres. In 1957, he received the Dizengoff Prize, for his painting "In the Courtyard of the Third Temple", which he created in response to the Kafr Qasim massacre. In 1970, he was invited to paint the ceiling mural in the main reception room at the President's Residence, Jerusalem.
"Naftali Bezem was among the generation of Israeli artists whose personality formed during the days of tension and unrest, the pioneering spirit, the striving for political independence, the War of Independence and the days of 'People in a Dream' of the establishment of the state. This is the rock from which he was hewn; this is the foundation of his social persona; this is the secret of his being rooted in the homeland and the layer of society that strives for progress; this is the secret of his devotion to the views of the country and its building. Yet the roots of his soul are deeply embedded in the base of the Jewish environment in the Diaspora, in the home of father and mother, who never got to immigrate to the hoped-for land […] he held on to a series of symbols, which might imply Jewish elements, to trigger associations of the Jewish town and its past life, and to serve as kind of an optical-visual escort for the lament for the Jewish home that was lost. Mute, slaughtered fish, the crying Lion of Judah, the traditional candlesticks and other daily artifacts from the Jewish house and the like appear in most of his pictures – individually or in tandem, implicitly or explicitly; all this to inspire the picture and its observer with an atmosphere of remembrance and lament". (from: Naftali Bezem [Hebrew], by Zvi Zohar. Published by "Sifriyat Poalim", [1966]; enclosed).