Nostalgia Sunday – Sali Ariel’s Tel Aviv Bauhaus

March 29, 2009 - 5:27 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel 

As Tel Aviv’s centennial gets underway and the weather warms up, more and more festive events will be held to celebrate the occasion. One of these happened last night, when the Rozin Center Gallery opened the season with an exhibition of works by painter Sali Ariel.

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Originally from the States, Sali was a long-time Jerusalemite who made the move to Tel Aviv over a decade ago. As she got to know her new home, she noticed it was changing before her eyes. “I started seeing the Ramat Gan business district going up and all the big tall buildings on Rothschild Boulevard and while I don’t think that’s bad, I was afraid we would forget how Tel Aviv looked. I also felt inevitably, Tel Aviv had to change but I didn’t know if it was for better or for worse. I wanted to document it for people in the future so they would know how Tel Aviv was in our time.”

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Ariel feels she looked at Tel Aviv as an outsider, “because I had just moved from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv seemed to have a bright happy fun look about it. And maybe for that reason I didn’t see the trash and crumbliness, because I was comparing it to the serious and the grayness of Jerusalem, which I also love and think is beautiful, but very different.”

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Ariel started out wandering Yarkon Park and trying to sketch the natural surroundings. “But whenever I started to paint trees there were buildings peeking out form behind. And when i started to paint buildings, shockingly, a lot of what i saw was green leafy stuff — they was sort of inseparable, the two.”

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Ariel was not a Bauhaus aficionado when she started working on this theme. “I was just doing buildings that looked nice to me. And then i was offered an exhibit at the Bauhaus Center and have had several exhibits since then. It also turns out that many of the building that I like are Bauhaus — but not all. Some of them are the older buildings in what’s called oriental or eclectic style.”

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More works can be viewed at Sali Ariel’s website and the current exhibit will be on display at the Rozin Center Gallery in Ramat Aviv until April 22.

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Nostalgia Sunday

July 6, 2008 - 4:06 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Profiles 

My mother’s uncle, Zvi Zinkin, was a painter. Not a famous one, except in our family lore. Dod Zvi and Doda Batya, as we knew them, were among the many eccentrics that called Tel Aviv home and made it a city like no other. They were elderly, agoraphobic, hard-of-hearing vegetarians when we met them in the 1970s, making their own watery beet juice and salt-free noodles (this was before veggie food was popular or palatable), composing poetry and melodies for Batya to dance, Isadora Duncan-style, around a living room embellished with wall murals of Zvi shaking hands with Moses, Herzl and Jabotinsky in the heavenly Jerusalem. Zvi’s true loves – Batya and the Land of Israel – were expressed through his paintings, some of which were handed down to my sisters and me.
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 1
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 2
One of Zvi’s recurring themes was the Yarkon River, usually depicting himself and Batya in a rowboat, or sometimes with just a solitary rower. He was also fascinated by the Reading Power Station. In these paintings, Reading’s distinguishing characteristic, the smokestack, has apparently not yet been erected.
Zvi Zinkin - Reading Power Station
Zvi Zinkin - Reading Power Station 2
Both Batya and my mother died aroud the same time, in 1975, and Zvi passed away a few years later. (I imagine the apartment went to people who scraped and plastered over the wall murals – I’ve never had the guts to go and check). My father, sisters and I managed to visit him only once, in 1976 – and it wasn’t easy to arrange. Zvi didn’t have a phone or couldn’t hear the phone – I was never clear on the details – so you had to send a postcard telling him about your plans to visit. Also, our relatives warned us that he’d become even more peculiar since Batya’s death. “He made a life-sized statue out of her old clothes and paper mache, and he talks to it,” they told my dad chillingly. “The girls will be frightened.” Actually, it was both Batya and Theodore Herzl, sitting opposite one another at the folding table, with a tape recorder of Batya playing the piano and singing. Somehow, though, it wasn’t really scary. It just was what it was: art and life, one and the same.

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