In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Salomon shifted his style frequently throughout his early years in Israel, experimenting with a variety of media and styles. By 1958 a new generation of artists further “infused abstraction with symbolic, semi-figurative, at times surrealistic content expressing pessimistic and even tragic views of the human condition”.[15] This set the stage for figures to re-enter Israeli art expressing Holocaust traumas and existential content, a trend that was similar to the Likrat/”Towards” movement of Israeli poetry spearheaded by Natan Zach. Zach and Salomon were colleagues. Salomon embraced Zach’s zeitgeist in his artwork upon his 1961 arrival to Israel, particularly in the march of distorted, ghostly figures in his black and white Holocaust.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Salomon also used symbols and strategic titles for his works; for example, Last Journey portrays the defeated individual (a bull) being dragged away by the many (several horses), a wrenching acknowledgement that, after the world forces conflict and war upon its peoples, at the end of the journey even the vitality of a ferocious bull is extinguished.
Israeli art historian Haim Finkelstein states that “Surrealism is a collapse of the given.”[14] It is humanity recreating reality. One might say that creating human art is the act of creation in the image of God, and in Surrealism the artist is creating from the space of subconscious desires. Salomon embraced his artistic process as a means to channel his unconscious, exploring violence, desire and basic instincts, and probing very raw (and at times harsh) human realities.
Salomon shifted his style frequently throughout his early years in Israel, experimenting with a variety of media and styles. By 1958 a new generation of artists further “infused abstraction with symbolic, semi-figurative, at times surrealistic content expressing pessimistic and even tragic views of the human condition”.[15] This set the stage for figures to re-enter Israeli art expressing Holocaust traumas and existential content, a trend that was similar to the Likrat/”Towards” movement of Israeli poetry spearheaded by Natan Zach. Zach and Salomon were colleagues. Salomon embraced Zach’s zeitgeist in his artwork upon his 1961 arrival to Israel, particularly in the march of distorted, ghostly figures in his black and white Holocaust.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Portraits were Shoah artists’ means to resist dehumanization and the wiping-out of individuality.[10] In the late 50s, Salomon was still trying to capture the individuals affected by the Shoah and the impact it had on their continued existence after the War. Often the dominant colors are dark, subjects’ skins a ghostly white and their eyes vacant. Pain and loss seem to overflow from these portraits. Salomon continued with portraiture for some time. He tried to capture his aged grandmother, who was burdened with sadness and exhaustion from a trying lifetime. Salomon pictured his father younger, with defiant eyes and still with the vigor of a strong body and soul.
In 1957-58, Salomon was a participant in the international competition concerning the design of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Auschwitz, Poland – where interestingly his nationality was only marked as ‘Jewish’, not Romanian. Antisemitism remained strong in Romania, even after the 1944 Battle of Romania in World War II, wherein the Soviet Union defeated Axis (German and Romanian) forces in the area, forcing the Germans back into Hungary; as well as after the December 1947 Communist declaration of the People’s Republic of Romania.
Throughout the late 1950s, Salomon worked on many paintings stored in his home studio in Cluj. Generally, his mother did not intervene in his art and its subject matter, despite the ominous, antisemitic environment in which Salomon was becoming a young man, and the potential dangers of any creative license taken on the canvas. One afternoon Salomon was moved to paint by the riverfront. He painted the sun a deep (un-Naturalist) red. A passerby, having seen this act of stylistic insurrection, apparently informed the Communist officials. Without knowing authorities were on their way, Salomon’s mother visited her son in his studio to see the paintings he was working on. One canvas had a soldier figure portrayed in a negative light, and she gently suggested to young Edwin that he paint a Nazi swastika on the soldier’s sleeve, so that no Communist viewers might get the wrong idea about Salomon’s loyalties to the regime. Salomon took his mother’s advice, and did add the swastika. Whenofficials indeed visited Salomon at his studio and saw this painting with the swastika addition, they felt that Salomon was clearly loyal to the Communist party and its hatred of the Germans. The officials who had been tipped off about this young renegade quickly dismissed the report and moved on to their next subject. Salomon recalled, “That trivial addition to the picture, introduced at my mother’s behest, saved my life. All the same, her request was a puzzle to me, and remains such.”[11]
Salomon was not exposed to much modern art during his master studies at the Institute, due to the restrictions and censorship of the Communists. Salomon wanted to tap into foundational Surrealist philosophies and concepts; to freely depict basic universal drives of the existential human condition, and to release subdued yearnings onto his canvases. However, as Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat (born 1945) postulates, there cannot ever be a true Jewish Surrealism due to the strong Jewish grounding in:
“…allegories derived from anxiety and a ‘dangerous mental energy’ (as [A. B.] Yehoshua himself put it), which symbolize the psyche of both the individual and the nation as a whole. In those allegories, the absurd element represents Jewish existence in Israel as a neurotic, abnormal existence, rooted in the perennial conflict between fathers (the fathers’ generation) and their offspring (the sons’ generation). The imposition of authority on the fathers’ side, and its repression and rejection on the sons’ side, underline the neurotic existence of the individual and the nation. The surrealistic situation is vastly different. Surrealism is the divestment of neurosis, the release of pressure and oppression; it involves the smashing of the authoritative super-ego (divestment of the social ethos). There is no expression of the conflict between fathers and sons in the surrealistic situation, which is mostly the situation of emancipated, rebellious sons.”[12]
There is no true release from dissonance and anxious pressure in Jewish Surrealism, as the dream, unconscious, and irrational focus of Surrealism would call for.
Narratives of the memories of the Jewish people are almost always present on the canvas of a Jewish artist. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks declared that “to be a Jew is to have a sense of memory.”[13] Jewish culture has no existence without memory. Salomon, in his animal jungle, is not always commenting on history, but he cannot escape embedded Jewish memories of discrimination, oppression, and death in fascist and then communist Romania.
Surrealism embraces a total freeing of the irrational subconscious, legitimizing its hallucinations and passions, however absurd they may be. The spurning of Surrealism in Jewish Israel is the result of a perspective that refuses to accept the concept of a fully irrational, illogical, absurd cosmos. Quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists are truly symbolists, communicating messages of memory and not breaking fully from reality. The imperative of the Hebrew word zachor, ‘remember,’ is mentioned more than twenty-five times in the Tanakh; the Jewish people are repeatedly commanded to remember. Whereas Breton views memory as the ultimate enemy of dream, an unwanted hindrance on the freedom of the dream world, The works of quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists from Chagall to Bergner to Bak inevitably reflect Jewish remembrance. Memories of history and remembrance of past tragedies made it impossible for artists of this tradition, in this milieu, to become true Surrealists.
Salomon also used symbols and strategic titles for his works; for example, Last Journey portrays the defeated individual (a bull) being dragged away by the many (several horses), a wrenching acknowledgement that, after the world forces conflict and war upon its peoples, at the end of the journey even the vitality of a ferocious bull is extinguished.
Israeli art historian Haim Finkelstein states that “Surrealism is a collapse of the given.”[14] It is humanity recreating reality. One might say that creating human art is the act of creation in the image of God, and in Surrealism the artist is creating from the space of subconscious desires. Salomon embraced his artistic process as a means to channel his unconscious, exploring violence, desire and basic instincts, and probing very raw (and at times harsh) human realities.
Salomon shifted his style frequently throughout his early years in Israel, experimenting with a variety of media and styles. By 1958 a new generation of artists further “infused abstraction with symbolic, semi-figurative, at times surrealistic content expressing pessimistic and even tragic views of the human condition”.[15] This set the stage for figures to re-enter Israeli art expressing Holocaust traumas and existential content, a trend that was similar to the Likrat/”Towards” movement of Israeli poetry spearheaded by Natan Zach. Zach and Salomon were colleagues. Salomon embraced Zach’s zeitgeist in his artwork upon his 1961 arrival to Israel, particularly in the march of distorted, ghostly figures in his black and white Holocaust.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Jackie Frankel Yaakov
“I am not in the habit of depicting animals in human form; on the contrary, I seek to comprehend mankind by means of animals. I query the aphorism that ‘man stands above the beast’, and I can only regret that mankind has forfeited the beautiful likeness of the beasts.” –Edwin Salomon
Abstract
Edwin Salomon (1935-2014) was a Jewish Israeli painter who was not afraid to embrace his own expressionistic, Surrealism-evoking style on the margins of the Israeli art world at the heights of Israeli conceptual and abstract art movements. His fringe immigrant voice sheds light on why Jewish Israeli art can never embrace the full measure of true Surrealism due to its hints of memory and hope intertwined on the canvas of the subconscious. Salomon escaped death by the Nazis as a boy, and the Communist regime as a young man in Romania, eventually settling in Holon, Israel where he was finally able to find his powerful voice through painting animals in a quasi-Surrealistic and existential style. There was no true Surrealism in Israeli art in the twentieth century. Surrealism was emancipation from stress and persecution, while in the young Israeli state allegories were gleaned from anxiety and the intense mental energy of the individual and the national psyche. Salomon could not fully break from his abnormal reality in the wake of the Holocaust and while facing frequent wars and existential crises. His art’s sharp comments using animal imagery give textured and colored expression to both the evil and the hope for good in humanity.
Edwin Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: A Retrospective in honor of his 10th Yahrzeit
Edwin Salomon (1935-2014) was an Israeli painter who was not afraid to embrace his own expressionistic, quasi-Surrealist style on the margins of the Israeli art world at the heights of the Israeli conceptual and abstract art movements. Salomon’s fringe immigrant voice sheds light on why Jewish Israeli art could not embrace the full measure of true Surrealism. Surrealism wanted to completely disconnect from reality and plunge into dreams and the irrational, while Jewish Israeli art could never be disentangled from underpinnings of both the harsh memories and much-needed real hopes of its people intertwined on the canvas of the subconscious.
Salomon was born on February 3rd, 1935 in Ocna Mureș, a small town in Transylvania, to Jewish parents. On January 24th, 1941, the very night he was slated and dressed to be deported to Auschwitz, an uprising against the Nazis in Cluj, Romania saved him from execution. He then grew up under the Communist regime, studying at the Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca (today the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca) from 1951-57, and in his fourth year of studies, the National Museum of Art of Romania bought three of his paintings. Salomon graduated in June of 1957 with honors. He became nationally renowned in Romania, to the point that on his birthday, his name ran across the screen of the national television station[1].
In 1961 Salomon, with his parents, managed to get out of Communist Romania and immigrate to Israel, arriving at a Jewish immigrant absorption center in Ashkelon. When Edwin was asked what his profession was, he insisted his one and only profession was being a painter. The intake agents had trouble accepting this, asking him over and over again about his primary occupation before finally believing him.[2] At first, he had trouble finding his footing, or indeed any work as a painter in Israel. Salomon had come from very traditional European culture and artist training into the young and rough Israel of the 1960s.
Edwin’s relocation to Israel freed his artistic expression. He was able as a young man to begin to embrace his true, personal artistic expression and find a powerful voice through painting animals in an existential, subjective style. Edwin explored the wake of Cubism, German Realism, and Surrealism. No longer bound to the dogma of the required (or tolerated) Naturalism of the Communist Romania he trained in, Salomon flourished in his painting of abstract figures, and then quasi-Surrealist animals, using various techniques during different periods of his career. In 1965, he won the Nordau Prize for Art in Israel; he then continued his art training abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year. After his return to Israel, Edwin continued to teach art and still painted, living out his days with his wife and only son in Holon.
Over the decades, Salomon’s use of animals continued to make strong statements about the nature of man and beast. Salomon’s painting of animals was his attempt to comprehend mankind by means of animals – everything from the examination of human as beast, violence and sex, the destiny of the individual versus the group/herd/nation, motherhood, society losing sight of the dignity that can be found in animal nature, the drive and struggle for survival.[3] Salomon liked to use his artwork to explore these facets of human nature, and his art demands the viewer to think through his colors, textures and thrilling techniques. Salomon’s technique on canvas involved texture, through scraping, of layered oil and acrylic paints. Salomon’s paper works were done with oil colors, utilizing chemicals to create burst effects.
While he painted in many styles throughout his lifetime, from realistic portraits to quasi-Surrealist scenes, he had a passion for using animals to give expression to fundamental human traits. He often drew predators hunting their prey, evoking their hunting instincts and depicting the gore of their feasting – expressing his contemplations on man. Salomon stated, “I am not looking for human traits in animals. I regret that man has lost his animal dignity.”[4] Salomon’s Surrealistic animals, in a moment of abstraction in Israeli art, were counter-cultural.
Surrealism was emancipation from stress and persecution. Surrealist artists sought to explore the realm of the unconscious and dreams through their work, creating bizarre, dreamlike images that defied logical interpretation. At its core, Surrealism is characterized by three main themes: dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational. In the young State of Israel, artistic expression echoed with the anxiety and the intense mental energy of the individual and national psyche, following the existential threat of the Shoah, the War of Independence in 1948, and subsequent wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and beyond. Jews in Israel had to believe that they were meant to return to the Land of Israel, in order to hold onto hope. “In other words, the rejection of Surrealism in Israel is a function of a very profound [Jewish] archetype that rejects all manner of irrational cosmic paradoxicalism.”[5] New Jewish existence in Israel was plagued by neurosis and pressure, some of which Salomon’s art grapples with in an attempt to understand our perplexing world; taking liberties with depicting human/animal Surrealist hybridity, with themes of mourning, remembrance and hope all at play.
Salomon comes out of a specific moment, though he was not a part of its zeitgeist. His internal struggles, of being at times a misunderstood immigrant, are also dealt with in his art. He was a solitary island of sorts, a respected marginality, and his career can help us understand why quasi-Surrealism was never embraced in the Jewish Israeli art scene. Salomon infuses much symbolism and many messages of memory in his art. His art’s sharp commentary helps us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be human – both the evil in humanity and the hope for good in humanity. Salomon believed in the power of art to educate the public, existing as it does beyond the bounds of self and language. He regarded painting as an influential vehicle for social change, having the power to turn pictorial horrors into comments on reality. Surrealism finds as its ultimate goal the dream, the escape from reality. Salomon cannot escape from reality, not even in his fantastical animal world. In that alternate universe, he looks critically at the world, at humans, at human psychology and interpersonal behavior. He turns fantasy into reality, or at least a critique and questioning of reality. He brings the spectator into a dialogue with the subject matter, his ultimate goal being to ask the viewer to think about the state of the world and his/her place therein through his ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art world.
The Salomon of Romania: From the Shoah to the Communist Regime
Artist, survivor and partisan Alexander Bogen declared, “To be creative during the Holocaust was also a protest. Each man when standing face to face with cruel danger, with death, reacts in his own way. The artist reacts in an artistic way. This is his weapon…”.[6] Many artists who lived through the Holocaust used art to document hardship, as a tool of survival and testimony and a means of maintaining sanity and reflecting external and internal realities. It was hard to make sense of the fact that ostensibly civilized human beings in real places were using modern technology for mass murder on an industrial scale. From January 20-24, 1941, a rebellion of the Romanian militant revolutionary fascist movement (and political party) Iron Guard, whose members were known as Legionnaires, occurred in Bucharest, Romania.[7] Salomon was a young boy on the evening that the Jews of his small home village outside of Cluj were slated to be rounded up to go to Auschwitz. However, that very night saw the Iron Guard uprising in Bucharest. One of Salomon’s paintings that the National Museum of Art of Romania bought in 1955, his fourth year of studies at the Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca, dealt with the rounding up of Jews and exodus from shtetls that Salomon himself never had to experience, titled in resistance This Shall Not Happen Again.
Salomon’s Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca graduation project was a portrait of himself as a 5-year-old boy on the night he was meant to be taken away by the Nazis.
As the Iron Guard’s privileges were being diminished by the Romanian dictator Conducător Ion Antonescu during an internal power struggle, the Legionnaires moved to revolt. During the rebellion, and the pogrom in its wake, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews, and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels. The Bucharest pogrom was not a side effect of the rebellion, but a parallel event, purposefully organized to give legitimacy to the rebellion and to equate the Legionnaires’ opponents with Jewish sympathizers. On 23 January, a few hours before the rebellion was thwarted, a group of Legionnaires selected 15 Jews at random. They took them in trucks to the local slaughterhouse and shot them. Five of the Jews, including a 5-year-old girl (the same age as Salomon), were hung on the slaughterhouse’s hooks, still alive, and tortured.[8] Salomon captured in Étude – Sleepless Night the innocent sleep of his 5-year-old self that night, properly dressed by his parents for their anticipated rounding-up by the Nazis, against the chaotic abyss of darkness on the canvas background. The harsh and distraught strokes almost devour the child, symbolizing all the gruesome, antisemitic violence going on in Romania’s capital that day, which ultimately led to Salomon being passed over by the Nazis. Salomon recalled:
“One night, I was walking the deserted streets of Cluj, hastening my strides so as to get home quickly. In one of the alleyways, a light was shining from a basement flat. My curiosity overcoming me, I peeped inside to see a child slumped over the table, dressed in a cap and coat as though prepared at any moment to sally out into the cold street; however, something strange about his posture made me realize that he was asleep. That brought to mind the late hours of one night, when I was a child in this township: it was beyond my comprehension why my parents put me to bed in my clothes. I learned the reason when I grew older. My family, and other families picked out by lot, had been designated for execution the following day. All the town’s Jews proclaimed a fast. In our home likewise, the members of my family all waited in tense expectation of what lay ahead. They sat at the table, without so much as touching food. That precise night – I recall the date clearly, it was January 24, 1941 – there was a palace coup d’état. The “Iron Guards”, who identified with the Nazis, suffered a resounding defeat. Our execution was put off. We were saved.
I continued to regard that child for a long time. I returned home and went to the studio, to paint that dreadful night, that night which was unlike all other nights, that sleepless night and the small child within it. That was my graduation project at the academy.”[9]
Portraits were Shoah artists’ means to resist dehumanization and the wiping-out of individuality.[10] In the late 50s, Salomon was still trying to capture the individuals affected by the Shoah and the impact it had on their continued existence after the War. Often the dominant colors are dark, subjects’ skins a ghostly white and their eyes vacant. Pain and loss seem to overflow from these portraits. Salomon continued with portraiture for some time. He tried to capture his aged grandmother, who was burdened with sadness and exhaustion from a trying lifetime. Salomon pictured his father younger, with defiant eyes and still with the vigor of a strong body and soul.
In 1957-58, Salomon was a participant in the international competition concerning the design of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Auschwitz, Poland – where interestingly his nationality was only marked as ‘Jewish’, not Romanian. Antisemitism remained strong in Romania, even after the 1944 Battle of Romania in World War II, wherein the Soviet Union defeated Axis (German and Romanian) forces in the area, forcing the Germans back into Hungary; as well as after the December 1947 Communist declaration of the People’s Republic of Romania.
Throughout the late 1950s, Salomon worked on many paintings stored in his home studio in Cluj. Generally, his mother did not intervene in his art and its subject matter, despite the ominous, antisemitic environment in which Salomon was becoming a young man, and the potential dangers of any creative license taken on the canvas. One afternoon Salomon was moved to paint by the riverfront. He painted the sun a deep (un-Naturalist) red. A passerby, having seen this act of stylistic insurrection, apparently informed the Communist officials. Without knowing authorities were on their way, Salomon’s mother visited her son in his studio to see the paintings he was working on. One canvas had a soldier figure portrayed in a negative light, and she gently suggested to young Edwin that he paint a Nazi swastika on the soldier’s sleeve, so that no Communist viewers might get the wrong idea about Salomon’s loyalties to the regime. Salomon took his mother’s advice, and did add the swastika. Whenofficials indeed visited Salomon at his studio and saw this painting with the swastika addition, they felt that Salomon was clearly loyal to the Communist party and its hatred of the Germans. The officials who had been tipped off about this young renegade quickly dismissed the report and moved on to their next subject. Salomon recalled, “That trivial addition to the picture, introduced at my mother’s behest, saved my life. All the same, her request was a puzzle to me, and remains such.”[11]
Salomon was not exposed to much modern art during his master studies at the Institute, due to the restrictions and censorship of the Communists. Salomon wanted to tap into foundational Surrealist philosophies and concepts; to freely depict basic universal drives of the existential human condition, and to release subdued yearnings onto his canvases. However, as Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat (born 1945) postulates, there cannot ever be a true Jewish Surrealism due to the strong Jewish grounding in:
“…allegories derived from anxiety and a ‘dangerous mental energy’ (as [A. B.] Yehoshua himself put it), which symbolize the psyche of both the individual and the nation as a whole. In those allegories, the absurd element represents Jewish existence in Israel as a neurotic, abnormal existence, rooted in the perennial conflict between fathers (the fathers’ generation) and their offspring (the sons’ generation). The imposition of authority on the fathers’ side, and its repression and rejection on the sons’ side, underline the neurotic existence of the individual and the nation. The surrealistic situation is vastly different. Surrealism is the divestment of neurosis, the release of pressure and oppression; it involves the smashing of the authoritative super-ego (divestment of the social ethos). There is no expression of the conflict between fathers and sons in the surrealistic situation, which is mostly the situation of emancipated, rebellious sons.”[12]
There is no true release from dissonance and anxious pressure in Jewish Surrealism, as the dream, unconscious, and irrational focus of Surrealism would call for.
Narratives of the memories of the Jewish people are almost always present on the canvas of a Jewish artist. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks declared that “to be a Jew is to have a sense of memory.”[13] Jewish culture has no existence without memory. Salomon, in his animal jungle, is not always commenting on history, but he cannot escape embedded Jewish memories of discrimination, oppression, and death in fascist and then communist Romania.
Surrealism embraces a total freeing of the irrational subconscious, legitimizing its hallucinations and passions, however absurd they may be. The spurning of Surrealism in Jewish Israel is the result of a perspective that refuses to accept the concept of a fully irrational, illogical, absurd cosmos. Quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists are truly symbolists, communicating messages of memory and not breaking fully from reality. The imperative of the Hebrew word zachor, ‘remember,’ is mentioned more than twenty-five times in the Tanakh; the Jewish people are repeatedly commanded to remember. Whereas Breton views memory as the ultimate enemy of dream, an unwanted hindrance on the freedom of the dream world, The works of quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists from Chagall to Bergner to Bak inevitably reflect Jewish remembrance. Memories of history and remembrance of past tragedies made it impossible for artists of this tradition, in this milieu, to become true Surrealists.
Salomon also used symbols and strategic titles for his works; for example, Last Journey portrays the defeated individual (a bull) being dragged away by the many (several horses), a wrenching acknowledgement that, after the world forces conflict and war upon its peoples, at the end of the journey even the vitality of a ferocious bull is extinguished.
Israeli art historian Haim Finkelstein states that “Surrealism is a collapse of the given.”[14] It is humanity recreating reality. One might say that creating human art is the act of creation in the image of God, and in Surrealism the artist is creating from the space of subconscious desires. Salomon embraced his artistic process as a means to channel his unconscious, exploring violence, desire and basic instincts, and probing very raw (and at times harsh) human realities.
Salomon shifted his style frequently throughout his early years in Israel, experimenting with a variety of media and styles. By 1958 a new generation of artists further “infused abstraction with symbolic, semi-figurative, at times surrealistic content expressing pessimistic and even tragic views of the human condition”.[15] This set the stage for figures to re-enter Israeli art expressing Holocaust traumas and existential content, a trend that was similar to the Likrat/”Towards” movement of Israeli poetry spearheaded by Natan Zach. Zach and Salomon were colleagues. Salomon embraced Zach’s zeitgeist in his artwork upon his 1961 arrival to Israel, particularly in the march of distorted, ghostly figures in his black and white Holocaust.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
Jackie Frankel Yaakov
“I am not in the habit of depicting animals in human form; on the contrary, I seek to comprehend mankind by means of animals. I query the aphorism that ‘man stands above the beast’, and I can only regret that mankind has forfeited the beautiful likeness of the beasts.” –Edwin Salomon
Abstract
Edwin Salomon (1935-2014) was a Jewish Israeli painter who was not afraid to embrace his own expressionistic, Surrealism-evoking style on the margins of the Israeli art world at the heights of Israeli conceptual and abstract art movements. His fringe immigrant voice sheds light on why Jewish Israeli art can never embrace the full measure of true Surrealism due to its hints of memory and hope intertwined on the canvas of the subconscious. Salomon escaped death by the Nazis as a boy, and the Communist regime as a young man in Romania, eventually settling in Holon, Israel where he was finally able to find his powerful voice through painting animals in a quasi-Surrealistic and existential style. There was no true Surrealism in Israeli art in the twentieth century. Surrealism was emancipation from stress and persecution, while in the young Israeli state allegories were gleaned from anxiety and the intense mental energy of the individual and the national psyche. Salomon could not fully break from his abnormal reality in the wake of the Holocaust and while facing frequent wars and existential crises. His art’s sharp comments using animal imagery give textured and colored expression to both the evil and the hope for good in humanity.
Edwin Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: A Retrospective in honor of his 10th Yahrzeit
Edwin Salomon (1935-2014) was an Israeli painter who was not afraid to embrace his own expressionistic, quasi-Surrealist style on the margins of the Israeli art world at the heights of the Israeli conceptual and abstract art movements. Salomon’s fringe immigrant voice sheds light on why Jewish Israeli art could not embrace the full measure of true Surrealism. Surrealism wanted to completely disconnect from reality and plunge into dreams and the irrational, while Jewish Israeli art could never be disentangled from underpinnings of both the harsh memories and much-needed real hopes of its people intertwined on the canvas of the subconscious.
Salomon was born on February 3rd, 1935 in Ocna Mureș, a small town in Transylvania, to Jewish parents. On January 24th, 1941, the very night he was slated and dressed to be deported to Auschwitz, an uprising against the Nazis in Cluj, Romania saved him from execution. He then grew up under the Communist regime, studying at the Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca (today the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca) from 1951-57, and in his fourth year of studies, the National Museum of Art of Romania bought three of his paintings. Salomon graduated in June of 1957 with honors. He became nationally renowned in Romania, to the point that on his birthday, his name ran across the screen of the national television station[1].
In 1961 Salomon, with his parents, managed to get out of Communist Romania and immigrate to Israel, arriving at a Jewish immigrant absorption center in Ashkelon. When Edwin was asked what his profession was, he insisted his one and only profession was being a painter. The intake agents had trouble accepting this, asking him over and over again about his primary occupation before finally believing him.[2] At first, he had trouble finding his footing, or indeed any work as a painter in Israel. Salomon had come from very traditional European culture and artist training into the young and rough Israel of the 1960s.
Edwin’s relocation to Israel freed his artistic expression. He was able as a young man to begin to embrace his true, personal artistic expression and find a powerful voice through painting animals in an existential, subjective style. Edwin explored the wake of Cubism, German Realism, and Surrealism. No longer bound to the dogma of the required (or tolerated) Naturalism of the Communist Romania he trained in, Salomon flourished in his painting of abstract figures, and then quasi-Surrealist animals, using various techniques during different periods of his career. In 1965, he won the Nordau Prize for Art in Israel; he then continued his art training abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year. After his return to Israel, Edwin continued to teach art and still painted, living out his days with his wife and only son in Holon.
Over the decades, Salomon’s use of animals continued to make strong statements about the nature of man and beast. Salomon’s painting of animals was his attempt to comprehend mankind by means of animals – everything from the examination of human as beast, violence and sex, the destiny of the individual versus the group/herd/nation, motherhood, society losing sight of the dignity that can be found in animal nature, the drive and struggle for survival.[3] Salomon liked to use his artwork to explore these facets of human nature, and his art demands the viewer to think through his colors, textures and thrilling techniques. Salomon’s technique on canvas involved texture, through scraping, of layered oil and acrylic paints. Salomon’s paper works were done with oil colors, utilizing chemicals to create burst effects.
While he painted in many styles throughout his lifetime, from realistic portraits to quasi-Surrealist scenes, he had a passion for using animals to give expression to fundamental human traits. He often drew predators hunting their prey, evoking their hunting instincts and depicting the gore of their feasting – expressing his contemplations on man. Salomon stated, “I am not looking for human traits in animals. I regret that man has lost his animal dignity.”[4] Salomon’s Surrealistic animals, in a moment of abstraction in Israeli art, were counter-cultural.
Surrealism was emancipation from stress and persecution. Surrealist artists sought to explore the realm of the unconscious and dreams through their work, creating bizarre, dreamlike images that defied logical interpretation. At its core, Surrealism is characterized by three main themes: dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational. In the young State of Israel, artistic expression echoed with the anxiety and the intense mental energy of the individual and national psyche, following the existential threat of the Shoah, the War of Independence in 1948, and subsequent wars in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and beyond. Jews in Israel had to believe that they were meant to return to the Land of Israel, in order to hold onto hope. “In other words, the rejection of Surrealism in Israel is a function of a very profound [Jewish] archetype that rejects all manner of irrational cosmic paradoxicalism.”[5] New Jewish existence in Israel was plagued by neurosis and pressure, some of which Salomon’s art grapples with in an attempt to understand our perplexing world; taking liberties with depicting human/animal Surrealist hybridity, with themes of mourning, remembrance and hope all at play.
Salomon comes out of a specific moment, though he was not a part of its zeitgeist. His internal struggles, of being at times a misunderstood immigrant, are also dealt with in his art. He was a solitary island of sorts, a respected marginality, and his career can help us understand why quasi-Surrealism was never embraced in the Jewish Israeli art scene. Salomon infuses much symbolism and many messages of memory in his art. His art’s sharp commentary helps us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be human – both the evil in humanity and the hope for good in humanity. Salomon believed in the power of art to educate the public, existing as it does beyond the bounds of self and language. He regarded painting as an influential vehicle for social change, having the power to turn pictorial horrors into comments on reality. Surrealism finds as its ultimate goal the dream, the escape from reality. Salomon cannot escape from reality, not even in his fantastical animal world. In that alternate universe, he looks critically at the world, at humans, at human psychology and interpersonal behavior. He turns fantasy into reality, or at least a critique and questioning of reality. He brings the spectator into a dialogue with the subject matter, his ultimate goal being to ask the viewer to think about the state of the world and his/her place therein through his ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art world.
The Salomon of Romania: From the Shoah to the Communist Regime
Artist, survivor and partisan Alexander Bogen declared, “To be creative during the Holocaust was also a protest. Each man when standing face to face with cruel danger, with death, reacts in his own way. The artist reacts in an artistic way. This is his weapon…”.[6] Many artists who lived through the Holocaust used art to document hardship, as a tool of survival and testimony and a means of maintaining sanity and reflecting external and internal realities. It was hard to make sense of the fact that ostensibly civilized human beings in real places were using modern technology for mass murder on an industrial scale. From January 20-24, 1941, a rebellion of the Romanian militant revolutionary fascist movement (and political party) Iron Guard, whose members were known as Legionnaires, occurred in Bucharest, Romania.[7] Salomon was a young boy on the evening that the Jews of his small home village outside of Cluj were slated to be rounded up to go to Auschwitz. However, that very night saw the Iron Guard uprising in Bucharest. One of Salomon’s paintings that the National Museum of Art of Romania bought in 1955, his fourth year of studies at the Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca, dealt with the rounding up of Jews and exodus from shtetls that Salomon himself never had to experience, titled in resistance This Shall Not Happen Again.
Salomon’s Institute for Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca graduation project was a portrait of himself as a 5-year-old boy on the night he was meant to be taken away by the Nazis.
As the Iron Guard’s privileges were being diminished by the Romanian dictator Conducător Ion Antonescu during an internal power struggle, the Legionnaires moved to revolt. During the rebellion, and the pogrom in its wake, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews, and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels. The Bucharest pogrom was not a side effect of the rebellion, but a parallel event, purposefully organized to give legitimacy to the rebellion and to equate the Legionnaires’ opponents with Jewish sympathizers. On 23 January, a few hours before the rebellion was thwarted, a group of Legionnaires selected 15 Jews at random. They took them in trucks to the local slaughterhouse and shot them. Five of the Jews, including a 5-year-old girl (the same age as Salomon), were hung on the slaughterhouse’s hooks, still alive, and tortured.[8] Salomon captured in Étude – Sleepless Night the innocent sleep of his 5-year-old self that night, properly dressed by his parents for their anticipated rounding-up by the Nazis, against the chaotic abyss of darkness on the canvas background. The harsh and distraught strokes almost devour the child, symbolizing all the gruesome, antisemitic violence going on in Romania’s capital that day, which ultimately led to Salomon being passed over by the Nazis. Salomon recalled:
“One night, I was walking the deserted streets of Cluj, hastening my strides so as to get home quickly. In one of the alleyways, a light was shining from a basement flat. My curiosity overcoming me, I peeped inside to see a child slumped over the table, dressed in a cap and coat as though prepared at any moment to sally out into the cold street; however, something strange about his posture made me realize that he was asleep. That brought to mind the late hours of one night, when I was a child in this township: it was beyond my comprehension why my parents put me to bed in my clothes. I learned the reason when I grew older. My family, and other families picked out by lot, had been designated for execution the following day. All the town’s Jews proclaimed a fast. In our home likewise, the members of my family all waited in tense expectation of what lay ahead. They sat at the table, without so much as touching food. That precise night – I recall the date clearly, it was January 24, 1941 – there was a palace coup d’état. The “Iron Guards”, who identified with the Nazis, suffered a resounding defeat. Our execution was put off. We were saved.
I continued to regard that child for a long time. I returned home and went to the studio, to paint that dreadful night, that night which was unlike all other nights, that sleepless night and the small child within it. That was my graduation project at the academy.”[9]
Portraits were Shoah artists’ means to resist dehumanization and the wiping-out of individuality.[10] In the late 50s, Salomon was still trying to capture the individuals affected by the Shoah and the impact it had on their continued existence after the War. Often the dominant colors are dark, subjects’ skins a ghostly white and their eyes vacant. Pain and loss seem to overflow from these portraits. Salomon continued with portraiture for some time. He tried to capture his aged grandmother, who was burdened with sadness and exhaustion from a trying lifetime. Salomon pictured his father younger, with defiant eyes and still with the vigor of a strong body and soul.
In 1957-58, Salomon was a participant in the international competition concerning the design of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Auschwitz, Poland – where interestingly his nationality was only marked as ‘Jewish’, not Romanian. Antisemitism remained strong in Romania, even after the 1944 Battle of Romania in World War II, wherein the Soviet Union defeated Axis (German and Romanian) forces in the area, forcing the Germans back into Hungary; as well as after the December 1947 Communist declaration of the People’s Republic of Romania.
Throughout the late 1950s, Salomon worked on many paintings stored in his home studio in Cluj. Generally, his mother did not intervene in his art and its subject matter, despite the ominous, antisemitic environment in which Salomon was becoming a young man, and the potential dangers of any creative license taken on the canvas. One afternoon Salomon was moved to paint by the riverfront. He painted the sun a deep (un-Naturalist) red. A passerby, having seen this act of stylistic insurrection, apparently informed the Communist officials. Without knowing authorities were on their way, Salomon’s mother visited her son in his studio to see the paintings he was working on. One canvas had a soldier figure portrayed in a negative light, and she gently suggested to young Edwin that he paint a Nazi swastika on the soldier’s sleeve, so that no Communist viewers might get the wrong idea about Salomon’s loyalties to the regime. Salomon took his mother’s advice, and did add the swastika. Whenofficials indeed visited Salomon at his studio and saw this painting with the swastika addition, they felt that Salomon was clearly loyal to the Communist party and its hatred of the Germans. The officials who had been tipped off about this young renegade quickly dismissed the report and moved on to their next subject. Salomon recalled, “That trivial addition to the picture, introduced at my mother’s behest, saved my life. All the same, her request was a puzzle to me, and remains such.”[11]
Salomon was not exposed to much modern art during his master studies at the Institute, due to the restrictions and censorship of the Communists. Salomon wanted to tap into foundational Surrealist philosophies and concepts; to freely depict basic universal drives of the existential human condition, and to release subdued yearnings onto his canvases. However, as Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat (born 1945) postulates, there cannot ever be a true Jewish Surrealism due to the strong Jewish grounding in:
“…allegories derived from anxiety and a ‘dangerous mental energy’ (as [A. B.] Yehoshua himself put it), which symbolize the psyche of both the individual and the nation as a whole. In those allegories, the absurd element represents Jewish existence in Israel as a neurotic, abnormal existence, rooted in the perennial conflict between fathers (the fathers’ generation) and their offspring (the sons’ generation). The imposition of authority on the fathers’ side, and its repression and rejection on the sons’ side, underline the neurotic existence of the individual and the nation. The surrealistic situation is vastly different. Surrealism is the divestment of neurosis, the release of pressure and oppression; it involves the smashing of the authoritative super-ego (divestment of the social ethos). There is no expression of the conflict between fathers and sons in the surrealistic situation, which is mostly the situation of emancipated, rebellious sons.”[12]
There is no true release from dissonance and anxious pressure in Jewish Surrealism, as the dream, unconscious, and irrational focus of Surrealism would call for.
Narratives of the memories of the Jewish people are almost always present on the canvas of a Jewish artist. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks declared that “to be a Jew is to have a sense of memory.”[13] Jewish culture has no existence without memory. Salomon, in his animal jungle, is not always commenting on history, but he cannot escape embedded Jewish memories of discrimination, oppression, and death in fascist and then communist Romania.
Surrealism embraces a total freeing of the irrational subconscious, legitimizing its hallucinations and passions, however absurd they may be. The spurning of Surrealism in Jewish Israel is the result of a perspective that refuses to accept the concept of a fully irrational, illogical, absurd cosmos. Quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists are truly symbolists, communicating messages of memory and not breaking fully from reality. The imperative of the Hebrew word zachor, ‘remember,’ is mentioned more than twenty-five times in the Tanakh; the Jewish people are repeatedly commanded to remember. Whereas Breton views memory as the ultimate enemy of dream, an unwanted hindrance on the freedom of the dream world, The works of quasi-Surrealist Jewish and Israeli artists from Chagall to Bergner to Bak inevitably reflect Jewish remembrance. Memories of history and remembrance of past tragedies made it impossible for artists of this tradition, in this milieu, to become true Surrealists.
Salomon also used symbols and strategic titles for his works; for example, Last Journey portrays the defeated individual (a bull) being dragged away by the many (several horses), a wrenching acknowledgement that, after the world forces conflict and war upon its peoples, at the end of the journey even the vitality of a ferocious bull is extinguished.
Israeli art historian Haim Finkelstein states that “Surrealism is a collapse of the given.”[14] It is humanity recreating reality. One might say that creating human art is the act of creation in the image of God, and in Surrealism the artist is creating from the space of subconscious desires. Salomon embraced his artistic process as a means to channel his unconscious, exploring violence, desire and basic instincts, and probing very raw (and at times harsh) human realities.
Salomon shifted his style frequently throughout his early years in Israel, experimenting with a variety of media and styles. By 1958 a new generation of artists further “infused abstraction with symbolic, semi-figurative, at times surrealistic content expressing pessimistic and even tragic views of the human condition”.[15] This set the stage for figures to re-enter Israeli art expressing Holocaust traumas and existential content, a trend that was similar to the Likrat/”Towards” movement of Israeli poetry spearheaded by Natan Zach. Zach and Salomon were colleagues. Salomon embraced Zach’s zeitgeist in his artwork upon his 1961 arrival to Israel, particularly in the march of distorted, ghostly figures in his black and white Holocaust.
Natan Zach’s “Likrat” focused on the anti-hero and social reject. Zach wrote a tremendous piece, “The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon,” that views Salomon’s animals as comprising a metaphoric, mythological language in and of themselves. The art of this generation was poetic and symbolically expressive of suffering and anxiety: the bitterness of human existence and its pained shared psyche full of troubled manifestations. This moment of Holocaust anxieties explored themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd in surreal situations. Salomon’s paintings, for example Wild Beasts and Cockfight, depict through animals the individual feeling powerless to control what is happening around and to them. However, it is not fully Surrealist art. Ofrat eloquently describes:
“Wherever you look in Jewish and Israeli quasi-Surrealism, it is not eros, the Id, or the body that dominates existence, but a consciousness frozen in the trauma of time, locked in the prison of memory.”[16]
Sadly, Jewish existential trauma leads to torturous memories, which Salomon confronts on his canvases in his animal jungle. His alienated roosters of Cockfight and fish of Wild Beasts are forced to fight and survive in the hands of cruel, wild gorilla and cat masters.
Art historian and critic Dalia Manor investigates the phenomenon that Holocaust-related subjects have been minimalized and marginalized in Israeli art. As with Israeli quasi-Surrealists Mordechai Ardon, Naftali Bezem, and Samuel Bak, Salomon’s symbolic, quasi-Surrealist visual language takes a hard look at the vicious side of humanity and its outcomes. Some human conduct that Salomon examines is influenced by faint childhood memories from the period of the Holocaust when Nazis displaced and dehumanized Jews; some is influenced by Communist violence and brutality seen as a young man (as portrayed in his Communist Torture, a portrait of Salomon’s friend); and as time goes on, some by the wars and existential anxieties of the young State of Israel. The Israeli art establishment was focused on form, not narrative, and language, not symbol. The taboo of the Holocaust was not of interest, but passé. Manor reflects that:
“…despite the wide acknowledgement of the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on life in contemporary Israel the subject remained relatively marginal in the art even within the context of relevant issues of anxiety and identity”.[17]
Inspired by Ardon, Bezem and Bak, upon his move to Israel in 1961, Salomon boldly worked to find his own language of signs and symbols, and also dealt with the taboo subject of the Holocaust. For example, Holocaust reflected directly on Nazi dehumanization tactics against Jews, a theme that would reverberate in Salomon’s artworks for decades. Through his unique animal imagery Salomon shows the rejected few in existential crisis brought on by the onlooking cruel masses and harsh officials of the regimes gawking at Jewish “otherness.” Salomon’s Bighorn, painted in 1980, shows an authority figure shepherding the masses up a treacherous mountain, with a smoky doom-filled sky of ashes alongside. Salomon’s use of marabou storks, rats, and fish schools reoccurs, shedding light on Salomon’s psychological distress around the stereotyping of exiled, frail, and/or submissive Jews, who in his memory were doomed to be persecuted and annihilated.
The Salomon of the Young State of Israel: A “Radicant” Art Immigrant Voice
Dorit Kedar (born 1948), an Israeli author and researcher specializing in gender and religion and longstanding colleague of Salomon’s and educator at HaMidrasha School of Art, recalls that Salomon loved classical Western culture and philosophy. He had trouble being understood in the local Israeli art scene, often on the outskirts of the dialogue on art of the HaMidrasha faculty he taught on for over a decade.[18] HaMidrasha attempted to educate its art students conceptually as “artists” and expected that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs. It was in this milieu that Salomon brought up a generation of sabra/native Israeli artists, from Haim Maor (who studied under him from 1961-68 and went on to be a full Professor of Art at Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) to Yigal Ozeri (a leading Photorealism painter now based in New York City). Regardless of his personal painting prowess and excellence as a mentor, Salomon still felt an odd man out, as he did not conform to the style of his colleagues. During the rise of conceptual art in Israel in the 1960s and 70s, art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object (some works of conceptual art may be produced by anyone following a set of written instructions), Salomon still focused on the fundamentals and excellence of technique in his own artwork.
Salomon honed his unique, animal-Surrealistic motif as an Israeli artist in the 1980s. In 1983 Salomon won the Prize for Creativity from the Beit Hatanach (Bible Museum), Tel Aviv – a venue primarily outside of the artistic circle that displays permanent exhibits depicting the times of our forefathers, but which also has temporary exhibits of art related to the bible, Judaism and the Land of Israel. Edwin and his contemporaries were encountering the Neo-Expressionism of the international scene and finding their own expressive modes of representation. Israeli artists from this era, such as Moshe Gershuni, tended to work with blood-red paint, as if renewing a blood-bound covenant with the Land. Salomon’s blood red, which runs throughout his decades of painting, including Prayers pictured here, have tinges of this theme in its hue. Here a pack of tigers roar to the abyss of the heavens in prayer. One tiger slightly stands out – an individual in contrasting, strong yellows against the pack. Only the tints of red and blue coming through the darkness of the background help distinguish the wider masses from endlessness beyond the canvas.
The 1980s were a transitional period for Israeli art, marking the beginning of contemporary art in Israel. There was a break away from the unity of formative ideas of Israeli identity as a new, robust generation of artists rose to the art scene. Professor of Visual Culture and Art History Dr. Yael Guilat calls the young artists in the 80s in Israel ‘The Turning Generation’ [דור המפנה]. Guilat explores how ‘The Turning Generation’ revealed a generation of artists who were forced to dismantle myths and break previous paradigms; a generation of young female artists who worked in a male-dominated field; a young generation that was accused of being reactionary and unsophisticated, but whose work was characterized by a strong and urgent artistic and political expression; a generation that acted in an unprecedented burst of energy, and for whom art was a multi-channel field of action, invention, protest, and disillusionment. The young artists that emerged from the beginning of the decade both shaped it and were shaped by it, as is reflected in changes that were made in the field of curation, in the medium field, and in the thematic-stylistic field. Looking at the multi-faceted portrait of the younger generation of artists who worked in the 1980s reveals the collapse of the imagined portrait of Israeli society.[19]
The energy of ‘The Turning Generation’ renewed Salomon’s inspiration. The 80s were a decade of tremendous output by Salomon and a push to participate in exhibitions, even at venues at the margins of the art scene of the time. The 1980s brought more private and public gallery spaces and alternative exhibition venues, which Salomon used as an opportunity to exhibit his works more often. This included his participation in several one-man shows in Israel, as well as group exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Like others of this time period who did not fit into the zeitgeist – the Israeli style of art Want of Matter [דלות החומר], which utilized meager creative materials to be socially critical – Salomon remained outside the mainstream and distinct from the definition of ‘Israeli art.’ Despite that fact, Salomon wanted to be responsible for the public seeing his own art, instead of waiting for a curator to discover him, and successfully exhibited throughout the decade.
In 1980, Israeli artist Jacob Gildor (born in 1948) was among the founders of Meshushe (Hexagon) group, which aimed to introduce Surrealist art to the Israeli art space – still dominated by abstract and conceptual art movements at that time. Back in 1971, Gildor had been invited by the Surrealist artist and teacher Professor Ernst Fuchs to Reichenau, Austria, to learn the master’s unique technique in tempera. A close friendship was forged between the teacher and student, which opened the young artist to the Surrealist movement and led him and his peers to establish Meshushe. The founding group consisted of Gildor and five other Surrealists: Baruch Elron, Yoav Shuali, Arie Lamdan, Asher Rodnitzky, and Rachel Timor. The Meshushe group held 10 exhibitions throughout Israel. While the exhibitions were warmly received and admired by the Israeli audience, Meshushe’s Israeli attempt at the escapism of Surrealism never managed to enter the Israeli Canon of Art critiques.[20] Surrealism did not find admiration in the Israeli art scene. It did not speak to the intensity of ‘The Turning Generation’ and its urgent artistic and political expression on the present moment in Israel in the 1980s. Meshushe found itself marginalized and irrelevant. Ultimately, each artist went on to explore a variety of other styles, each finding it hard not to relate to the history, symbols, and narrative of the Jewish people and the present Israeli landscapes or cityscapes they were encountering in their art. While Salomon and Gildor had some overlap of influence by the Shoah (Gildor was Second Generation), the impact of Surrealism, and exploration of woe, they worked in parallel spaces, not recognizing the similarities of their styles and subject matters sprouting from their mutual hometown of Holon, Israel. It is unclear why Salomon was not involved with this group.
At one point in Salomon’s career – despite his home in Holon, art pieces explicitly exploring the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 1993 Oslo Accords, and having his artwork displayed in the President’s residence in Jerusalem – he was still told by the leading Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat: “You are not an Israeli painter. [אתה לא צייר ישראלי]”[21] An artist’s relations between homeland and Diaspora are complicated as they negotiate their identity through a complex psychological process of dramatic self-adjustment. As Sigal Barkai concludes:
“A new negotiation between local and universal cultural identities changes the
demarcation of Israeliness, and obscures outdated national ideas such as the negation of the Diaspora. It allows for mutually-nourishing artistic and societal formations that inspire the Israeli, Jewish, and global ‘imaginary community.’”[22]
Israeli art is eclectic, and very hard to define, specifically due to global mobility and influence, as well as post-immigration hyphenated identities – like Salomon’s Romanian-Israeli identity. The ethos of negation of exile, and the attempted melting pot of perceived ‘weak’ Diaspora Jews into the new native Israeli identity of strength, greatly troubled Salomon. Salomon was proud of his Romanian upbringing, despite ultimately being persecuted and rejected because he was a Jew. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests:
“In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.”[23]
Negation of exile is thus a cultural force in the construction of Zionism from the late nineteenth century to the present. It builds on the denying of specific features in Jewish histories that may “dangerously” contradict the image of national revival in the Land of Israel. Thus, it is only logical that Salomon’s European-influenced paintings were hard to place in the Israeli art scene, marginalized by his contemporaries – in a place of bitter isolation, an empty space filled by his studio.
Historian and educator Dr. Ori Soltes considers Israeli art “radicant art.” A radicant plant grows its roots, spreads, and adds new roots as it advances, with multiple enrootings along the way, just like an immigrant and their art. Salomon’s career in many ways is an example of immigrant radicant art adapting, evolving and enrooting anew along one’s journey of immigration to new places, and the identity transformation that coincides with changes of location and a new local reality and mindset. Salomon shifts from Realism and portraiture in Romania, to Cubism and Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism in young Israel, to then the quasi-Surrealistic and metaphoric animal jungle of his mind on canvas as the years go on and he and the Israeli art scene mature.
Artistic play becomes a therapeutic means of working through strong emotions due to social and internal dissonance for Salomon. The gradual merging of homeland and Diaspora bring forth a new cultural identity and a variety of ways to belong, the art being a means to an end of psychological processing and reconciliations, brought on by new and converging global and mobile realities.
Salomon explores not just Jewish survival, but also the struggles of masculinity and motherhood. He explores predators hunting their prey. He explores the dark sides of human nature, perhaps in ways that were indeed taboo and ahead of his time, as a radicant artist enrooting himself in the intensity of the Middle East. We can clearly see over time through his artwork a nuanced change in Salomon as an individual artist, but also of the wider social scene of his day, deriving meaning from and giving form to life experiences in the wake of wars, especially the 1982 Lebanon War.
In Fall 2023 we marked the 50th anniversary of a formative event in the Cold War, a defining moment in the geopolitics of the Middle East, and one of the direst trials for the young state of Israel: the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Though this War ended in a military victory for Israel, the invasion by Egypt and Syria and the days of anguished battle that followed threatened the very existence of the Jewish state. The war had dramatic and long-range impact as well: the politics, culture, and national-security strategy of Israel were forever altered, as were the USA, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world likewise deeply affected.[24] Salomon investigated this existentially precarious moment for the young Jewish state in his pieces The Tank and Yom Kippur the very next year, 1974. The blood red of Jewish spirit is depicted in Yom Kippur with tanks pouring out light, driven by bulls above in a herd of strength, almost a divinely protective pillar of cloud: a very moving exploration of this crisis. The animal imagery and symbolism portray defensive strength and ultimately victory for Jewish survival. Yom Kippur is also an early example of him finding his artistic voice in his unique, existential art style of ‘Like Animals,’ investigating human behavior through quasi-Surrealist animal imagery – the style he spends the majority of his career exploring, perfecting, and exhibiting around the world.
Salomon’s ‘Like Animals’ Existential Art: Investigating Human Behavior through Surrealistic Animal Imagery
Postwar Surrealism established itself in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism emphasizing that our acts create our essence, the humanist cultural policies of the French Communist Party articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde. A Surrealist imposes meaning on the absurdity of the universe in an artistic way; effectively creating his own reality. The paintings of Surrealism, which are open to interpretation, can become whatever the viewer decides. In the face of existential agony, the existentialist exercises the human freedom to choose a meaningful life course, while the Surrealist chooses to impose meaning on elemental chaos through art. Salomon’s animals seem to work through the chaos of human violence and survival, partially focusing on the basic existential givens, including death and isolation.
Surrealism was a melting pot of avant-garde ideas and techniques still influential today, especially the introduction of chance elements. This new mode of painterly practice also blazed a trail for Abstract Expressionists, such as the Surrealist navigation of the unconscious and the Jungian symbolism of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. According to the theory of psychologist Carl Jung, symbols are language or images that convey, by means of concrete reality, something hidden or unknown and dimly perceived by the conscious mind. These symbols can never be fully understood by the conscious mind. Salomon included chance and a release of the unconscious in his technique for paper with oils on which he used special chemicals to create burst effects, releasing the image of his subjects from his paint layers, like in Camouflage.
Salomon’s earliest available artwork on the struggle of life through fauna art, painted in the 1950s prior to his move to Israel, uses cats and fish to investigate Communist oppression over the masses of Romania; this is his piece Belșug și pentru pisici / Plenty for cats too, which is in the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum collection. The cats are the Communist officials, who are also competing amongst one another for power and wealth, and the fish are the average people being ruled over and starved of their freedom, like the fish taken from their water – unable to breath, unable to function. These motifs return in Salomon’s 1973 Wild Beasts, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Here it is harder to determine who is represented by which wild animal. Perhaps the rulers of the Arab nations who initiated the attack are the cats, battling even amongst each other for power and territory, with other Arab nations ominously looking on from the dark shadows of the background. The cats are forcefully sending their citizens into bloody battles, making them swim through the stream of blood while warring with Jews. Salomon’s return to this cat and fish motif after twenty years, emerging from an ominous, vast black background, is very interesting. In Communist Romania he dared not use red on his linocut, while in 1973 Israel the blood red was already a motif of Salomon’s oil and acrylic paintings. The ghostly white fish stand out and take up much of the foreground in both pieces, while the cats both come from and fade back into the dark abyss of cruelty.
Per artist and art scholar Professor Haim Maor, “The experience of the viewer observing the patina is not intellectual, but rather retinal. His eye revels in the sensorial-tactile, sensuous-physical and emotional dimension it invoked in him.” Salomon got this effect through his technique of layering and then scraping acrylic paint, a style he developed after visiting frescoes in Pompeii and exploring their patina. Patina is a thin layer of acquired change of surface due to age and exposure. Salomon tried to create a similar effect, but to do it instantaneously. He enjoyed layering his paint and then using a scalpel to cut away and expose surfaces, layering themes and motifs as well in order to dialogue with the eye of the spectator. Sometimes Salomon used paper with oils and special chemicals to cause color explosions, using paint throwing to bring his animal figures to the surface of the canvas. The spectator is drawn into the drama of the images physically through this exciting texturing, and then emotionally – oneself becoming a character of the scene.
Salomon pins the individual against the masses, the crippled single against the uncaring pack or vicious flock, like in his Cerberus (1995) and Marabou (1995). Nature is supreme and mankind has no true control. There is tainted hope of new life and renewal for the tragedy-worn mother. There is the endless threatening and threatened, fear of the unknown, falls and fights to the death; the great contrast of anxiety-ridden and tormented life against the strong will to live. So much of these essentially Salomon themes are captured in Salomon’s Coexistence (1993), portrayed through a determined bull pushing forward despite the persistent pecking of a flock of birds in an unrecognizable time and place, contextualized only by the painting’s title and 1993 date – the year The Oslo Accords were signed. Salomon seems to be asking about the nature of this relationship, of the bull and the birds, and of ‘coexistence’ in general. Does the bull gain more from the birds grooming his back in a symbiosis, or suffer from their endless parasitic nipping? Would he be better alone, or does he need the coexistence to survive? Who is friend and who is enemy? Salomon’s pieces are full of questions and not answers, as he pulls the spectator into a triangular viewer-artwork-artist dialogue using his play with color, texture, and perspective. The spectator is the primary character for Salomon, who loved posing quandaries. As Salomon declared, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, just as a postal stamp is no longer a stamp if it is issued only for stamp collectors.”[25]
The gathering of his herds for their forbidding fate just beyond the canvas is apocalyptic, an exploration by Salomon of the effects of speciesism and the persecution of Jews. As Zach proposes, on Salomon’s canvas the Greek mythological characters Eros, god of love and sexual desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death, are in a constant push and pull of masculine domineering and deadly predatory power, epitomized in Salomon’s masterpiece Feast (1990). Salomon is grappling with his burned-out, contemporary Israeli masculinity – brought on by endless violence in Israel since his immigration, from the Six-Day War (1967), to the War of Attrition (1967-70), to the Yom Kippur War (1973), to the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon (1971-1982), to the 1982 Lebanon War (1982), to the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), to the First Intifada (1987-1993). The persistent violence and conflicts of young Israel led to constant existential anxiety, which strong male Israelis were supposed to overcome and conquer with confidence and bravery. His feasting vultures and wolves bring to light harsh themes of action and impotence, death and desire, and fear of death. Zach concludes about Salomon’s paintings that:
” . . . whoever tunes in correctly his inner ear will perceive the warm heartbeat – agonized and tormented or inspired by an ardent desire to live – that resounds here across the film of ice, the film of eternity.”[26]
Ofrat views Salomon’s animals as rooted in the human wildness of subconscious passion, a contentious self-image of the artist. The unleashing of repressed aggression of leaping leopards and charging bulls culminates in Europa (2013), wherein Salomon’s inner bull still tries to charge forward out of the bursting blood red of his second bout of spreading cancer, exhaustion, and disappearing vigor the year before his passing. In fact, Europa Salomon painted with his son Tavi. Tavi helped Salomon with his paint throwing at this advanced stage of his illness, when much of his strength and desire was quickly vanishing. Through the paint throwing they brought out one of Salomon’s final bulls, his inner bull surfacing, faded, through the red cancer aggressively advancing and covering his knowing stance and surrendering gaze.
Ofrat, like Zach, also views Salomon’s paintings through the lens of Eros and Thanatos, death and sexual passion in dialogue on the canvas. Ofrat declares:
” . . . the painter draws his wild world from the ultimate roots of human wildness, namely sub-conscious passion. It is there, in between sex and the death of its lusts and fears, that Edwin Salomon’s herds wander.”[27]
Even Salomon’s garbage cats sexually courting, on the background of the Lebanon War ruins, are classic ‘Salomonistic’ combinations of Eros and Thanatos. His mental safari rouses malevolent spiritual entities from an anxiety ridden, frail world. Kedar too considers the mythological in Salomon’s approach, but of the god of the underworld, of Hades; Hades who invokes a repetitive purgatory where death being a part of life leads to endless punishment and atonement. Decay and existence feed off of and into each other perpetually. Salomon expresses, “In my view, death is not the opposite of life; rather it is its echo and metamorphosis.”[28] The use of animals to portray the waging of an existential war is seen as Salomon being “ahead of his time”[29] by contemporary Israeli artist Farid Abu Shakra.
In Egypt Salomon deals with a national-cultural memory from the story of the Exodus, and the symbolic death of the Egyptian pursuers of the Israelites into the Red Sea. He portrays them as shadowed, dissipating bulls coming up against the striking pillars of water of the split sea. This piece was done in 1982, the year that Israel invaded southern Lebanon following a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border. It is a fascinating piece full of symbolism around power, death, existential threat, and freedom. Like Egypt, Salomon’s works continually contrast beginnings and endings in the face of violence and renewal, especially during this violent period in Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War inspired several ‘Like Animals’ existential artworks, from Salomon’s Ambush (1982), to Last Journey (1982), to End or Beginning (1982), to Oxygen Starved (1984).
Salomon blurs whole lines and missing lines, the present and a hallucination of the future, time and space into chaotic substance. The unknown backdrops upon which his animals wander evoke a feeling of unrest in the viewer. His herds gallop, jump and flee upon an existential emptiness, being either the charging mob of pogrom destruction or the fleeing, fear-filled prey. Life morphs into death. Creatures experience all pain and brutal force without restraint, while knowingly being captive to the cycle that nature has set up, from which there is no escape. For an example, see the ferocious protection of the mother tiger for her preyed-upon cub in Salomon’s Camouflage.
Camouflage was a loaded word for Salomon. He expressed:
“Camouflage in nature is part of the struggle for survival. The same camouflage is also manifested in my paintings, as the texture of the animal merges with the background. At times the animal is visible, at others – it remains concealed. The viewer must have the patience of a hunter in order to discern both worlds.”[30]
Here in Camouflage his technique utilizing chemicals and oil and acrylic paint throwing brings the animal figures to the surface of the canvas. In this later period and new style of his works, with the use of chemicals and paint throwing randomness, Salomon seems to be exploring a new form of animal representation. Salomon learns from the animal universe the visual language of camouflage, or the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings. At the visual level of an ecosystem, living organisms through their interrelations have a certain visual consequence, and Salomon here has brought this to his painting and to the medium of using paint on the canvas. During this paint throwing later period, Salomon at times breaks from symbols and allows himself to embrace non-conceptual, non-intellectual perception and basic animal-like sensorial response to the world around us.
Conclusion: Salomon and the Importance of a Respected Marginality
Understanding the Fate of Surrealistic Artists in the Jewish Israeli Art Scene
Salomon’s paintings have found themselves in the margins of Israeli art history. Perhaps this destiny was determined by his alienation as a radicant, immigrant artist in the throes of redefining his self-identity and grappling with taboo questions of his day, whether the Jewish existential crisis of the Shoah or the pain of the Yom Kippur War. His perception of Jewish history, the State of Israel, nationality, and a sense of belonging before and after immigration created a special nuance of style and quasi-Surrealism which was enhanced by the tension between homeland and diaspora, personal traumas, and the negotiation of cultural memory through multiple narratives and transitory realities.
Salomon’s multiple cultural identities were forged between history and culture, in a studio space where the constant play on canvas of memory, fantasy, narrative, and mythology further brought quasi-Surrealism to Israel through his animal jungle. His negotiation of local and universal cultural identities and existential ponderings brought the viewer into his questioning of contemporary events and societal realities of the Israeli, Jewish, and universal human communities through brilliant technique, texture, and color. Salomon did not want his artwork to be shown in galleries for only the elite, nor were they designed for mass commercial production. His dream was that his paintings would speak to everyone, but intimately. Salomon asserted, “The simple man should not stay apathetic (לא להישאר אדיש).”[31] He wanted his art to engage with the average man, to question him. Salomon also wanted to have his say in the world and find his voice through his painting and use of universal animal imagery and symbolism, especially in the face of his language barriers as an immigrant.
Viewing Salomon’s artworks in person is a wonderful adventure of texture and color springing from the canvases and papers, bringing to life the human experience through animal motifs in a swirl of movement and expressiveness. Each work is a revelry of layers, exciting surfaces that the eye engages with in delight. The first moments of viewing the pieces are retinally, physically stimulating – which in turn evokes an emotional and then intellectual engagement with the many components of the subject matter and its presentation. Salomon proclaimed, “The animal and the texture in my works are one. In their ‘struggle,’ the power balance alternates and each time another party will raise its head and have the upper hand.”[32] Salomon’s physical and spiritual accessing of the greater cosmos faces reality, and is yet surreal.
Edwin Salomon passed away in 2014. His ‘Like Animals’ art has left his questions to the world and strong comments on humanity, helping us to contemplate at a deeper level what it is to be a human being. Salomon’s paintings appear in numerous private collections in Israel, the USA, Canada, Uruguay, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, and Hungary, as well as in public collections such as the National Museum of Bucharest, the Cluj Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, and the Great Synagogue of Washington DC.
Salomon knew taboo issues had to be faced, and was exhibited exploring these questions with the viewer alongside younger contemporaries, particularly in the March 2013 exhibition “Like Animals” curated by Haim Maor. This exhibition presented artists passionate about using animal imagery to explore life inquiries, not escape them by fleeing into a full Surrealistic dream. The previously unfathomable first atomic bomb had been dropped and the Shoah had been perpetrated, and from the death and chaos of World War II it was hard to simply break from all reality and not engage with the harsh world and the memories it seared into the minds of European, and world, Jewry. Solomon’s fascinating quasi-Surrealist style breaks perspective lines and uses movement, brilliance of color, and unnaturalistic representations and expression to help us see the human as animal and bring us closer to certain elements of ourselves – even elements we would prefer not to face and have buried deep into the unconscious mind.
Salomon’s work and representations help us explore humans through animals – and when humans act as animals – across aesthetics, periods, and styles spanning his career of some 50 years. Salomon believed that animal fauna is the best tool to express true human nature, especially in the Middle East’s environment. His subject matter on human beings through the wild animal will help generations to come ponder the existential human experience.
[1] Tavi Salomon. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 23 August 2023.
[2] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[3] Gideon Ofrat. “Beauty and the Beast” in Edwin Salomon, edited by Jacques Soussana. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991.
[4] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003, 32.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104.
[6] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[7] Jean Ancel(2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8.
[8] Jean Ancel (2002). History of the Holocaust – Romania (in Hebrew). Israel: Yad Vashem. ISBN 965-308-157-8. For details of the pogrom itself, see volume I, 363–400.
[9] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, p. 11.
[10] Spirit of Creativity: Resistance Through Art During the Holocaust [Exhibition]. (2023). The Museum of Holocaust Art, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
[11] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 56.
[12] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 104-105.
[13] Douglas Murray. (13 October 2023). ‘You are not alone’: A message to the Jewish people. The Spectator.
[14] Haim N. Finkelstein. Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: University Microfilms International, 1979.
[15] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Towards 1958 – On the Human Condition’, 2008, 11.
[16] Gideon Ofrat, ‘Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?’, 2014, 116.
[17] Dalia Manor, From Rejection to Recognition: Israeli Art and the Holocaust, 1998, 256.
[18] Dorit Kedar. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 12 October 2022.
[19] Yael Guilat,. The Turning Generation: Young Art in the Eighties in Israel
[דור המפנה; אמנות צעירה בשנות השמונים בישראל]. Oranim Academic College of Teaching. Kiryat Sde Boker: Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2019.
[20] Jacob Gildor. (Accessed 6 January 2024). Jacob Gildor. https://www.jacobgildor.com/bio2.
[21] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[22] Sigal Barkai. ‘Neo-Diasporic Israeli Artists: Multiple Forms of Belonging’, 2021, 18.
[23] Amon Raz-Krakotzin. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return,” Journal of Levantine Studies, 3.2 (Winter 2013), 37.
[24] Jonathan Silver, Senior Director of Tikvah Ideas, Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. (2023). 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Tikvah Ideas.
[25] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Mechira Pumbit, Meiri Print: Holon, 2003. 15.
[26] Natan Zach, ‘The Animal Language of Edwin Salomon’, 1987, 8.
[27] Gideon Ofrat, Edwin Salomon’s Fauna, 1987, 1.
[28] Edwin Salomon, Jacques Soussana, ed. Jacques Soussana – Graphics: Jerusalem, 1991, 97.
[29] Farid Abu Shakra. Interview. Conducted by Jackie Frankel Yaakov. 27 December 2022.
[30] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 46.
[31] Tavi Salomon. (2021, April 19). Edwin Salomon [PowerPoint slides]. Art History Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Research Seminar of Art History Spring 2021. Zoom Seminar.
[32] Edwin Salomon, Tavi Salomon, ed. Ravgon Ltd.: Herzliya, 2006. 28.
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