The Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim
October 9 – November 28, 2024
Yehuda Armoni was born in Jerusalem on December 12, 1953. He is a scion of the Castel family, which arrived in the Land of Israel after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain more than five hundred years ago. His great-uncle is the outstanding painter Moshe Castel, to whom our Museum is dedicated. A number of works in this exhibition have been painted under the influence of Moshe Castel’s art and in dialogue with it. The only two portraits in the exhibition – the one oil on canvas, the other charcoal on paper – are portraits of Castel, and we are grateful to Yehuda Armoni for agreeing to donate these artworks to our Museum collection.
According to Yehuda himself, he discovered his passion for painting, and his talent for it, back in his childhood; however, because of his professional commitments, and the resulting time constraints, he was unable to pursue this passion as he would have liked. Yehuda Armoni devoted twenty-five years of his life to defending our one and only country, serving as a high-ranking officer in the IDF. Now, for almost a quarter century, he has been documenting the landscapes of our land; his documentation does not merely reflect nature, but also conveys the attitude of the person who is observing and experiencing it. Since the end of 2001, Armoni has devoted all his time to mastering the art of painting and creating his own works. In 2013, after studying with various artists for several years, he graduated from Israel Hershberg’s master class at The Jerusalem Studio School.
Yehuda Armoni is a landscape painter who practices his art outdoors (en plein air). Like almost all of us, Armoni loves the Impressionist painters who worked outdoors, and especially the two trailblazers of that artistic school: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) and the Impressionist par excellence, Claude Monet (1840–1926). Having studied their approach, he excels at ‘one sitting painting’ (premier coup) through observation; he has made it his custom to finish a painting in a single session. He feels that he must paint quickly, since the sun and the clouds are in constant motion, and the motif of the painting may change at any moment, to say nothing of the difficulty of capturing the nuances of light over time. Armoni paints alone, always in a standing position, for three hours straight, without pause. Nowadays, he works in a studio, as well. Armoni remains highly goal-oriented; he would never sign a painting that seemed unfinished to him, yet he puts more trust in his visual memory and the photographs he has taken, and gives himself more time to finish working on each and every artwork.
In general, the Impressionist school has exerted a profound influence on Armoni’s oeuvre. In lieu of adhering to the classical painting techniques, in which the image is created first as a sketch, Impressionism offered a direct painting method, which was rooted in unmediated observation of nature; this is exactly how Armoni works. Through their creations, the Impressionists gave voice to a novel artistic approach; they painted outside the traditional studio in order to capture the passing moment, the light at a particular time of day, and its impact on the texture, the color palette, and the subject being painted. Throughout their careers, the Impressionists kept returning to the same elements and scenes, painting them from the same points of view, so as to capture the differences in lighting; this is just what Armoni does.
He spends much time painting in the Ben Shemen Forest and the Canada Park, which lie near his home in Modiin–Maccabim-Reut; in this, he follows in the footsteps of Camille Pissarro, the only Jew among the Impressionists, who used to paint in a garden in Pontoise, the Paris suburb where he lived. In the works of both artists, we can clearly and distinctly see the buildings, the paths, the trees, and the flowers. And yet, this comparison also brings out a striking difference between the two: While Pissarro was an outstanding painter of simple landscapes, his scenes also incorporate houses and peasants at work, depicting them in a serene and vividly colorful manner; by contrast, Armoni’s paintings do not show human figures, and his landscapes are completely pure, with nature their only ruler. Armoni paints nature ‘as it is,’ and this is his way of refusing to partake in modern art, with all its diversity and multiplicity of schools, all of which (with the sole exception of the Realist school) refrain from doing this very thing – painting the material world as it is. Many of his works depict corners of the Land of Israel that have never been painted before. If his oeuvre were to be gathered in an extensive album, it would show almost all the forests, fields, seas, lakes, hills, and craters of the Land of Israel: in the Galilee and the Sharon plain, in the Ayalon Valley and the Negev. No other artist would have devoted more than twenty years of their life to the project of creating a portrait of the Land of Israel out of the totality of its individual landscapes – and yes, almost every painting by Armoni is a virtual portrait, albeit one that depicts a landscape, rather than a person. Last year, when we decided to award him the Moshe Castel Prize for outstanding contribution to Israeli art, we naturally took this aspect into account.
After the tragedy of October 7, we saw in the newsreels our land being burned and turned to ash; this exhibition, too, presents two pieces by Armoni titled After the Fire. “It pains me greatly to see this,” says the artist, “I have intentionally refrained from painting burned houses. I have made sure to show some green at the edge, meaning that there is hope, and there is a future.” It is this message that Yehuda Armoni seeks to convey, by showing us a land of stunning beauty, which opens its fields and secrets to all those who truly cherish it, are loyal to it, and defend it. Every visitor to this exhibition will be treated to a tour of the Ben Shemen Forest and the Ayalon Valley, Palmachim Beach and the Ramon Crater, Latrun and the Dead Sea – and many other places besides. There are fifty works in total, almost all of them exhibited for the first time. As is well known, the words “Zohi artzi u-sdoteiha” are taken from a famous poem, Shir Ha’emek by Nathan Alterman, which has been set to music and performed by countless singers, from Arik Einstein to Ofra Haza. And yet, Yehuda Armoni’s exhibition inevitably brings to mind another celebrated Israeli song, by Ehud Manor, whose central message is now vindicated: We truly have no other land, even if it is burning… And Yehuda Armoni shows beyond all doubt just how beautiful this Land actually is. “With a painful body, with a hungry heart, here is my home,” says Armoni, echoing Manor, and we all join him.
The Armoni family has supported our Museum a great deal since its establishment, and on February 14, 2024, when we awarded the prize to Yehuda, two nephews of Moshe Castel, Motke and David Armoni, came to the Museum. In the seven months that have elapsed since then, both Motke Armoni (1930–2024) and Yehuda’s mother, Miriam Armoni (1925–2024), as well as Itzik Armoni (1927–2024) passed away. We dedicate this exhibition to their memory.
We are proud and excited to invite the visitors to this amazing exhibition at this particular time, which is so complex and challenging for the People of Israel, and we would like to thank Yehuda Armoni for his tireless work, and wish him to continue working on this important project.
Dr. Alek D. Epstein, Curator,
The Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim