“To Heal the Wounds, to Rise above the Ordinary”
Dan Livni’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Castel Museum
March 2 – April 20, 2025
Jerusalem, 1973
Jerusalem, 1974
Jerusalem
Eternal City
Sunset in Jerusalem
Cliffs and Houses
The Floating Heart (Between Sky and Water), 1993
The Abandoned Fortress
From Here to Eternity
Candles. In Memory of the Dead
Haifa. View From the Sea
Roses in White Houses
Dan Livni, whose name has been known for decades both in Israel and abroad, has dedicated his entire life to Israeli society and culture: as a fighter who participated in five wars, as an educator who has nurtured generations of young artists and teachers, and as one of our country's foremost painters. We are therefore very proud to exhibit his best works at our Museum.
Dan Livni, a uniquely gifted painter, whose artistic talent is truly exceptional in both the local and the international contexts, was born on January 25, 1936. His parents, Israel and Mina Lakritz, who were natives of Ukraine and Poland, respectively, moved to Germany in 1921. In 1933, they emigrated to Palestine/Eretz-Israel after the Nazi seizure of power. The family belonged to the founding generation of the State of Israel, which was certainly not handed to the Jewish people on a silver platter. The artist’s mother was an activist in the Jewish underground paramilitary organization Haganah, while his father was involved in the construction of a phosphate factory on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 1934.
This factory was the brainchild of the engineer Mikhail (Moses) Novomeysky, founder of the Palestine Potash Company. In his book Given to Salt: The Struggle for the Dead Sea Concession (London: Max Parrish, 1958), he thoroughly recounted the story of the abandoned highway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, which had been brought back to life after the arrival of caravans of trucks loaded with all kinds of construction materials, such as wooden boards, concrete, armature, and pipes.
Potash production was based on extremely large evaporation pans, even though the plot of land on the Sea’s northern shore was relatively small. While conditions on the northern shore were tough, the southern site was far harsher still, due to its isolation from civilization in the heart of the Judean Desert, combined with that region’s arid climate. The United Kibbutz Movement organized a team of twenty young men who, in 1934, traveled to Mount Sodom together with Palestine Potash workers, to set up a work camp. Materials arrived from Jerusalem, while water was purchased from Jordan. The group was joined by some workers from Ra’anana, one of whom was Dan Livni’s father.
From the age of three, Dan Livni lived in Kibbutz Maoz Haim, not far from the town of Beit Shean, at the junction of the Jordan River Valley and the Jezreel Valley; notably, his parents were among the founders of this kibbutz. Prior to that, they had lived in the nearby Kibbutz Ein Harod until 1935, and then in the town of Ra’anana from 1935 to 1938.
In 1954, Dan Livni finished high school in Kibbutz Maoz Haim, and went on to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces for three years. While in the army, he took part in the 1956 Suez–Sinai War. He spent most of his military service in the Negev Desert, being enthralled by the mountains and canyons where no human being had ever set foot, and by the steep slopes and sheer cliffs, which reminded him of the lunar craters, but which occasionally sheltered verdant oases strewn with flowers. These experiences had a huge impact on his artistic vision. Later, while on reserve duty, he fought on the frontlines of another four wars waged by the State of Israel: from the Six-Day War (1967) to the First Lebanon War (1982). During the former conflict, Dan Livni was one of those who gave the Jewish nation the chance to reestablish lasting control over its historical capital.
Whenever Dan had a moment of leisure between the fights, he would go back to drawing. A catalogue of twelve sketches executed by him in 1967 was published later (it is now a sought-after rarity), and since 2008 they have been on display at the Ammunition Hill Memorial Museum, which commemorates the 182 Israeli soldiers and officers who fell in the battle for Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. After the Yom Kippur War, and then after the First Lebanon War, new catalogues were published, featuring the sketches he had produced during lulls in the fighting.
In 1958, Dan Livni moved to Jerusalem and entered the Bezalel Art Academy. He lived in Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, and was often so strapped for cash that he had to get home on foot. However, his passion for art gave him the strength to overcome all obstacles. He fell in love with Jerusalem, and the austere beauty of the Eternal City became his main inspiration. While his paintings of the streets and houses of Haifa feature moving cars, ships, and people in the streets, his vistas of Jerusalem are utterly different. Devoid of any motion, they present a city where time has stopped forever, so one cannot see any passersby, vehicles, or vessels. He celebrates the Israeli capital as a truly eternal city, and the blooming cypresses and olive trees are the only motifs suggesting that life in Jerusalem does go on after all.
Dan Livni depicts Jerusalem in a way it has never actually looked in real life, and the present-day city has moved even further away from his vision. However, just like the description of Jerusalem imagined by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) in his unforgettable novel The Master and Margarita, which does not draw on any actual historical or archeological data, but has been praised and admired by several generations of readers, Dan Livni’s paintings are not meant to faithfully chronicle the life of a real city, but, rather, show it the way the artist sees it, through the prism of his own emotions and philosophical vision. Both versions of the painting Eternal Jerusalem, as well as Walls of Jerusalem, and especially the breathtaking Jerusalem. City Searching for Its Roots, offer an image that hardly has anything to do with the actual Israeli capital. And yet, the artist clearly favors the imaginary ‘celestial’ city over the real one.
This brings up an issue that Israeli society as a whole had to face in June 1967, when its long-nurtured, centuries-old dreams suddenly came true in the blink of an eye. Praying near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and in the Cave of the Patriarchs in the heart of the old city of Hebron was no longer a distant dream, but a real option; so, there was now a need to facilitate the worship by providing public transit lines to those places, and by maintaining order and hygiene there. These challenges required practical efforts, rather than spiritual exaltation or glorification, yet a purely practical approach is hard to adopt when dealing with sacred places that are venerated as religious sanctuaries, or with nationally significant sites. However, while other painters sought to capture the buses and streetlights around the walls of the Old City in a more or less realistic fashion, Dan Livni chose to ignore it all. For him, the Eternal City stands above all political dramas and technological innovations; thus, there is nothing to disrupt the peace that reigns within its walls, where the faithful of all religions worship in their sanctuaries and peacefully share their common land, overlooked by a sky that has no boundaries.
However, the undisturbed harmony pictured by the artist is a far cry from reality, a mere dream that cannot be brought to life. Besides, there is no evidence of what the Temple in Jerusalem really looked like; hence, in his painting Dan Livni has added stairs that lead up to its presumed entrance, and are overshadowed by robust olive trees. These trees seem to have waited there for the wrongs to be reversed through a reconstruction of the Temple…
After graduating from the Bezalel Art Academy and receiving the first prize at a young artists competition held in Tel Aviv, Dan Livni moved to Be’er Sheva, where he began to work as a middle-school art teacher. Still living in Jerusalem, he married Ora Ben-Herut. A year later, they had their twin daughters, Tali and Dafna (their third child, a son called Yonatan, would be born sixteen years later, in 1979). That same year, the Be’er Sheva municipal museum hosted his first exhibition, and in 1965 he was awarded the First Prize in the Be’er Sheva and the South Art Exhibition.
The family of Ora Ben-Herut descends from Rabbi David Even-Zimra, who was apparently born in Spain in 1479, moved to Eretz-Israel in the late 15th century, and died in Safed in 1573, aged ninety-four. Ora’s ancestors on her mother's side are also attested to have lived in Palestine/Eretz-Israel for several centuries. Thus, Dan Livni and Ora Ben-Herut started a family that had ancient Jewish roots, with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic heritage. Ora has always supported her husband’s creative endeavors and projects. She was the one standing by his side on the scaffolding while he was working on a five-story-tall mural on the wall of the house at 24 Hayim Nahman Bialik Boulevard in Tel Aviv. She was the main organizer of most of his exhibitions, and played a key role in publishing a catalogue of his selected works. Also, she is the one who has been keeping a digital archive of his paintings.
In 1965, Dan and Ora Livni moved to Haifa, a city that has been their home for over half a century ever since, and is nicknamed the “city of six religions” (an appellation he chose as a title for one of his paintings). For more than thirty-eight years, he worked as an art teacher at a local high school. He taught and led various projects at the Gordon College of Education for a period of twenty-five years, and since 1988 he has supervised various seminars for art teachers, as well. In addition to his paintings and drawings, Dan Livni also created a number of murals in public buildings all over Israel, not to mention that he was also a book illustrator and theater designer (as early as 1967, he designed the stage set for a production of Fiddler on the Roof by Sholem Aleichem and L’Avare, ou l’École du mensonge by Molière at the Haifa Youth Theater). Apart from that, he was an organizer and curator of art exhibitions and festive events.
Dan Livni honed his artistic skills at the St. Martin School of Art in London (during the 1970–1971 academic year); at the summer courses of the Reichenau Center, Austria (in 1980 and 1981), where he studied under such outstanding artists as Ernst Fuchs (1930–2015) and Wolfgang Manner, the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, and at the Museum of Fine Arts’ School in Boston (during the 1986–1987 academic year). Having been raised in a far-flung kibbutz in the middle of nowhere, Dan Livni traveled around the world. Wherever he went, he met fellow artists and visited museums and exhibitions. But, above all, he was a passionate admirer of the local nature and a keen observer of its beauty, seeking to recreate it later in his works.
He had the same passion for nature back home in Israel, a country that boasts a diverse and rich natural heritage, as well as different types of land relief, despite its small size. With his easel, Dam Livni traveled to the Golan Heights and the Galilee, the Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, which was later returned to Egypt… His painting is purely figurative, although it has nothing to do with photographic realism, since the artist not only shows the fields and mountains the way he sees them, but also invents tiny details that do not exist in real life, but add an almost mystical dimension to his landscapes. Whenever he gets inspired by a natural or urban site, he not only pictures it the way it really is, but also thinks of the way it used to look in the past, and the way it will look in the future; he then combines his ideas in an image that is conceived like a journey through time… The painting In Between the Times is one of the most impressive examples of this type.
Dan Livni is an artist-philosopher, who reflects on the fundamental issues of human existence and experience. He confesses that he has always been concerned about the future and the survival of the Jewish state, and his reasons for this go far beyond the five wars that he has witnessed in his lifetime. In his own words, he has never forgotten the terrible pogroms that once forced his ancestors to leave Ukraine and Poland, or the Holocaust, which his parents escaped, but which claimed the lives of six million Jews.
Most of his mother’s family, including four brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and children, were killed by the Nazis and their accomplices. The son of his father’s sister also died at their hands. Her other son, Manfred Goldberg, was first deported to the Riga Ghetto, and then to the Stutthof concentration camp east of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk), a horrible place where soap was produced from the bodies of human victims. On May 9, 1945, the soldiers of the 3rd Belorussian Front liberated the camp, but almost all the prisoners had been sent on foot to other camps before this point. Many of them died, or were shot dead, during these “death marches,” but Manfred Goldberg was among the few who managed to survive, and he was saved by British troops near the town of Neustadt. In July 2017, Prince William, the heir to the British throne, and his wife visited Stutthof, and Manfred Goldberg was the one invited to accompany them…
The Holocaust and the wars fought by the State of Israel for its existence radically intensified the feeling of existential instability and impermanence, which had accompanied the artist from adolescence. Ever since he was a child, Dan Livni has loved watching the clouds being carried across the sky by the wind; when he grew older, he produced a painting titled Existential Anxiety, which features clouds that symbolize human beings, fragile and powerless against the whims of fate. However, in a painting from the series Moving in Space and Time, he introduces other symbols of temporality and doom, such as seashore cliffs, to complement the clouds. Thus, one can see that even hard rocks turn out to be too brittle, unable to provide a lasting shelter to the people who had finally found it. The painting Broken Earth is a metaphor for the Jewish State, which occupies most of the Negev Desert, where modern cities have sprung up, with their universities, colleges, medical centers, and even an airport. Livni's painting shows none of that – only a crooked tree with vigorous roots growing on the edge of an empty crater and stretching its branches to the sky in a desperate attempt to reach it. The painting Cracks in an Abandoned Orchard is a contrasting juxtaposition of earth and sky, painted in the same hues, which symbolizes the gap between the well-developed and densely populated coastal region and Jerusalem, on the one hand; and the inaccessible Negev and Judean Deserts, which the people of Israel have yet to conquer and modernize, on the other. The huge candles one can see in the painting titled In Memory of the Dead rise from the sand in the middle of a mountainous desert covered with cracked soil, like huge trees, with no trace of human presence; hence, there is no telling if anyone is left to keep alive the memory of a nation that has almost died – or, more globally, the memory of humankind as a whole.
Many of Dan Livni’s exhibitions were held in Haifa, including three at the Marc Chagall Artists’ House in 1979, 2011, and 2012. In 1988, his solo show took place at the Jerusalem Artists’ House. In total, dozens of his exhibitions have been held in Israel, and an additional eleven have taken place abroad, including three at different galleries in London in 1970–1971, one at the Euro Galerie in Saarbrucken, Germany, in 1977, and another seven at galleries and community centers in the USA between 1971 and 1987. Some of them were arranged for special occasions – e.g., Jerusalem – 40 Years since the Six-Day War (Haifa, 2007) and Sketches from the Yom Kippur War (40 years later) (on permanent display at the Armored Corps Memorial Museum in Latrun since 2013).
Dan Livni has certainly enjoyed well-deserved acclaim and attention; he has been the recipient of a number of prizes awarded by the Haifa Municipality, such as the Pinhas Shiff Prize (1998) for lifetime achievement in artistic training, the City Medal (2000), and the Hermann Struck Prize for his achievements in painting and the plastic arts (2012). In 2011, he received a prize for his lifetime achievements from the Israel Painters and Sculptors Association (Haifa and the Northern District). However, he has remained largely unknown and underestimated outside the city that has been his home for more than sixty years. Unfortunately, none of the Israeli art museums display any of his paintings. In 1985, a catalogue was published featuring a selection of the paintings created during the first twenty-five years of his artistic career. Sadly, this is still the only catalogue available as of today, even though Dan Livni has created a large number of outstanding works since then. I dedicated a chapter to him in a large book, Expressing the Inexpressible: Surrealist Art after the Holocaust, published in 2019 in Russian and English by the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Plastic Arts. However, both editions were published in Moscow, and only a few copies reached Israel… This state of affairs cannot be considered normal, seeing as Dan Livni is one of the few artists whose work, while growing out of a profound understanding of the history, geography, and present day of Israel, has at the same time attained the highest level of artistry.
Taking all this into account, we decided to award Dan Livni the Moshe Castel Prize for his outstanding contribution to Israeli art, which was presented to him on December 4, 2024. At the same time, we began preparing a representative exhibition of the artist and its catalog. Now that the exhibition is open and the catalogue has been published, we sincerely invite everyone to visit us at the Castel Museum in Ma'ale Adumim.
Dan Livni is one of the few artists who draw on Israeli history, nature, and contemporary spirit for inspiration, while also displaying tremendous professional ability. He possesses extraordinary graphic and coloristic skills, and works meticulously on each square inch of his canvases. He has found his own unique path, carrying on the traditions started by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and the Surrealist artists, although his visual language is different from the ones used by painters like Samuel Bak or the late Zeev Kun, whose style goes back to the same roots. He gives a new meaning to every place captured upon his canvas, transforming it into a microcosm that has a historical, philosophical, and even a futuristic dimension, so that every location, no matter how familiar, appears completely new to the viewer. His personal philosophical and artistic reflections result in the symbolic coexistence of different temporal perspectives upon the same canvas. But, most importantly, Dan Livni’s paintings enable us to view the life that goes on around us through the prism of eternity.
Dr. Alek D. Epstein,
Curator, The Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim
Translated by Michael Sigal
