An Exhibition in Honor of the 125th Anniversary
of Isaac Alexander Frenkel (Frenel) (1899–1981)
From Odessa to the Artists’ Quarter in Safed via Paris
Curator – Dr. Alek D. Epstein
The Moshe Castel Museum of Art is honored to host a retrospective exhibition of Isaac Alexander Frenkel (Frenel), Moshe Castel’s teacher in the mid-1920s, his Parisian friend in the 1930s, and his partner in establishing the Artists’ Quarter in Safed in the 1940s. Frenkel (Frenel), one of the foremost artists of Eretz-Israel during the Mandatory period, was ten years Castel’s senior, and influenced him greatly at the beginning of his artistic career.
Frenel’s life story is not just that of a talented artist and one of the pioneers of modern art in Eretz-Israel in the 1920s and 1930s, but also an example of the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. A native of Odessa, he came to Palestine/Eretz-Israel in 1919 aboard the steamboat “Ruslan”, which also carried, on that storied voyage, the poetess Rachel, the renowned scholar Yakov Pereman, and the major physician Arie Dostrovsky. Despite his young age, Frenel quickly assumed a leading role in the “HaTomer” association, which formed the kernel of the first art gallery in Tel Aviv. Several years later, upon returning from Paris, he opened his own studio in Tel Aviv. Operating under the auspices of the Histadrut [General Organization of Workers in Eretz-Israel], this studio quickly became a center for training painters in the new Jewish city. Many of the foremost Israeli painters from the generation of the state founders – including Moshe Castel, Ziona Tajar, Mordechai Levanon, and others – studied and honed their skills there. After the Israeli War of Independence, Frenel was one of the founders of the Artists’ Quarter in Safed, together with Moshe Castel, Arieh Allweil and other artists. In 1973, Frenel established an open museum for all art lovers in his home.
With the exception of a brief period in his youth, when he was influenced by Cubism, Frenel maintained a lifelong attachment to the Expressionist style of painting, which had been beloved by the foremost Jewish painters active in Paris in the interwar period. His former student Moshe Castel, too, was an Expressionist painter in the 1930s. Thus, the two were close stylistically, as well as personally and artistically, at this time. However, Castel eventually chose to leave that style for a more Modernist and avant-garde aesthetic, joining the Ofakim Hadashim [“New Horizons”] movement, whereas Frenel remained loyal to the art style in which he had excelled back in Paris. In fact, until 1958, when Mané-Katz moved his center of life to Israel, Frenel had been the most prominent representative of the Jewish “School of Paris” in our country.
Like Castel, Frenel left Paris shortly before the German invasion. He would testify forty years later: “The Holocaust was a terrible blow for me. When I came to Eretz-Israel, and to Safed in particular, what attracted me was the mystery, the Kabbalists; all that is fabled, beautiful, and pure around Safed – actually, the heavenly Safed – without the rebuke of Jerusalem. The Galilean light, with the infinite vistas – that is what drew me. And then, suddenly, the disaster, the national disaster of the People of Israel, the disappearance of six million Jews. The entire Diaspora vanished. All this Jewry, which is actually closest to me.”
In parallel to his participation in major exhibitions, art fairs, and salons in Europe and beyond, Frenel also worked for many years as a theater artist (mostly at the Habima and Ohel theaters, the latter of which has since closed). He also excelled as an engraver, with most of his engravings dedicated to Safed, and created stained glass windows.
Isaac Alexander Frenkel (Frenel) won the prestigious Meir Dizengoff Prize five times (in 1934, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1948). His works, which had first been exhibited in the museum space exactly 100 years ago (at a group exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem in 1924), were eventually acquired by important museums in Israel and abroad, and nowadays they are included in the permanent collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc. For several decades, he worked with galleries in Paris and London, which arranged solo exhibitions of his art on an almost annual basis. He also exhibited in various cities in the USA, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, etc. In 1977, a major exhibition of Frenel’s works took place in Amsterdam.
Now, for the first time in the museum space, we are exhibiting more than forty masterpieces by this important artist, borrowed from eight distinguished private collections.
In a radio interview, the journalist told Frenel: “You work about the same number of months a year in France and in Safed.” The artist replied: “Yes. But I can say: even though I am in the West, my soul is in the East,” and added: “I am convinced that the Israeli public accept and understand me better.” Today, as we celebrate his 125th anniversary, we open here, at the Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim, a solo exhibition of Isaac Alexander Frenkel (Frenel). In this way, we keep alive in the public consciousness a talented Jewish artist, who painted its landscapes, cities, and sites in a unique and touching style.