By Mikhail Ne-Kogan, LECHAYIM, October 2008
An exhibition of the artist Aharon April took place at the Tretyakov Gallery. His name probably means nothing to today’s Russian viewer. Indeed, who would remember an artist, admittedly not of the first magnitude, who last exhibited here in 1971 and left a year later? Although… Here’s what the artist Vladimir Salnikov wrote in his LiveJournal: “As a child, I liked the artist Aron (Aaron) April, a ‘sixties’ artist who was in the same league as Zhilinsky, Popkov, and the Smolin brothers. Then he disappeared somewhere. A few years ago, I remembered him while writing an article about the Soviet era. I asked art connoisseurs and girls from the Tretyakov Gallery about him. No one had ever heard of him. I looked him up online. I found a brief biography. I learned that he was the son of a pharmacist from Vilnius whose property was expropriated after Lithuania reunited with the Soviet Union, and he and his whole family were exiled, I believe, to Syktyvkar. His brother went mad from the hardships they faced. However, this way the family was saved from the pogroms orchestrated by Lithuanians after the retreat of the Soviet army. Nevertheless, Aharon received an art education in Moscow during years that were unfavorable for a Jew with such a class background, and then he made a stunning career—he became one of the leading artists of the Soviet Union and suddenly disappeared. He moved to Israel, I decided. But I couldn’t find anything about him in Israeli resources. And then recently, I saw an Aaron April catalog at the Tsereteli Museum. I leafed through it. Horrible! Where was the artist I loved? Just some daub! Maybe, though, some of his old works are preserved in museums. Such a sad story.”
Summer 1971
Portrait in Blue Dress 1977
He was indeed born in Lithuania in 1932 into a well-to-do family. The estate where he spent his childhood was located near Kibartai station, where Isaac Levitan was born. This happy childhood came at a high price for Aaron: in 1941, the nine-year-old boy and his entire family were deported first to the Altai Krai, and then even beyond the Arctic Circle, to a settlement on the Yana River. The future artist finished school in Yakutsk. From 1949 to 1951, he studied at the Moscow State Art College in memory of 1905, but his childhood happiness didn’t last: in 1951, he was exiled a second time. It was therefore quite logical that, after graduating from the V.I. Surikov Moscow State Art Institute in 1960, he chose the “severe” style. “Someone said in the first year: ‘You only paint with umber, and the earth is grey-umbery’,” the artist recalled. It was in this palette that he painted “Narym Fishermen” and the cold landscape of Mirny, a city he knew from his deportation, in the early 1960s.
A turning point came in 1972, after a trip to India and the Middle East. “I emigrated to Israel primarily because I am Jewish…” April recently stated to the “Kultura” channel. But it seems it wasn’t just that: as an artist deeply connected to geography and the colors of the earth, he seemingly felt that the understated Eastern European nature could no longer offer him anything new, while in Israel, many discoveries and great progress awaited him.
In April’s work, there’s an interesting struggle between color and light, expressed in his choice of material, subject matter, and ultimately, the genre itself. In painting, color triumphs: “In Jerusalem, the light is special, sometimes even cruel, and it actively interferes with painting… It’s hard to discern reality behind this light. And my task was to win in the competition with light.” April’s oil paintings—primarily his contemporary Jerusalem landscapes—are very impasto, saturated with color, and even the cool colors on his canvases burn. Watercolors are different: “Watercolor has its own inner light,” says the artist, who uses this technique for biblical subjects and portraits. The artist spends more time on any watercolor work than on an oil painting, but he also demands thoughtfulness from the viewer, which allows them to see shimmering figures in the spots of color and light. For example, a self-confident Herod in a luxurious tunic (“In Herod’s Summer Palace”). Or the timid “Job.” Incidentally, the biblical theme appeared in April’s work by chance: while reading the Holy Scriptures in the original Hebrew, the artist found phrases—precise definitions for his paintings.
In Herod’s Summer Palace 1993
This led to “Song of Songs” (1981–1983). This is how the multi-layered imagery of his paintings arises, and canonical subjects—”Lot with Daughters,” “Hagar,” “The Sacrifice”—are filled with new meaning. “The two levels of his paintings ‘work’ separately,” remarks Ilya Kabakov, “the level of the dramatic plot and the curtain of paint that covers it—and between them a complex and mysterious connection and rupture.”
Job 1998
Settling in Jerusalem, the artist taught painting, drawing, and composition at universities in Haifa and Jerusalem, exhibiting in Israel, Germany, France, Switzerland, Canada, the USA, and Russia. In 2005, he was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts. All 95 exhibited works were created by him during three and a half decades of his life in Israel and are united, by the artist’s own admission, by a single task—to express the collective image of the country. In recent years, he prefers the language of allegories. For example, the work “Allegory of Disengagement.” It’s autobiographical: for nine years, Aaron April led the settlement of Sanur, where artists from Russia worked and exhibited. This settlement fell under the program of disengagement between Israelis and Palestinians; now it’s a military base. The artist tells this story using symbols. “It’s what Serov said: not to depict, but to evoke feeling,” he explains.
