As the Fab Four put it over six decades ago now, money can’t buy you love. The Mop Tops from Liverpool got that right. Love is, as we all know, the great sustainer in life.
Even so, there is that incisive observation by 20th-century British-American Pulitzer Prize laureate poet W.H. Auden: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
Add to that a reference made by Rachel Verliebter to Hungarian-born ethnographer, historian, anthropologist, and rabbi Raphael Patai, who, she says, “notes that among the primordial elements, none stirs the human imagination as deeply as the liquid element – water.”
Verliebter proffered that nod to Patai in her curator textual accompaniment to the “Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” art exhibition, which recently ran at the Schocken Library on Balfour Street, right opposite the sprawling – long unused – official residence of our prime minister.
She should know. Verliebter clearly has all the requisite academic credentials for making an informed statement about the connection between spiritual spheres and H2O. And let us not forget that still waters generally run deep.
“My aim, in my role as curator, was to devise an exhibition that reflects my doctoral research work, which is about the phenomenology of water in Jewish mysticism,” she informs me.
That sounds like heady stuff, and fertile ground for displaying works that feed off multiple, expansive, and rich strata of thought, aesthetics, and creative intent.
No limits to longing
The exhibits resonated the breadth of aspects of the confluence between the life-giving liquid and spiritual realms and, in particular, how water features in Kabbalistic thought.
Altea Steinherz took a somewhat left-field line in plumbing the philosophical theme, and strayed into exploratory chemical territory.
“This is the YInMn blue that was developed, by accident, by Oregon State University,” she tells me, as we view one of her contributions to the show, an eye-catching watercolor called The Limits of Your Longing.
The shade in question is the first new inorganic blue pigment found in over 200 years, the result of heating yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides – the name of the hue derives from the chemical component appellative openers – to around 1,200 °C.
The discovery spoke to Steinherz and fired her imagination.
“I read about this, and it just blew my mind,” she exclaims. “I thought I must get hold of this blue, because I want to paint shamayim hadashim [new heavens].”
In Kabbalistic and Jewish philosophical circles, that relates to the continuous, ongoing renewal of reality by the Divine rather than simply forgetting or erasing past suffering.
Suffering, in that line of thought, is understood as a temporary deficiency or a correction (tikkun) of our desire to receive, which transforms into absolute pleasure once aligned with the Creator.
Steinherz was keen to incorporate that in her oeuvre and spread the good word. “There is this color that is going to make us forget our suffering. The verse says when there is the creation of the new heavens, we’re going to forget all the suffering.”
That is as fine a concept as one could possibly latch on to, particularly in these post-Oct. 7, post-COVID-19, and – dipping into a more distant, yet ever-present, cataclysmic passage of time – post-Holocaust times.
The Limits of Your Longing makes for arresting and compelling viewing. The wavy ellipsoid seems to shimmer and merrily oscillate as it sort of hangs there, in a white void, pregnant with possibilities and brimming with latent promise.
The shape came from an illustrious source.
“In the Vatican loggias there are the Raphael paintings,” Steinherz cites from one of the world’s most celebrated sets of works. “There’s the figure of the creation of the heaven. There’s a floating thing behind the head, so I took the form from there to depict this.”
Then there’s the unique hue, which opened up exciting opportunities for visual probing.
“In the history of art, blue is the great white whale, the great blue whale,” she laughs. “There is almost no blue. This is a big deal in the art world, and I am very excited about it.”
New room for maneuver
The Limits of Your Longing is well named, and suggests an paradoxical field of exploration and personal growth.
“There’s the infinity [suggested by the form of the painting’s motif] and all of the concepts that I am trying to represent, about desire,” Steinherz expounds.
There are existential creative dynamics afoot, which anyone who has ever been to the seaside will have witnessed. “Essentially there is the spiritual idea of the separation of the waters and this continuous moving up and down of the waves, which we see when we go to the beach.”
Sublimation is the name of the game. “There are the lower waters trying to move up [heavenward].” That suggests a striving for reunification with celestial fluids, after being split during Creation.
It also makes perfect sense if we consider that the Hebrew word for heaven or sky incorporates the word for water – “mayim” as part of “shamayim.”
The curator brings us back to the core theme of the exhibition, and the raison d’être behind the showing.
“What is the history of water, in a Jewish context?” she poses. “We wanted to home in on the myths from the Kabbalah, and to imbue them with a visual form.”
Verliebter meanders betwixt elements and physical entities, citing a leading man of pertinent thought.
“There was a French phenomenologist called Gaston Bachelard who wrote a wonderful book called The Psychoanalysis of Fire, and also about the appearance of water in dreams, in the 1940s and 1950s. He talks about reverie, dreams, related to material substance.”
Water water everywhere
The leapfrogging between the tactile and the abstract continues.
“He says there is imagination pertaining to form, and material imagination. He says philosophy always related to imagination more in the context of form.
“He looks towards poetry and literature, primarily [books like 19th-century Herman Melville’s epic novel] Moby Dick and [Melville’s contemporary American poet-author] Edgar Alan Poe, and how they write about water. And there is Shakespeare and [his depiction of] Ophelia [in Hamlet, who drowns]. These dream personifications are always very sad. Water is the sad element.”
“Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” was designed to take us through some of those philosophical and corporeal tracts. The accent is very much on the primary – in a definitive and temporal sense – source of human life.
“I tried to craft a visual walk through the material imagination in Jewish mysticism,” Verliebter sets out her exhibition’s, and, hence, the visitor’s experiential, line of thought.
I raise the point that imagination and material occupy polar existential positions.
“Bachelard fuses them and says that our original imagination is connected to milk, mother’s milk, and our nutrition,” she says. The contrasting-complementary plot thickens. “Our nutrition comes from water, and milk, whereby our unconscious imagination is initially fueled by material.
“Bachelard contemplates Western poetry.” That was a curatorial launching pad. “I took that thinking into Jewish mysticism.”
Creating from something, not nothing
The exhibition pries into the ethereal and hidden biblical layers.
“There is great mystery in Genesis,” Verliebter contends as we view Giordana Musani’s fetching richly hued rotund Sacred Flow acrylic painting.
“Rashi studies that mystery in a striking way. He writes about God hovering above the water. That means, according to Rashi, that the water was not [divinely] created. That is a scandal. Water is evidence that the Creation was not about creating something from nothing. It was bringing something from something that already existed, from something material. That means that, from Genesis, water is primordial matter.” That is quite a revelation, and serves to underscore the centrality of water as a source of all life, and the universal relevance of the exhibition theme.
Iris Ahuva Pykovski addresses the oxymoronic cross-elemental admixture in her A Fiery Stream oil painting. “This work, and the others in this part of the exhibition, dream the moment before the division [between water and land in the Creation],” Verliebter explains.
Any separation definitively implies a sense of longing that goes with distancing from a previously unified body. The aforementioned aquatic sadness returns to the fore. “Kabbalah talks about this being the birth of longing. There it says that the upper and lower waters separate with weeping. This spawns tears, cosmic tears, tears of the sea.”
That doesn’t sound too gentle or user-friendly. It suggests that violence and force were integral to the Creation.
Verliebter is tuned into that, and points to a highly evocative bronze statuette by British-born Daniel Baharier called After the Flood.
“This is influenced by [20th-century Dada-surrealist German painter-sculptor] Max Ernst. It portrays the destruction, the [biblical] flood, the attack on the matrix, the attack on women on Oct. 7. This is the young girl who lost her hands, whom the paramedic couldn’t save.”
The Baharier sculpture spells out the corporeal and emotional scene in aesthetic words of one syllable. He crafted a handless figure in a stark, supplicatory pose which grabs you by the heartstrings and duly yanks.
“Daniel aimed to commemorate the girl and the attempt to save her,” Verliebter explains.
Violence at the source
There are broad pertinent implications.
“I placed this work here, in the context of the weeping waters of Creation in Jewish mysticism, not only because of the primeval violence there [on Oct. 7]. In the [Jewish] myth it is something that is happening now; it is something that happened at the Nova festival. It is something that takes place in the constant violence against women and mothers. I positioned it there because there is violence at the source.”
“Sea of Wisdom: Woman and Water” is not only about wrongdoing and nefarious acts committed against women across the ages. Ester Schneider’s Calathea Ornata – aka Praying Plant – is a gorgeous watercolor creation on kozo paper held up by a skeletal wooden frame.
“I put it in the Bauhaus window bay so the light could shine through it,” Verliebter explains someone superfluously, as we observe the foliage and floral arrangement against the late morning solar-illuminated backdrop.
Jewish mysticism emerges, once again, through the alluring, clearly delineated shapes. “You can see the very feminine forms here. You can see ovaries and breasts. For me, this is reminiscent of the American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe.”
That is not hard to get. Femininity pervades O’Keeffe’s vast eclectic oeuvre, and her use of color and form was widely interpreted as metaphorical representations of the female body. Interestingly, O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 98, publicly rejected that notion.
Going with the light flow
We return to biblical narratives and mystical climes, as Verliebter references the river that flowed through the Garden of Eden.
“According to the Book of Zohar, this nahar (river) in Aramaic is called nahara, which is very similar to nehora – light.” The latter term, in Jewish mysticism contexts, often implies spiritual clarity, too. Hence the curatorial logistics. “The light that comes in through this Bauhaus niche lights the work up, the nahara.” Neat.
In pictorial terms Pykovski’s A Mist Rose Up oil painting offers the most succinct portrayal of the exhibition narrative – women, creation, and female sagacity.
“This connects with the amniotic fluids and individualization – the female, maternal ability of self-birth, or rebirth.”
There is a psychological flow to the work, which features a female figure suspended in thin air, back arched and arm outstretched in a heavenward beseeching gesture, with towering mountains reflected in the crystal clear waters of a lake. There is a doe on one bank, and an echo of the woman’s acrobatic posture appears in red on a rock below her, possibly a fiery complement to the largely aquatic surroundings.
“The Doe of the Dawn is connected to femininity and the childbirth waters, and the pain of the birth of the new dawn,” Verliebter adds.
There is an intriguing personal storyline to the work. “That comes from Iris Ahuva’s return to Israel from the Himalayas and her process of becoming religiously observant. There are all sorts of issues about self-birth.”
The figure’s suspended position also hints at the interim period of Pykovski’s road to Jewish spiritual awakening.
The red swirl references yet another biblical slot. “That is the lily of the valley [mentioned in the Song of Songs] which we also see in the work by Yifat Bezalel.” The aquatic spiritual ambiance is, indeed, front and center in Bezalel’s Thirteen Petals charcoal drawing.
The curator’s exhibition notes close with a comforting curative Bachelard quote: “Water carries us. Water rocks us. Water puts us to sleep. Water gives us back our mother.”
For more information about the Schocken Library: schocken-jts.org.il