Igael Tumarkin

Tumarkin was born in 1933 in Dresden, Germany, under the name Peter Martin Gregor Heinrich Hellberg.[1][2] His mother, Berta Gurevitch, was Jewish; his biological father, Martin Hellberg, was a German theater actor and director.[1] When Tumarkin was two years old, his mother took him to Mandatory Palestine, where she later married Herzl Tumarkin — whose surname Igael would adopt and whom he regarded as his father.[2][3]

The family settled and Tumarkin grew up in Tel Aviv and Bat Yam.[4] His childhood unfolded against the backdrop of the struggle for Israeli statehood and its immediate aftermath, and the experiences of Israel's wars left a mark on him from an early age — destruction and ruin would become recurring presences in his drawings, paintings, and sculptures throughout his career.[5] As a teenager he began experimenting with art and sculpture, and after completing military service in the Israeli navy he started studying art seriously.[4]

Training and European Years

Following his naval service, Tumarkin apprenticed with sculptor Rudi Lehmann at the artists' village of Ein Hod on Mount Carmel.[1][3] In 1955 he traveled to Berlin, where he met his biological father for the first time as an adult.[3] There he worked as a set designer with Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble and produced his first iron sculptures.[1] He later moved through the Netherlands and then Paris, where he associated with Dada artists and held his first solo exhibition, showing works fashioned from industrial and urban discards, polyester, and scrap materials — material he called "the scrap of the First Machine Age."[3][6] He also worked periodically as a stage designer during this period.[3] By the time he returned to Israel around 1960–1961, he had absorbed currents from pop art, assemblage, Dadaism, and Cubism and had cited Brecht as a deep personal influence.[2][7][6]

The 1960s: Weapons, Desert, and the Human Figure

Back in Israel, Tumarkin emerged quickly as a pioneering presence, placing works in both desert and urban settings.[3] He presented work at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.[2] A 1962 visit to Japan influenced his use of spraying techniques, visible in his early desert works.[1] His large-scale environmental sculptures Arad Panorama (1962–1968) and Age of Science in Dimona (1962–1969) used whitewashed concrete walls of varying heights and shapes, treating sunlight, shade, and the viewer's own movement through the forms as integral elements of the work.[1]

The Arad lookout, eventually completed in 1968 after a funding search in which local residents contributed privately and the Ministry of Housing financed most of the project, exemplifies his approach to site-specific sculpture.[8] Made of exposed concrete, it combines a large tilted circular platform with abstract forms painted red, blue, and yellow, with weapons embedded in the concrete as references to war and its human cost — weapons that were later stolen and never recovered.[8]

Tumarkin designed the lookout as a destination rather than merely an object to observe: visitors can sit in its shade, climb on it, and look out toward the Judean Mountains, the Dead Sea, and the Mountains of Moab.[8] He called the work "a monument to man and the landscape in the desert" and described his sculptures more broadly as "nonfunctional, poetic architecture."[8] Art researcher Gideon Ofrat identified concrete, construction-industry technology, and geometric-architectural concerns as shared features across the roughly ten concrete sculptures Tumarkin produced over a decade, distributed from Kiryat Yam in the north through Tel Aviv and the Jordan Valley to Dimona in the south, and described him as a pioneer in the field in Israel.[8]

During this same decade Tumarkin made assemblages from discarded Israeli ships, weapons, and machinery, incorporating weapon parts into works that removed those objects from their original function and prompted reflection on militarism and war.[1] He also worked in bronze, nickel, and stainless steel, turning to the human body in relief and three-dimensional forms.[1]

His life-size bronze He Walked in the Fields (1967) takes its title from Moshe Shamir's novel about Eli, a kibbutznik killed in the War of Independence and associated with the ideal of the "New Jew."[1] Tumarkin's figure deliberately subverts that ideal: it is blind, has a torn-open chest revealing weapon parts, and has amputated arms.[1] The IDF donated damaged weapon parts for the work.[2] A later Ynet essay described the sculpture as an assemblage combining violence, destruction, brutality, and vulnerable machismo, situating it among public monuments whose recurring imagery moves between injury and strength, mourning and hope, memory and creation, and life and death.[9]

His mixed-media triptych Sinai (1967), made in the wake of the Six-Day War, represents war not as triumph but through disjointed body parts, military boots, and red paint; its central black wood panel holds feet, hands, and heads — some helmeted — alongside scattered empty boots.[1] From 1964 onward he used art explicitly for political protest, transforming weapons of war into sculpture and addressing Jewish and Arab residents' ties to the land through drawings, prints, and sculptures.[7]

In 1966, peace activist Abie Nathan commissioned Tumarkin to create a monument to peace.[10] The roughly hewn stone sculpture was planned for a site opposite Jerusalem's Old City walls — then under Jordanian rule — at a location later occupied by the B'nai B'rith Bridge.[10] Actual guns, cannons, and other metal implements were fused at the sculpture's base, and the words of Isaiah 2:4 were etched into the stone.[10][11] The monument near the Jaffa Gate, described as made of melted weapons and carrying words from Isaiah, was erected that year.[11]

The 1970s: Holocaust Memorial and American Encounter

One of Tumarkin's best-known public works, the Monument to the Holocaust and Revival, was created between 1971 and 1975 and stands in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square.[7] Its structure consists of a large inverted pyramid of Corten steel intersecting a smaller one beneath it; viewed from above, the two forms create a Star of David.[10][12] The upper pyramid represents the weight of Jewish history bearing down on, but supported by, the lower structure, while the openwork bars refer to the striped uniforms worn in Nazi concentration camps.[10][12] Tumarkin wrote that the aim was to express "terrible physical oppression breaking free and bursting into joy," comparing the image to "a prison cage, breaking open."[12]

The monument's reflecting panes of glass were described as symbolizing life's triumph over death in the concentration camps.[1] Jewish News describes its burnished-steel frame as rib-cage-like and rusty brown from exposure to the elements, and notes an area at its base where visitors can explore the structure.[13]

A prolonged stay in the United States between 1974 and 1976 introduced Tumarkin to glass and Corten steel, which shaped the formal vocabulary of this period.[1] His sculptures became more horizontal, which he conceived as a counterpoint to modern architecture's upward thrust, while glass allowed him to reflect the surrounding urban environment directly into the work.[14]

The 1980s: Earth, Travel, and Response to War

Beginning in 1977, Tumarkin's interest in earth architecture took him across the globe — to India, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, and Mexico — and the works that resulted used earth, iron, wood, and fabric to address nature, religion, and sacrifice.[1] Bedouin Crucifixion (1982), held by the Israel Museum, exemplifies this strand of his practice.[14]

When the First Lebanon War began in 1982 and casualty announcements appeared daily in the Israeli press, Tumarkin responded with Mita Meshuna (the Artist's Monogram).[10] He fashioned parts of an army stretcher into a mixed-media object reminiscent of a cross; its Hebrew title plays on words meaning both "strange bed" — referring to the stretcher — and "strange death," a term associated with an extreme punishment in Jewish law.[10] The white and blue fabrics allude to the Israeli flag, and the work is held by the Israel Museum.[10]

Also in the 1980s, Tumarkin produced two-part sculptures inspired by divided cities, including Berlin, Beirut, and Jerusalem.[6] His Dovecote, erected in 1978 on the road to Shiloh when the settlement was founded, was placed there by Peace Now activists as an expression of their view that settlements obstructed Israeli-Palestinian peace; Shiloh's residents later came to regard the work as a symbol of their own endurance.[15]

The accumulation Behold the Fire and the Wood: But Where is the Lamb for a Burnt Offering? (assembled across 1962–1983) brought together a toilet bowl, an open sewage pipe, a trash altar, a typewriter, buckets, a chair, and twigs.[1] Its title quotes Isaac's question to Abraham in Genesis 22:7, and Tumarkin treated the whole as a shrine without religion or cult — the spectator who sits on the toilet bowl becomes the sacrificial lamb.[1]

The 1990s and Late Career: Iron and the Computer

In the early 1990s, Tumarkin combined digital and traditional methods: he used a computer to enlarge drawings of small vertical forms and then worked with iron-foundry professionals to produce pillars that could be tall and narrow or short and wide.[1] His "Autobiographical Andmardk" described these forms as resembling "a flame, a fist, a column, a totem, an obelisk."[1] From the 1990s onward, iron became his primary material, which he shaped himself at around 1,200 degrees using heavy tools.[14]

A 1992 retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art covered three decades of his work; examples of his iron sculptures were displayed on the plaza outside the museum.[16] By that point he had established an international reputation and an acknowledged influence on the Israeli art scene.[16]

Thematic Range and Artistic Contribution

Across all phases of his career, Tumarkin worked in sculpture, painting, drawing, graphics, and theatrical set design.[17] He designed sets for productions at Brecht's Berliner Ensemble and for Uri Zohar's film A Hole in the Moon.[17] He also wrote books about art and books for children.[4]

His public and site-specific sculptures changed with sunlight, shade, time of day, and season.[1] His art engaged with war, militarism, sacrifice, collective memory, the Holocaust, national rebirth, and the human condition; his return to the human figure challenged the abstract idiom dominant in the generation before him.[1] The themes of his 1981 autobiography distill his divided cultural standing: "I do not feel a Jew and yet I am from here. Not from there. I feel no bond with Germany — the country, the landscape, the people. Yet my culture is mostly from there, not from here…. I am from the shores of the Mediterranean."[1]

A 2010 English-language monograph devoted to his imagery — a 369-page illustrated study — examined biographical landmarks, childhood trauma, self-images, monuments, tributes, ideologies, and the Jewish aspects of his work.[18] A 2024 academic study explored how his Crusades-related art expresses tensions between past and present, East and West, and personal and collective memory, engaging with questions of whether contemporary Israel belongs in the broader Levantine context and with his identity as a Jew born in Germany who often saw himself as an outsider moving among different cultural iconographies.[19]

His public works span the country: they include the Rabin Square Holocaust memorial, the Arad viewpoint, the Sundial Garden in Ashkelon, and the Peace Memorial in Jerusalem.[4] His works are held in major museum collections — including the Israel Museum — and installed in public spaces in Israel and internationally.[1]

Tumarkin represented Israel at three international biennales: the Venice Biennale in 1964, the São Paulo Biennale in 1967, and the Tokyo Biennale in 1968.[1][3] His earlier awards include the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art (1968), the Dizengoff Prize for Sculpture (1985), the August Rodin Prize at the Open Museum competition in Hakone (1992), and an Award of Excellence from the president of Germany (1997).[14]

In 2004 Tumarkin received the Israel Prize for sculpture.[3][6] The jury's citation praised the variety of his artistic vocabulary and techniques, called him an innovator and pioneer of Israeli art, and noted that his monumental works were displayed at public sites in Israel and abroad.[6] He said that he had first been recommended for the prize in 1974.[7] The prize judges quoted by Ynet described him as "one of the most important and original artists in modern Israeli sculpture," crediting him with influence on contemporary artists and pointing to his monumental works in public spaces in Israel and internationally.[3]

Tumarkin died in August 2021 at his home in Tel Aviv at the age of 87, after an illness.[17] He was buried at the cemetery in Kibbutz Na'an, near Rehovot, the day after his death.[17] He was survived by three children, including actor Yon Tumarkin.[17]

His influence on Israeli art rests on several intersecting contributions. He helped pioneer environmental and site-specific sculpture in Israel, working at a large scale and with materials including concrete, iron, Corten steel, glass, bronze, earth, wood, and found industrial objects.[1][8] His politically committed practice demonstrated that public monumental art could simultaneously serve collective memory and mount pointed criticism of the society commissioning it.[1] The Monument to the Holocaust and Revival in Rabin Square remains among his best-known public works.[1]

His career was the subject of a major 1992 retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and of a substantial 2010 scholarly monograph.[18][16] Academic interest in his work has continued: a 2024 study examined his Crusades-related art as a lens onto questions of Israeli identity and historical consciousness.[19] The exhibition brochure for his 1974 War Impressions show at the Tel Aviv Museum's Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, with a foreword by Dr. Haim Gamzu, remains a documented early record of critical engagement with his war-inflected imagery.[5]

Tumarkin was publicly engaged in Israeli politics and current affairs from the early 1960s, and his provocative statements and actions generated sustained controversy throughout his life.[3] In 1980, he brought a pig wrapped in phylacteries to Kings of Israel Square as a protest against settlements in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — an act that nearly resulted in criminal prosecution.[6] He received Yad Vashem's Zussman Prize in 1998 for works concerning the Holocaust, but the award was canceled following public protests against him.[6]

His 2004 Israel Prize provoked the most prominent public dispute. Shas chairman Eli Yishai called for reconsidering the award and denounced Tumarkin's past conduct and remarks.[6] MK Shaul Yahalom petitioned the High Court, arguing that the prize recognized public character as well as professional achievement; the petition cited Tumarkin's statements and actions as grounds for reconsideration.[20] These were the petitioner's allegations and arguments, not judicial findings, and the prize was ultimately awarded.

His art itself was often deliberately provocative — works such as He Walked in the Fields and Sinai challenged conventional representations of military heroism and national sacrifice, and Behold the Fire and the Wood irreverently reinterpreted the Binding of Isaac.[1] These interpretations belong to his artistic project rather than to settled critical consensus, but they established him as a figure who treated Israeli cultural life as a site of ongoing critical inquiry.