Moshe Kupferman

Moshe Kupferman was born in 1926 in Jarosław, a city then in Galicia, Poland, to Yosef and Amalia Kupferman, who owned a shop and maintained a traditional, Zionist household.[1] He received a Jewish education at a school where Polish was the language of instruction and Hebrew was also taught, and before the war he joined the Dror Zionist youth movement.[1]

When the German army entered Jarosław on October 10, 1939, the Kupferman family was expelled together with the town's approximately 10,000 Jewish residents to a village in the Krasnofimsk region.[2] Soviet authorities subsequently deported Jews from Jarosław into the Russian interior, and the family found themselves living in a barracks settlement.[1] Kupferman later recalled: "We lived in unfinished barracks. Each family got a room in a barracks and a stove. The adults worked cutting trees and preparing them for shipment along the rivers. The center of our life was the stove in the barracks room; we cooked on it and warmed ourselves around it."[1] During this period he worked for a state company maintaining a local water route, serving at one point as a sailor on a cargo vessel.[1]

The family was deported to the Urals in 1941 and relocated again to Kazakhstan in 1942.[1] His mother died in 1942 and his father in 1944.[2] After the war ended, Kupferman and his sister returned to Poland, but his sister died shortly after their return.[2] After returning to Poland, he resumed drawing; later, in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, he began painting and illustrated issues of the Dror movement's publication, Lahavot.[1] It was also during this period, in 1947, that he visited Munich's museums — including the Alte Pinakothek — and encountered paintings by van Gogh, Titian, and Tintoretto, an encounter that marked him profoundly.[1][3]

Kupferman immigrated to Israel in 1948, traveling via the displaced-persons camps in Germany.[1][4] He trained for kibbutz life at Ein Harod and, in 1949, became one of the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot — whose name commemorates the ghetto fighters — where he would live until his death.[2][1]

At the kibbutz he worked as a building formworker for roughly twenty years, a physically demanding trade that required precision in constructing the molds into which concrete was poured.[5] He carved out time alongside this labor to draw and study art, and he described painting explicitly as "one of the kibbutz occupations," refusing throughout his career to separate his identity as a kibbutz member from his identity as a painter.[2][4] When curator Yona Fischer met him, Kupferman was working four days a week for the kibbutz and three days in his studio.[1] He later summarized his outlook by saying he did not distinguish between the work expected of a kibbutz member and the work he did as a painter, and did not believe in the muse arriving by chance.[4]

His early artistic training was informal but serious: he studied through private lessons, art seminars, and kibbutz classes, and was in contact with fellow kibbutz artists Haim Atar and Shimon Avni.[2] Atar was his first teacher; he later received guidance from Yosef Zaritsky and Avigdor Stematsky, including at summer courses held at Kibbutz Na'an.[1] In 1961 he traveled through Europe and visited its major museums, adding to the visual education he had begun in Munich in 1947.[2] From 1964 onward he worked steadily in his kibbutz studio.[2] The studio itself became a characteristic space: a modest room with natural light, a sofa beside the worktable, and walls covered with works in progress; it was left largely as he had used it after his death.[6]

Kupferman's earliest works were figurative studies of people and landscapes, but he moved steadily toward abstraction.[1] A major account of Israeli art places him among the figures who studied with painters of the New Horizons group, including Streichman and Stematsky, and characterizes his mature work as defined by spontaneity, expressiveness, and the productive role of chance.[7] The Israel Prize judges described his early work as rooted in lyrical abstraction, after which he developed an independent, highly personal expression unlike other abstract art and not susceptible to imitation.[4]

His palette was consistently restricted: a range moving from gray to smoky purple, with green, red, white, and black combining across layers into a gray-violet that became a hallmark of his paintings.[2][4] To arrive at his characteristic purple, he reportedly began with green, added other colors layer by layer, removed some of them, mixed them further on his palette, and then returned them to the canvas.[2] The resulting surfaces were never the product of a settled plan conceived before the work began; Kupferman described his aim as discovering what would remain in a painting rather than deciding everything in advance.[1]

The working process itself was a kind of archaeology of marks. He began with forceful, expressive strokes on a clean surface, then overlaid them with ruled graphite grids, lines of varying weight, and murky washes of paint applied with a whitewashing roller, then returned to drawing and covered again.[1][4] The resulting compositions — dense vertical bars, crosshatched grids, layered planes of line and pigment — could resemble, as the Israel Prize biography put it, a cage through whose bars the viewer glimpses something beyond.[1][4] His formal vocabulary also included what viewers described as scaffolding-like structures and, in works on paper, reversed Hebrew writing visible beneath the painted surface.[3]

A 2006 exhibition of his 1960s paintings, among his earliest, underscored that this decade was foundational: it was the period in which he laid the groundwork for the entire subsequent body of work.[8] Kupferman himself viewed his oeuvre as a single continuous project — essentially "one long painting."[8]

Kupferman began exhibiting in 1952, showing work at an exhibition of artists from the United Kibbutz Movement at Kibbutz Naan.[4] His first solo exhibition was held in 1958 at Beit Lohamei HaGeta'ot, the Ghetto Fighters' House museum at his kibbutz.[1] Two years later he mounted his first solo show outside the kibbutz framework, at Tel Aviv's Chemerinsky Gallery in 1960.[1]

Curator Yona Fischer encountered Kupferman around 1967 and was struck by the hundreds of small, free, and tense sketches in his albums — a visual diary tracing a path from landscape toward full abstraction.[3] Fischer recalled that even at that stage, the questions of covering and uncovering, revealing and erasing, were already central to how critics were approaching the work.[3] Fischer curated Kupferman's first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in 1969.[1][3]

His profile grew steadily through the 1970s and into the 1980s. A major retrospective covering paintings and works on paper from 1963 to 1984, also curated by Fischer, was held jointly at the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1984–85; it characterized his black-white-violet grid and scaffold compositions as emotionally charged and expressionistic.[7] Three years later, in 1987, a solo exhibition titled "Paintings, Works on Paper" was held at the Musée national d'Art moderne at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, marking a significant international milestone.[2]

By the time of his death in 2003, Kupferman had opened more than 70 solo exhibitions in Israel, Europe, Japan, and North America.[3] Major international venues included the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.[3] His work was also shown in Paris, Warsaw, Amsterdam, New York, and museums elsewhere, and the Israel Prize judges noted that his large paintings and small drawings were exhibited and highly regarded in leading museums in Israel, eastern and western Europe, and the United States.[4] A 2025 report stated that works by Kupferman remained on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.[6]

Among his titled series, the most discussed are With Beirut – After Beirut – With Beirut (1982), Yitzhak Rabin in Memoriam (1996), The Rift in Time – Di Kriye (1999), and the 1997–1999 series Di Kri'ah ("The Tearing").[2][1] The overwhelming majority of his canvases, however, were left untitled.[2] A 2002 retrospective at the Israel Museum, also curated by Yona Fischer and titled "All the Way and One Step Further," covered works from 1962 to 2000 and brought renewed critical attention to the recurring crosshatched lines that had defined his career.[5] A separate exhibition at Yad Layeled, the children's museum at the Ghetto Fighters' House, presented his series "The Rupture and Time" — eight large oil paintings, three made especially for the museum — as a way of illuminating Holocaust history for children through form and color.[9]

Kupferman accumulated significant recognition across his career. The Schiff Prize of Haifa Municipality came in 1971, followed by the Sandberg Prize in 1972.[1] He received the Haim Gamzu Prize for Advancement of the Arts in 1991, the Sussman Foundation Prize in 1995, and the Igan Kolb Prize for Israeli Graphics in 1998.[1]

In 2000 he was awarded the Israel Prize for the Hebrew year 5760 (תש"ס), in the field of plastic arts — painting, sculpture, and photography — with the judges' citation specifying that the prize was deserved in painting.[1][10] The judges described a body of work that had moved from lyrical abstraction to an independent personal idiom, praised the process of drawing and covering through which his surfaces were built, and quoted Kupferman's own statement that he did not distinguish between kibbutz labor and studio work.[4] Their rationale explicitly connected his biography — deportation, displacement, bereavement, immigration, and life at Lohamei HaGeta'ot — with the emotional weight carried by his paintings, while also acknowledging that the Holocaust was not an overtly depicted subject in most of the work.[4]

One art-historical essay places Kupferman's abstract work among the earliest Holocaust references in Israeli art and argues that such references were extremely rare before the 1980s. It situates his work alongside expressionistic drawings and etchings by Osias Hofstatter and Moshe Bernstein, within what the essay describes as a broader repression of Holocaust discussion in Jewish-Israeli society after the war.[11]

His formal contribution was equally significant on purely aesthetic grounds. The Israel Prize judges characterized his personal idiom as independent and difficult to imitate — high praise in a field where influence and derivation are constant concerns.[4] His process of creation through erasure, the layered accumulation and removal of marks, and the emergence of a restricted but emotionally powerful palette from this repeated action have been recognized as defining features of a singular body of work.[5][6]

His life at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot — a community founded by Holocaust survivors, partisans, and fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising — gave his work a particular moral gravity.[6] Living and working at a site dedicated to the memory of the ghetto fighters, producing paintings that viewers repeatedly associated with fences, railway tracks, and camp structures, while himself declining to define his art as Holocaust art: this tension between biographical weight and formal restraint became one of the most discussed aspects of his career.[1][5] His studio at the kibbutz, left nearly as it was during his life, remains a testament to the working environment he maintained for decades.[6]

Kupferman's international reach — more than 70 solo exhibitions across Israel, Europe, Japan, and North America, including exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh — established him as a figure of significance beyond Israeli borders.[3] A 2025 report said his work continued to be displayed at the Centre Pompidou.[6] He is also listed in the National Library of Israel's index of major Hebrew cultural figures.[12]

Several interpretive questions surrounding Kupferman's work have generated genuine scholarly and critical debate, and the sources document them with care.

The most persistent concerns the relationship between his abstraction and the Holocaust. Some critics and writers have connected his dense grids and intersecting lines to camp fences or railway tracks, while others have proposed that the lines reflect his two decades of work as a building formworker, where precision and repetitive geometry were daily realities.[2][5] Kupferman did not confirm either interpretation.[2] The official Israel Prize biography records that he did not define himself as an artist expressing the Holocaust, though it also states that he carried its images in his mind and did not try to free himself from them.[1] His 1997–1999 series Di Kri'ah was an exception he described explicitly, addressing three periods: "the beginning of the German occupation, the period of the death camps, and the end of the war, when the question 'What next?' was asked."[1] Some writers also proposed a connection between his abstract vocabulary and the abstractness of the Jewish God, a reading he similarly left unconfirmed.[2]

The claim that Kupferman's works represent the first Holocaust references in Israeli art, and that such references were extremely rare before the 1980s, is a specific historical framing advanced in an essay published by the Jewish Virtual Library; it should be understood as that essay's interpretive position rather than an established consensus.[11]

The series With Beirut – After Beirut – With Beirut (1982) has been described as one of the rare works in his output placed in explicit relation to a specific historical event — the massacre at Sabra and Shatila — referring in particular to the rows of bodies found there.[2][13] The description of this series as connected to Sabra and Shatila is drawn from a single source and should be read as that source's characterization of the work.[13]