Pamela Levy

Pamela Levy was born in 1949 into a Baptist family in Iowa, in the Midwestern United States.[2] After earning art degrees, she moved to Mexico, where she joined an artists' colony and met her future husband, the Israeli psychoanalyst Itamar Levy.[2] She later moved to Israel, converted to Judaism, and established herself as a painter and maker of woodcut prints.[2]

Her traditional Christian upbringing was later linked to her treatment of the body in art. The nakedness that became a central theme in her mature painting has been interpreted partly as liberation from the negative attitude toward the body associated with that background, and partly as an exploration of exposure, vulnerability, fear, lust, and social power.[2]

Levy is recognized as one of the pioneers of the return to painting in Israel in the 1980s.[3] Her earliest work consisted of collages made from fabric and mixed media on muslin, depicting stereotypical female activity that she transformed into powerful abstract art.[2] Over time she moved away from abstraction and into a figurative mode, and her major paintings came to be described as "in-your-face realistic."[2]

A defining feature of her method was the use of photography as a starting point. Levy worked from photographs of leisure-time situations, including swimming, and translated and transformed them onto canvas or wood, producing images whose smooth or apparently bland surfaces concealed tension and, sometimes, a sense of threat.[2][5] The scale of her canvases was, in her view, inseparable from their meaning: she considered that her paintings worked best at full size because smaller canvases could not carry the same weight, and that size reinforced the impression that the depicted person was physically real and unadorned.[2]

Feminism was a central theme throughout her career. Levy is credited with bringing the influence of early American feminism to Israel, and her response to the tradition of the male gaze was formative.[2] Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe — which juxtaposes two clothed men with a naked woman — prompted both a feminist challenge to the traditionally male viewer-and-female-object relationship and a sustained interest in nakedness as a human and social reality.[2] That interest extended to the inclusion of naked men in many of her mature paintings and prints.[2] She also collaborated with the poet Dalia Rabikovich on an artist's book combining poetry and visual art, presented alternately page by page — a format that became a tradition for the book-art workshop in which they worked.[6]

Her paintings addressed violence as directly as they addressed the body. Levy painted young pre-pubescent girls alongside adults, figures that were naked and some that were dead, and she took on violence against women — including rape — as well as the violence of war.[2] An early series of large paintings depicted dead bodies.[2] Her paintings of tigers and vicious-looking dogs used the beauty of dangerous animals to imply an ever-present potential for violence.[2]

She made direct references to Biblical subjects in works titled Lot and His Daughters and Cain and Abel, and to Greek mythology in Minotaur and Centaur, yet her oeuvre remained centered, in the main, on the contemporary Israeli scene and an underlying atmosphere of fear and insecurity.[2] Her 1994 painting Minotaur depicts a naked girl embracing herself with a glazed gaze, beside a lying man whose face is erased.[7]

Despite her conversion to Judaism, her work was characterized as containing little that was specifically Jewish while containing much that was distinctly Israeli.[2] The National Library of Israel has described her paintings as depicting women and girls in bathing suits or towels in states of exposure — figures whose vulnerability arises from their unawareness of the viewer — and noted that "in Levy's paintings there is always an unresolved tension between the background and the figures, and a subterranean, remote feeling of disaster, of a chaotic eruption that will come — or perhaps is already here."[8]

In 1992, Levy was one of twelve Palestinian and Israeli artists who took part in a group exhibition curated by Ariella Azoulai, timed to coincide with peace negotiations and described as renewing the participants' commitment to the peace process.[5] Fellow participants included Moshe Gershuni, Tamar Getter, Assad Azi, David Reeb, Sliman Mansour, and Nabil Anani, among others.[5]

Her painting East Jerusalem was later included in "HaOman 26," a chronological survey of four decades of activity at the Jerusalem Artists' Studios.[3] A work titled Eskimo Limon entered the art collection of Discount Bank and was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue for a Levy exhibition opening at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in January 2018.[4]

Levy's art occupied an unusual position in Israeli cultural life, offering what has been described as an outsider's perspective on the country's social and military realities.[2] Her paintings of Israeli soldiers depicted not the heroic, physically intact figure associated with the Zionist ideal of the "new Jew" but soldiers with limbs torn and exposed to the elements, interpreted as sacrifices in an apparently endless war.[2] These images have been compared to Francisco Goya's etching series The Disasters of War, and they represent one of the relatively few instances in Israeli art in which Israeli Jews were portrayed in so gruesome a manner.[2]

Scholarly treatments of Levy's work include Tal Dekel's 2007 article, "Rediscovering Feminism in Israeli Art: New Aspects of Pamela Levy's Early Work," published in Hagar (vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 129–154) and listed in the Jewish Women's Archive's bibliography on Israeli women artists from 1970 to 2000.[9] A major retrospective of Levy's work was presented at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and her work later appeared in curated exhibitions including "The Man in the Brown Suit" at Makom La'omanut in Tel Aviv.[2][7] Levy died in 2004, and her early death has been noted as leaving open the question of what further artistic directions she might have pursued.[1][2]