Yehezkel Streichman

Yehezkel Streichman was born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania. His parents were Isaac, a wealthy timber merchant, and Hasia Streichman. While attending the Hebrew Gymnasium, he received personal instruction in art.[1]

Sources differ on the year of his immigration to Eretz Israel. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry gives 1924, while Yad Vashem gives 1926; both agree that he studied at Bezalel in Jerusalem.[1][2] He then continued his education in Europe. From 1927 to 1931, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he studied at the Brerra Academy in Florence.[1] He also studied architecture in Paris, while Renaissance art encountered in Florence became an important source of inspiration.[7]

After completing his studies in 1931, Streichman returned to Kovno and painted portraits of family members. Yad Vashem says he settled in Tel Aviv in 1935, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica places his return to Eretz Israel in 1936.[2][1] He brought the portraits he had painted in Lithuania with him when he began his artistic career in Tel Aviv.[2]

Streichman's parents, Itsik and Chase, and his brother Wolf were murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem describes the surviving portraits of his parents as unique within his oeuvre and as a rare visual testimony to his family.[2] In 2013, the portrait of his mother, Chase Streichmanas—an oil on canvas dated 1931–1935—and the 1933 portrait of his father, Itsik Streichmanas, were donated to Yad Vashem by Erela and Giora Streichman.[2]

Settled in Tel Aviv by the mid-1930s, Streichman combined painting with a long career as an educator. He taught art in schools and at Avni College, where his work placed him in direct contact with younger generations of Israeli artists.[1]

In 1945, Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky established the Studio atelier in Tel Aviv, where many young artists received their art education.[1] Their collaboration also became important to the development of the abstract style later associated with New Horizons and with Israeli lyrical abstraction.[4]

New Horizons emerged in 1947–1948, with Streichman among its founders.[4][7] The group aimed to free Israeli painting from literary associations and bring it into dialogue with contemporary European art. It helped legitimize abstract art in Israel and remained a dominant force into the early 1960s.[3] Yosef Zaritsky became its dominant artistic figure, and his atmospheric lyricism—marked by fragments of local landscape and cool color tones—influenced Streichman and Stematsky.[3]

Streichman participated in all eleven New Horizons exhibitions, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry.[1] His work was also sent to the Venice and São Paulo Biennales on more than one occasion.[1]

Streichman's artistic development followed a long movement from expressive figuration toward lyrical abstraction, shaped by his European training, contemporary French painting, and the landscape and light of Israel. His early paintings used dark colors and expressive brush movements. During the 1940s, his encounter with French painting contributed to a brighter tonal language and a greater emphasis on contour lines.[1]

Portraits and landscapes remained recurring subjects throughout his career.[1] Many portraits depicted family members and friends, while his wife, Tzilla, was a recurring subject for more than thirty years.[1] She recalled that he would summon her to the studio by saying, "Put on a blue shirt and come down to the studio." She could bring embroidery and a book while he painted, and he would later ask for her opinion of the canvas.[7]

Although Streichman believed from the 1940s that modern art was moving toward abstraction, he reached a fully abstract style only around the 1960s.[1] Landscape remained the starting point for this later work, and he frequently named paintings after the places that inspired them. Recurring motifs included trees and fenced windows. His 1970 work Soaring Bird is held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.[1]

The style developed by Streichman and Stematsky became known as "lyrical abstraction," combining a free abstract approach with the light and color palette of local experience. Their work was influenced by Picasso and the lyrical tendency within the School of Paris.[4] Streichman described his own style as "open, bright, and happy." The Encyclopaedia Judaica connects his belief in a distinctive Israeli painting to the strong influence of Zionist ideology on his life and artistic outlook.[1]

Streichman's influence extended beyond his own paintings. He and Stematsky taught at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv and helped form a second generation of artists who took abstraction in new and more varied directions.[4][3]

Artists identified with this younger generation included Raffi Lavi, Aviva Uri, Uri Lifschitz, and Lea Nikel. In their search for personal imagery, they challenged the refined brushwork of lyrical abstraction with pluralistic works drawing on expressive and figurative abstract styles from abroad.[3] Their development illustrates how the idiom associated with Zaritsky, Streichman, and Stematsky became a foundation against which later Israeli artists could experiment.

Streichman also remained active as a painter while teaching. Many of his works entered important collections during his lifetime, and relatively few of his oil paintings remained with his family.[8]

Alongside his public career, Streichman maintained an intimate domestic art project. Over several decades, he painted approximately 350 ceramic tiles for the bathroom of his Tel Aviv apartment. Their imagery included mythological figures, nude women, primeval landscapes, sea motifs, fish, nymphs, and sailing boats.[8] The colorful, fantastical bathroom contrasted sharply with the otherwise Spartan apartment.[8]

His son Giyora recalled that the project developed after Yehezkel and his wife Tsila moved into the apartment in the late 1950s. Streichman took a bath there every Saturday morning as a kind of ritual and attached the tiles with whatever adhesive was available. The nonprofessional method eventually contributed to leaks and made pipe repairs difficult.[8] The bathroom also became a domestic storytelling space, with Tsila recounting stories about the painted images while bathing the grandchildren.[8]

The freely arranged designs echoed Streichman's painting and included sea waves, sailboats, a galloping horse, birds, female nudes, a woman's face inspired by Picasso's "woman-flower," and forms associated with Joan Miró.[9] Curator Carmela Rubin described the ceramic work as technically imperfect but artistically interesting, suggesting that ceramics allowed him to experiment with color, materials, styles, and figurative imagery in ways distinct from his abstract-oriented public work.[8] His granddaughter Noa remembered making clay models with him in the studio, while Giyora noted that Streichman sometimes painted with his fingers.[8]

The tiles were created for household members and guests rather than as a public artwork. After the bathroom was dismantled, the tiles were conserved and reconstructed on panels for an exhibition at the MonArt Museum of Art in Ashdod.[9][8] The restoration took half a year and was carried out by Shai Farkash with the involvement of senior curator Yona Fischer.[8] Rubin remarked that "the restoration was too good," explaining that the roughness of the original installation had been part of the work's experience.[8]

Streichman's studio practice was marked by repeated revision. According to his son Giyora, he returned to paintings over periods of years and added another date whenever he reworked a canvas.[8] The practice reflects a working process in which a painting could remain open to reconsideration long after its initial creation.

The catalog for a 1975 Tel Aviv Museum exhibition covering paintings from 1942 to 1975 included a foreword by Haim Gamzu. Gamzu wrote that Streichman's paintings testified to "what happens in his soul in moments of confrontation with the blank canvas," which became, through painting, "a seismograph recording the tremor of his experiences."[6]

A 1997 book titled Streichman, with text by Yona Fischer, was published by Phoenix Insurance and the Yehezkel Streichman estate. The National Library of Israel describes the 308-page illustrated volume as the first in a projected series of monographs on Israeli artists.[10]

Streichman's work received recognition from major Israeli cultural institutions. He was awarded the Dizengoff Prize by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality four times and also received the Sandberg Prize from the Israel Museum.[7] His works were exhibited in Israel and abroad and were sent to the Venice and São Paulo Biennales more than once.[1][7]

In 1990, three years before his death, Streichman received the Israel Prize for painting.[1][5] That year he was also designated a "Worthy Citizen of Tel Aviv-Yafo."[7] His work Soaring Bird (1970) is held by the Israel Museum, while the portraits of his parents are preserved in the collection of the Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust Art.[1][2]

Yad Vashem identifies Streichman as one of Israel's major artists and a founder of New Horizons.[2] His historical standing rests on several related contributions: his role in the development of lyrical abstraction, his sustained participation in New Horizons, and his influence as a teacher. New Horizons helped legitimize abstraction in Israel, while Streichman and Stematsky shaped younger painters who subsequently moved beyond the group's refined aesthetic.[3]

Streichman's attachment to local places remained important even after his work became abstract. He regarded his painting as distinctly Israeli and described its character as "open, bright, and happy." The free, vibrant atmosphere he sought in his work was closely connected to the Zionist outlook that strongly influenced his life.[1]

The principal disagreements among sources concern chronology rather than Streichman's artistic role. The Encyclopaedia Judaica and Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality give 1924 as the year of his immigration to Eretz Israel, while Yad Vashem gives 1926.[1][2][7] The sources also differ on his final return from Lithuania: Yad Vashem says he settled in Tel Aviv in 1935, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1936.[2][1]

The chronology of New Horizons is also reported differently. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says Streichman participated in all eleven exhibitions through 1964, while the Jewish Virtual Library says group exhibitions were held until 1963.[1][4] The available sources do not explain these one-year differences.