Artist Hava Raucher: An Exhibition With Nothing to Hide
Gilad Meltzer
In her paintings and sculptures, Hava Raucher presents the aging human body in full nudity. It is a courageous exhibition by an artist who hasn't always received the recognition she deserves.
Israeli art has a fragmented, stuttering, and complex affair with nudity. After all, it is a small country where everyone knows everyone—including the neighbor across the street who is modeling, or the cousin who comes to visit and suddenly appears in a painting on the wall. Yet, despite this, the naked male or female body has been present in paintings and prints since the very beginning. However, they are usually "distanced" into biblical stories, such as Zeev Raban’s Song of Songs series, the Expulsion from Eden in Abel Pann's work, and later, in Nahum Gutman’s depictions of the brothels and prostituted women of Jaffa. Well, they were Arab, exotic, and shameless.
The near-taboo on painting nudity has eroded since the 1980s, primarily due to the bold, political, and groundbreaking paintings of Pamela Levy—depicting both young women on the beach and the bodies of dead soldiers, as well as, by contrast, the humiliating nudity of Palestinian detainees. Sasha Okun, Roni Taharlev, and Eli Shamir were part of this process of "normalizing" direct nudity—neither allegoric nor mythological—within local painting.
And so does Hava Raucher. "For the living and the Dead," the solo exhibition of the 80-year-old artist, includes works from the past five years, almost all of which feature nudity. While nude male and female bodies have appeared occasionally in painting—as they have in Raucher’s work for 40 years—there is almost no nudity in Israeli sculpture.
When it does exist, it is rarely the nudity of a specific, identifiable individual—such as that of Ephraim, Raucher’s partner, who appears in the paintings, sculptures, sarcophagi, and video. At least half of the exhibition could be described as a joint endeavor. At times, Ephraim is presented—painted or sculpted—in full nudity. When his private parts are concealed, it is because the painting was created following a canonical work where they were originally hidden. However, Raucher’s reliance on such "lofty trees"—some of the most iconic figures in art history—is entirely a deliberate act of "downscaling." She does not mock the French Revolutionary hero Jean-Paul Marat from Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting, but rather domesticates him. She reminds us that he is, first and foremost, a human being, not a myth, hero, or villain. Instead of the bathtub where the hero-villain was murdered as immortalized by David, Ephraim sits in a washbasin—a smiling elderly man at peace with the approaching end of his life, while the eternally young Marat hovers above him like an angel.
What hovers over the exhibition, seeping in and present in nearly all the works, is not exactly the Angel of Death, but certainly the recognition that he is just around the corner. It is a peaceful acknowledgement of old age and the decaying body, as seen in the smiling Ephraim holding the figure of Seneca—a pillar of the Stoic school. Raucher reproduces the Roman philosopher from a painting by Rubens. She places him like a baby in a diaper (which is, of course, merely a covering of his private parts) in the arms of Ephraim, who is well-acquainted with Seneca’s famous saying: "He who fears death has never learned the role of man." Ironically, it is Seneca who appears terrified of death—of the suicide forced upon him by Emperor Nero—while Ephraim accepts his fate. This same serene looseness is present in the circle of nude portrait sculptures of Ephraim. It is a dual antithesis: on one hand, to the proud power of "Nimrod" or the countless statues of sturdy warriors, such as the Defenders' Monument in Negba; on the other hand, to the fragmented, destroyed male body presented by Igael Tumarkin in his sculptures of mangled soldiers, most notably "He Walked Through the Fields." Raucher’s Ephraim is simply aging like any other human being. Not as a "New Jew," a pioneer, or a warrior, but as a common man. Ephraim is not a "manly man"; he is just the neighbor, the colleague, Hava’s partner. And it is human—so very human.
For years, Raucher has been identified with feminist art. This exhibition marks her winning the Becky Dekel Award from the Association for Women’s Art and Gender Research in Israel. While it is certainly a feminist exhibition, it is, above all, humanistic. Her engagement with the human body—in all its beauty, grotesqueness, aging, and the inherent tragedy within it—is more powerful than any specific agenda regarding women and their bodies. Thus, opposite the sculptures of the aging Ephraim, the "Amazons" are displayed in the second room. Yet, contrary to their name, they are not threatening warriors but older women (a euphemism for the elderly), flaccid and even bleeding. You will not find Venus or the other beauties of art history here, but rather women of flesh and blood. Men and women standing naked, downsized, in long rows—each and every one exactly as they are.
Raucher concludes this morbid journey with a series of sarcophagi. Within these downsized coffins, the body's mold is imprinted in varying degrees of decay. Much like the famous Egyptian funerary portraits found in Faiyum, Raucher’s fusion of artistic beauty and the realization that what lies before us is the void—the end—creates a confusing, awe-inspiring sensation. This is a courageous exhibition by an artist who has not always received the recognition she deserves.