The Jerusalem Post, December 3, 1999. Included a large colour reproduction.
The arts of this century have been the most varied and creative of all time. spurred by the advent of mass communications. Happily, this has not resulted in a global culture. Such a development may be another millenium away.
Nevertheless, this has been the century of intercultural influences and Marc Scheps, former director of the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art and for the last decade the director of the Ludwig Foundation in Cologne, has curated the first exhibition anywhere to examine this phenomenon on a global scale. His huge international retrospective, now at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne (until March19) is entitled Art-Worlds in Dialogue - From Gauguin to the Present. It chiefly examines the discovery by Euopean arrtists of what was then known as the primitive world.
After Gauguin first visited Tahiti in 1891 German artists began their explorations of colonial Africa. Piicasso's famous adaptions of African carvings and faces (on postcards!) set off ethnological expeditions all over the New World, from Alaska to Yucatan. In Australia, the guilt-riddden revival of interest in aboriginal spirit art has launched careers of many contemporary aboriginal artists. Global culture? No, this has been the century of the revival of ethhnic pride and cultural plurality and equality.
This show, inspired perhaps by the aims of the late Arnold Bode's massive Documenta exhibitions of international art held in post-war Kassel, desrves at least a page to itself but as yet I have seen only its barely heftable catalog. I have however, seen, on the computer screen where it was born, one of the most pertinent exhibits in the show, an invention of Reuven Kadim, a leading Israeli hard-edge minimalist painter and retired Bezalel Academy teacher, notably of color harmony.
It was over a decade ago at the Bezalel that Kadim - then and even now better known as Reuven Berman - began to encourage his Arab students to look into their own cultural backgrounds, without actually copying bits of their ethnological motifs.
Kadim, once our Tel-Aviv art critic, has, like this writer, an obsession with the permutations of the Golden Section; we have been discussing them for well over 40 years and Kadim has been employing them to great effect in all his carefully calculated compositions.
For the last decade or so, Kadim has been examining the geometry and math of the ground plans of classical and Near East temples, some of which have found their way into his non-associative abstract paintings. More recently, a fascination with the highly sophisticated geometric designs of Islamic architecture have led him to study the dense patterns and sub-patterns of wall tiling that sometimes contains Koranic texts.
Kadim has a special fondness of the Golden Section nature of the pentagon. Using his Macintosh, he came up with a cluster of six pentagons, one in the center and five flipped ones, each attached to one of its sides. The cluster itself formed a pentagon but the spaces between the flipped ones reesulted in a broken contour. He continued the procedure, using each enlarged cluster as a centerpiece. The unfilled spaces grew into "lakes" that not only grew in size but created new bays and inlets at each stage. Kadim diiscovered that he had unwittingly created a fractal process, not one derived from the Mandelbrot equation but a derivative of the Islamic method.
Kadim's Detail of Islamic Fractals #10, in the Ludwig show is an elaboration of his unexpected encoounter, a huge computer printout-cum-mural; never ending, it can be viewed from any side. And it all derives from a primary 8 x 8 mm. pentagon. The work is not just mechanical, but the result of aesthetic decisions. It has three separate interacting pentagon patterns rendered in complementary colors. The darkest, blue-violet, is the base pattern. The modules of the other two, while differing in their internal design, are scaled to match the sizes of different generations of the base pattern. Each pattern has been tilted at an angle, not only to free it from the pull of gravity but to emphasize the constant evolutionary nature. Like the single pentagon and its internal five-point star, all the angles are multiples of nine.
Kadim regards his dark violet and orange complementaries as the quintessential hues of the Near East and among the most frequently encountered in Islamic architecture. Apart ftom deciding where to place the starting primary modules (he placed the first seed pentagon on the Golden Section division of the width of the classical Root Five rectangle) he made no attempt to organize a composition, but provides the viewer with an amazing variety of detail, shapes that are always "right". Their density changes as the viewer steps forward or back.
In the past, Israeli artists have dealt with their Islamic surroundings only as a milieu. Kadim has always worked in a "language" unknown to or abhored by Israeli painters. He says it is this language barrier, more than Arabic, that has obstructed the initiation of a dialogue between Israeli visual art and its surrounding culture. Be that as it may, his Islamic fractal is certaiinly the most up-to-date piece of cross-fertilization in the Ludwig review of global cultural connections.
Copyright Jerusalem Post.
(Note: Three years in the making, the above exhibition included some 400 works, some of them rare loans from major museums. Included were works by Albers, Arakawa, Bourgeois, Brancusi, Ernst, Gauguin, Giacometti, Matoum, Kahlo, Kapoor, Klee, Leger, Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, Newman, Noguchi, Orozco, Picasso, Ping, Rivera, Viola, Zhen and many others from various parts of the world. RK)