Barbara Ludman
Their work could not be more different – Anne Sassoon’s haunting shapes and faces, Hadassah Levin’s lyrical landscapes. But there are certain commonalities – two, actually – which make sense of their joint exhibition, on until the end of the month at the Lighthouse Gallery in the ancient city of Old Jaffa, just outside Tel Aviv.
Both Sassoon and Levin are South African artists currently living in Israel, and the country of their birth finds its way into the work of both artists.
Sassoon’s jumping-off point is the images she collects as she goes – among them old studio photographs from Diagonal Street and scraps of South African photo story magazines, along with Japanese characters, Victorian nudes, political posters, Hitchcock stills, grainy, blown up bits of Renaissance art.
It’s reduced on the computer, blown up on the photocopier, put through the fax machine – blurred and corrupted – until only the movement is left to work with. “Something like the movement of music, or water, or light,” she says.
The executive lunch has entered her range of subjects, combined with “a bit of a Last Supper influence”. Which means that although Sassoon says she tries to keep aloof from the political and religious wars that surround her, the influence of religion, in any case, is inescapable for someone who lives and works in Jerusalem. A new-found interest in portraiture helps.
Levin – who was for two decades on the staff of the Israel Museum – takes the South African connection even further: alongside a scene of workers resting among the olive trees in Jersusalem are watercolours painted in St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth. Watercolour, says Levin, is her natural medium, although she also works in oils as well, and line drawings for scenes of Jerusalem that, according to one critic, “combine a sense of the tangible with an almost dream-like involvement with the transcendent”.
Both artists have work in collections in Europe and the United States as well as South Africa and Israel. And both have something to say about the light in Jerusalem. Levin: “I am intrigued by shapes and forms found in nature, the movement of clouds and sea and the mystic light of Jerusalem.”
Sassoon: “Whereas I found painting in London difficult initially because of the greyness and lack of light, here the problem is too much light, which is almost blinding. I’m not surprised Jerusalem is where people get enlightened and see visions.”