Dani Karavan

Biography

The first major work associated with Dani Karavan's name is the Monument to the Negev Brigade near Beersheba: he worked on it from 1963 to 1968, and it is made of concrete, in the open air, in the desert. That is his usual material and his usual setting.

He was born on 7 December 1930 in Tel Aviv. His father, Abraham Karavan, was the city's chief gardener and landscape architect, and, it seems, the son grew up watching people work with space rather than with canvas. He began to draw and paint at thirteen. His teachers are named as Aharon Avni, Marcel Janco, Avigdor Stematsky and Yechezkel Streichman; in 1949 he studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. The sources disagree on the exact years of study with each teacher, so I give only the names. From 1948 to 1955 he lived on a kibbutz, Harel, founded in 1948 on the road leading to Jerusalem. There he married Hava Fogler in 1955. Then he returned to art and in 1956–1957 studied fresco technique at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, and drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.

In the 1960s and 1970s he designed stage sets, working with Martha Graham's company (by some accounts from 1961 to 1974), with the Batsheva Dance Company and with the Israel Chamber Orchestra. At the same time he made reliefs for public buildings. Among them are the wall relief “Jerusalem City of Peace” in the Knesset assembly hall (1965–1966), 35 wall reliefs and an iron sculpture for the Court of Justice in Tel Aviv (1962–1967), and works for the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot: the relief “From the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life” (1964) and the Memorial to the Holocaust (1972).

In 1976 Karavan represented Israel at the Venice Biennale, and in 1977 he took part in documenta in Kassel. After that commissions came from France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland. He kept count himself: since the 1980s his outdoor works have run to dozens, about seventy. Kikar Levana (the White Plaza) in Tel Aviv took more than ten years, from 1977 to 1988. The Axis of the Metropolis (Axe majeur) in Cergy, near Paris, was begun in 1980 and remains unfinished. In Nuremberg, at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, stands “The Way of Human Rights” (1989–1993). In 1990 a steel disc sculpture, “Tzaphon”, was installed in Düsseldorf at the entrance to the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia. At Portbou, on the Spanish-French border, where Walter Benjamin died in September 1940, he built “Passages”, a memorial to the philosopher (1990–1994). The Japanese projects stretched over years: “Way to the Hidden Garden” in Sapporo (1992–1999), “Ma'ayan” in Miyazaki Prefecture (1993–1995), “Bereshit” in Kagoshima Prefecture (from 2000), and the Murou Art Forest in Nara Prefecture (1998–2006). The Garden of Remembrance in Duisburg opened in 1999, and “Way of Peace” in the Negev Desert near Nitzana was made in 1996–2000. In 2005 a memorial to the destroyed synagogue was unveiled in Regensburg, and in 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism opened in Berlin.

In the 1980s Karavan spoke up for the preservation of Tel Aviv's buildings in the International Style. At his urging, Mayor Shlomo Lahat convened a jury of international architects and critics, which assessed these buildings; in the 1990s they began to be conserved, and in 2003 the White City was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

He never stayed away from politics: he drew abandoned Arab villages near the kibbutz, belonged to the Meretz party and sat on the public council of the organisation B'Tselem. In 2010 he demanded that his work on the south wall of the Knesset assembly hall be covered, in protest against an amendment on admissions committees in small communities. This is a matter of his own public position, and I give it as a fact.

He received the Israel Prize for sculpture (1977), the Praemium Imperiale of Japan (1998), the UNESCO Artist for Peace award (1996) and the Legion of Honour (2014). In 2007 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art held a retrospective.

Karavan died on 29 May 2021 in Tel Aviv, at the age of ninety. He is buried in the cemetery of Kibbutz Shoval.