Moshe Castel

Biography

In 1927 Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who happened to be in Paris at the time, wrote the introduction to the catalogue of Moshe Castel’s first exhibition. The show was organised by the World Union of Hebrew Youth. The artist was about eighteen.

Moshe Elazar Castel was born in Jerusalem in 1909, when the city was part of the Ottoman Empire. His father, Rabbi Yehuda Castel, was born in Hebron and opened religious schools for Sephardi boys in the Jerusalem quarters of Nahalat Shiv’a and Bukharim. The family traced its descent to the Jews of Castile who moved to the Holy Land after the expulsion of 1492. Moshe spent his childhood in the Bukharim quarter and attended his father’s school.

He was accepted at the Bezalel Art School, directed by Boris Schatz. He studied there from 1921 to 1925 (by other accounts he began in 1922). On weekends in 1925–1927 he travelled to Tel Aviv to see Yitzhak Frenkel, a painter of the School of Paris, and there first encountered modern French art. His teacher Shmuel Ben-David advised him to continue his studies in Paris.

In 1927 Castel moved to the French capital, where his brother Yosef helped him with money. He attended the Académie Julian and the École du Louvre. He sat for long hours in the museum’s galleries copying Rembrandt, Velázquez, Delacroix and Courbet, interested in how they laid down and layered paint. Later he put his conclusion this way: art rests on material, and what matters most is how the paint is placed and how the layers are arranged. Sources differ on how long he spent in France; by some accounts he lived in Paris for most of the time from 1925 to 1940.

In 1940 Castel returned to Palestine and settled in Safed. There he founded an artists’ quarter on the model of Montparnasse in Paris; according to one account, he also helped develop the Safed artists’ colony after the fighting of 1948. His former house now holds the Beit Castel gallery. His early works of the 1930s and 1940s deal with the life of Sephardi Jews in the Holy Land and show the influence of Persian miniatures. One of the best-known paintings of this period, “Sabbath in Safed” (1940), is in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

In 1947, together with Yosef Zaritsky, Yehezkel Streichman, Marcel Janco and others, he became one of the founders of the group New Horizons (Ofakim Hadashim). Its members combined methods of European abstraction with Eastern motifs and “Canaanite art”. In 1948 Castel took part in the group’s first exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and in the Venice Biennale.

The turning point was a visit to the ruins of an ancient synagogue at Korazin, in Galilee. The basalt blocks with carved ornaments and images affected him so strongly that he began to work in basalt himself. He ground the stone, mixed it with sand and glue, moulded the mass into shapes and covered it with deep, saturated colours. The technique became his recognisable trademark. From the 1950s he made relief paintings on themes drawn from the “ancient predecessors of Hebrew civilization”, with archaic signs, symbols of Jewish mysticism and mythological motifs from Hebrew and Sumerian culture. Examples include “City of the Zohar and the Kabbalah” (1956), “Red Parchment” (1965, Israel Museum) and “Tablets of the Covenant” (Luchot HaBrit, 1958). A drawing of 1958 appeared on an Israeli postage stamp in 2005.

At the same time he made murals and wall reliefs: for the Dan Accadia hotel in Herzliya (1955), for the El Al offices in Rockefeller Center in New York (1955), stained-glass windows for the ships “Israel” (1956) and “Jerusalem” (1957), the Churchill Auditorium at the Technion (1958) and Binyanei HaUma in Jerusalem (1958). Later came “Song of Praise to Jerusalem” in the Knesset (1966) and the panels “Glory to Jerusalem” and “Golden Scroll” (1970–1971) in the residence of the President of Israel.

Solo exhibitions were held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1955; by other accounts also in 1942 and 1946), at the Flinker gallery in Paris (1965) and at the Janus Gallery in Washington (1977). For the sixtieth anniversary of his career, a jubilee exhibition was mounted for him in the Knesset in 1984. In 1959 he bought a studio in Montparnasse and spent several months there every year. The Tel Aviv Municipality awarded him the Dizengoff Prize in 1941 and 1946, and at the São Paulo Art Biennial he received the “Premier do Estado” prize. His works are held by the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vatican and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Castel died in Tel Aviv on 12 December 1991 and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery. In February 2010 the Moshe Castel Museum of Art opened in Ma’ale Adumim, in a building designed by the architect David Resnik, on a hill near the home of the artist’s widow.