At the age of 29, Elie Abrahami left IAI (Israel Aviation Industries) and went to Paris to be a painter.
His Mizrahi identity and his dialogue with Western culture made him one of the most prominent artists in multicultural painting, but as an ascetic and introverted type, he could not sell himself. Until he met with Roni Fuhrer. Now he does not know what to do with success.

Aviv Lori / Haaretz / March 2002

Elie Abrahami and Roni Fuhrer met three years ago and since then their relationship has been flourishing. The matchmaker was a mutual friend, Danny Karavan. "It was a co-de-powder (love at first glance)," says Fuhrer, the most talkative of the two, who does not miss an opportunity to praise his choice. They fit together like a glove next to him: Abrahami is an introverted painter; Fuhrer is a collector and glamorous art dealer. Abrahami works hard in a modest Atelier in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, which he received from the French Ministry of Culture. Even Fuhrer works hard, although with respect to modesty, good, he leaves to others.

Among his activities, Fuhrer is a talented, eloquent and uneducated painter who offers them for sale to private collectors, museums and gallery owners in Israel and abroad, forcing him to sail in an endless universe of glamorous events around the world to socialize with counties and princesses. And in addition to earning money, and a lot of talent, including the estate manager of artists such as Yitzhak Danziger, who was a relative of his (in his dark office stands one of Nimrod's original bronze casts), Zvi Meirovitch, Mordechai Ardon and others. His is a mailing list, partly confidential, that is700 names upper echelons of the Israeli-strictly (see box).

In the presence of prominent representatives from this list, two weeks ago, at the Fuhrer Gallery, located on the 11th floor of an office building in Tel Aviv called Golconda, opened the exhibition of Abrahami's new paintings, "The Song of the Leaves." The exhibition includes 40 paintings, most of which were made using an oil technique on Abrahami's special wax, including rows of Impressionist trees, with hints of Persian miniatures in the background that will fascinate everyone who loves Van Gogh and Gauguin. Abrahami fulfilled his duties faithfully. He turned around, chattering with everyone he had brought before him and selling nearly 30 paintings at prices ranging from $ 2,000 to $ 18,000. Some of them were actually sold before the official opening; The most serious of the collectors and the museum directors hurriedly bought Abrahami's paintings on the phone, immediately after receiving the catalog. The "wood" painting, for example, wax on a canvas of 73 by 60 cm, went to Caroline, one of the new sworn sympathizers of his work.

Abrahami, 60, does not swim in "Golconda" like a fish in the water. From the history of art he had heard in his youth, in the Persian part of Kurdistan, only one name, Raphael; This is what he was told by one uncle who was considered educated. But the encounter with Fuhrer is helpful, especially with regard to his local reputation. Fuhrer will not leave Abrahami anonymous in Israel for a long time. He has long been a well-known artist whose paintings were acquired by the world's most important museums, including Metropolitan, Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the British Museum in London, the National Center for Modern Art in Paris and the Kamakura Museum in Japan. By the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum and collectors who specialize in it, such as the Geneva businessman Dov Gottesman, the new president of the Israel Museum, who began to gather Abrahami 15 years ago. "He is well represented in our private collections, we have been following him for many years and we are certainly not the only ones," Gottesman says by telephone. "I know there are more collectors of his works in Israel."

In recent years, when the Western world has increasingly begun to advocate multiculturalism, the power of Abrahami's paintings is only growing stronger. "He succeeded in creating an interesting technique that combines the East and the West in a way that many did not succeed before," says Yigal Zalmona, an interdisciplinary curator at the Israel Museum, who has known Abrahami since his days as an art student in Paris. "On the one hand, it combines the French heritage in terms of the shades and the perception of space, and on the other hand, it contains orientalism, which can be as far east as Japan or the Near East like Persia, and the later works are a kind of meeting, perhaps the deepest, between these two cultures. In one texture, one cloth, you can feel different worldviews of different cultures that unite into one thing, not many people have done it, a lot of people try to do it, a lot of people think it's important to do and a lot of people say they do it. They do it as authentically as he does. "

Why did not he break into the Israeli consciousness?

"I knew him personally even when he was a poor young man in Paris, and I always recognized him as the artist in the profound sense of the word, and it was hard to live in Paris when you did not know French and struggled for your existence. Who lived like this, but I recognized his power at that time. He is raped to be an artist, and he has exhibited his works in the Israel Museum, but most of the time he is a very private person who does very little public relations for himself. "

The boy is going crazy

Abrahami was born in Sanandaj, a Kurdish city in Iran. His mother's family was affluent and respected, and it brought out well-known doctors who studied in Europe. His father's family was from a low social class. In school and on the street he spoke Persian, with his Muslim friends he spoke Kurdish, while in the Jewish community spoke ancient Aramaic that was preserved from generation to generation. The life of the small community (5,000 people) was pleasant and carefree for him. His father was a jewelry merchant and then opened a store selling imported fabrics from Japan. The rolls of colored fabrics were the first patches of color to which he was exposed as a child. "Life was like a thousand nights, very intimate," he says. "Everyone knew everyone, in our beautiful city, with the mountains around and a river in the middle, there were three synagogues."

When he was in 10th grade, the family moved to Tehran and a year later, in 1958, immigrated to Israel and settled in Rehovot. The absorption was difficult. The parents were adults and Abrahami, the eldest of the brothers at the time (the eldest remained in Persia to finish the university), undertook to take care of the entire family. He worked in the orchards of the region and picked cotton, and in the evenings he studied Hebrew in the studio at Kibbutz Gezer. At the age of 19 he returned to the 10th grade to complete his high school studies at the evening high school but felt ridiculous and moved to the Air Force Technical School in Haifa to study aircraft mechanics. At the age of 21 he enlisted and served in the air force and even signed a permanent four-year contract. After his discharge, he was accepted to work in an aeronautical industry and his future as a department manager was clear, including to himself, even though his talent was already proud of him.

In the army he was also a talented portrait painter. "I used to buy film magazines, cut the photographs of the actors and make portraits of them, then I would shoot my friends' girlfriends from photographs and sell each portrait for 16 pounds, I drew a portrait or two a week and I made a living from it. I remember when a truck with books arrived at the base in Hatzor and among the books I would buy - "Haim Gouri, Agnon - I found a book about Van Gogh one day, then I read about Rubens, Renoir and others and I sat for hours looking enviously at the paintings they painted. I asked myself: 'How did they do that?' I thought it was not enough to paint film actors, that I had to go to school, and my family and friends at the base told me that I had to go to school. "

Abrahami enrolled at the plastic institute in Bat Yam and felt how gradually he was swallowed up in a magical world unfamiliar to him. My aunt's husband told me that one of the greatest painters of all time was Raphael, but I never saw anything of Raphael and I did not have any books, and sometimes, together with the Japanese cloth, he would come to the store Of my father Etiquette, I would cut the objects with the geisha and the Japanese letters and collect them ... These were the paintings of my childhood, only in Israel I discovered what a museum is ... The first exhibition of my life, by the French painter de la Croix, After that there was an exhibition by Van Gogh in the museum, and as I stood in front of these works, I still feel a shudder in my bodySo I did not know it was a crossroads. "

He had a lot of questions and a few answers, he says. "I knew what I was doing in flight, I had a moral obligation to my family, one brother and two sisters were still in school, and I could not afford to work, so I continued to study painting for three years. I got up at five in the morning to see what I had done yesterday, it was a miracle, an extraordinary experience, as if I were studying medicine and saving a man who had almost died. One thing I had in mind then, to move on and develop, and when I graduated I did not know I was going to be an artist, but you did I have a special relationship to painting, as if it were a part of my soul. I could not live a day without painting. "

In addition to painting, he studied engraving with the artist Tuvia Be'eri in the Tel Aviv Painters Association, bought a press and began to work in copper engravings. At the same time, he was discharged from the army and began working for Israel Aircraft Industries after signing a contract for a year. A few months later he realized he was wrong. "I looked at myself and said, 'What am I doing with the white robe?' I went to my manager and told him: 'I can not work here anymore, I have to go to paint.' The manager threatened me and said, 'If you leave, you do not get the salary you deserve.' I said, 'Okay, I'm leaving.' A few days later, he came to my house with one of my friends and tried to persuade me to return, but my parents did not know that I had stopped working.

"One day, my father said, 'I have not seen your salary slip for a long time,' so I broke down and told him the whole story, and on Saturday I invited my parents to my studio, and in their terms, someone who was involved in art was crazy about cutting his ear. They did not know who Van Gogh was, but they knew that painters lived hard, I made coffee, ate a cake my mother baked, and showed my parents what I was doing and asked my father to help me put the etchings in the water. My mother bring me lunch, and my father would help me, so I turned them into my friends and every time I sold an etching I would bring my father a check and tell him: 'Do not Bonds, also it gets money. You can live painting. "

The first serious customers of his engravings were occasional tourists at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv. That was in '69. He stood with his portfolio near the shops and as tourists, especially Americans, came in to look for jewelry or Gottex's swimsuits, he would go into conversation with them and show the etchings. "There was one woman who bought ten etchings from me at once, and I had a few regular customers who would come and look for me, and I sold 50 or 60 pounds per engraving."

At the beginning of 1970, Abrahami's sister found in one of the newspapers a small announcement published by the Ministry of Education and Culture about available places for artists in Paris at the Cite International d'Or, studios owned by the French government and loaned to foreign artists. "I asked myself to bring a portfolio and come to Jerusalem, and I went there and the supervisor looked at my work and said, 'There are places available, you can go.'" I asked her who would pay, and she said, 'You will pay. We're paying rent. 'I said,' Sorry, but I can not keep myself. '"

After she bought an etching from him, she was sent by a colleague from the office in Tel Aviv. He went there immediately, "and that lady asked me to keep her portfolio, and she also bought two etchings from me." That same evening she called him and said there was a committee meeting that decided to give him 2,000 pounds for a trip to Paris for a week, a trip and a visit to museums. "I bought a ticket for a travel ship to Marseilles, which was carrying onions and potatoes and some students, and we had to bring food from the house, and then I went to the market, bought a suitcase and went with my suitcase straight to my parents' home on the streets. I said, 'There's a ship, I'm going to Paris on Saturday night, I got a scholarship.' My parents were in a panic, 'What will happen to us, who will take care of us?' "

Equipped with a special tent his mother baked and a blanket against the cold on the deck, or in the public garden, arrived in Paris and began looking for a place to live. Suddenly I saw a shop that said 'kosher meat.' "I waited outside until someone who spoke Hebrew came in. I followed him and asked him questions and he told me what was happening in the city. In the Chambre de bonne, a maids' room on the floors under the roof near the Odeon Theater in the sixth district, and I started looking for work. "

He did not return to Israel at the end of the week - "How can I discover art in a week, even museums I could not get there" - and this week has been longer than 30 years and remains in force to this day. Even his Israeliness remains strong today, he says, even though he is a resident of Paris and has French citizenship. His national identity preoccupies him very much: he feels a bit Kurdish and Persian but mainly an Israeli living in France. "I was very happy to live six months in Israel and six months in Paris so as not to lose the great ocean, Paris, and not the little sea called Israel," he said. Worry, questions and agonies. "

Via Dolorosa

In those first days in Paris, he wandered around the city like a moon. "I felt I was standing in front of a huge ocean that I could never finish." Suddenly, at the age of 30, new horizons opened up to him and he did not intend to argue with the inner voice that told him that whoever was already in Paris would not leave her so quickly. He found a job as a guard and at the same time enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts and studied in the lithography department of an old Russian teacher from the Kandinsky school. In addition to his studies at the Academy, he has studied with the engraving artist Johnny Friedlaender. Since then, he has lived in his art in the 14th arrondissement (in the same building where Caravan lived), with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture. French citizenship was given to him by virtue of his being an artist and his contribution to the French nation.

"Sometimes people are in one place and miss another, I live in Paris and I miss Paris," he says of his exile. "I'm looking at Van Gogh, about Gauguin, looking at the art of the Middle Ages and I know that I belong to some land and nation. For me it's very important. "

Did not the ocean startle you?

"When I was little, I moved from Kurdistan to Teheran and saw that the world belongs to everyone, and I came to Israel and saw that the world belonged to my people as well, and suddenly I was in Paris and there was everyone else's world, and to survive in this world I had to stand with two legs on the ground and use my head. I found that my role on this land is to show the influence of the Western world on the eastern man, and also the eastern influence on my art, which has become Western, coming from my father's store and from the Japanese cloths. I belong to the first generation of my art and art artists, identical".

Abrahami's art is divided into three periods. In the 1970s, he mainly engaged in etchings. In the 1980s he developed and perfected watercolor techniques, his paintings were realistic with a tendency to the abstract that developed over the years. He painted landscapes, metaphors of nature and a weaving of abstract shapes that created an effect of oriental ornamentation. These were the watercolors that the great museums had acquired. In the 1990s he painted oil and watercolors alternately and three years ago began painting oil on wax. This is an ancient Egyptian technique that Abrahami adopted and developed, in which we mix wax with special glue and the desired color and place it on the canvas.

In 1972, he met an American art dealer and publisher who loved his works and purchased his entire series of color engravings and published them in an American edition album .In the United States, the concept of ethnicity aroused great curiosity and the American art market was thirsty for innovations from the outside, In 1988, he had a solo exhibition at a gallery in Boston, in 1993 at the Cite Museum in Paris, and again in Boston, in 1995 at the Israel Museum, in 1997, at the Israel Museum. A solo exhibition at a gallery in Tokyo and in 1999 his paintings were exhibited in the group exhibition "Touching Water Touching Light" in the museum Yoon Israel from the end of the 1970s, he also began selling well and collecting good reviews.

"It's hard to say that I have a name in Paris as it was for the great artists, but many people know me, and most importantly, the directors of the important museums know me, and in December 1994 the art critic of Le Monde saw an exhibition of my works and wrote me good reviews. The committee of museum directors in Paris contacted me and asked to see my works, I submitted eight watercolors to the committee and they unanimously bought them all. "

So why are you so modest?

"I tell you why, sometimes, in the winter, on cold days in the middle of the night, I go down to the Metro and paint the homeless, I have a mental need to paint them in order to be proportionate to life. I have to serve, and I personally believe in modesty as in the air to breathe, compliments are good, but the question is what next, that's why I can not sell myself, who buys my art, please, but I'm not talking about myself, "Hello, I came to show you my work, say what you think." Someone can mediate between me and my work. I'm just looking for another window, another gate, another window for my personal progress, I just hope nothing hurts and I can continue to work, but too much success, too many pats on the back. It can be harmful and even cause blindness.

When he talks about solving questions in painting, he expresses himself with grave seriousness, as if there were existential questions. "When I stood in front of a picture and could not finish the work, it was an agony, there was one painting I had fought with for two years, two years in the morning, standing in front of the blue cloth for hours, not knowing if it was the right blue or not. I made the color from paint powders and with a few brush strokes I touched the blues and all at once everything worked out, the painting was finished, as if the fabric was waiting for this moment for 100 hours, I was so happy that I managed to climb up those steep stairs and find Every time I face such a problem it frightens me, and if one day I do not find it The right sand? "

For these reasons, he also distanced himself from political or social art. His totality attracts all his attention to subjects that are art for art. She also keeps him away from society; he never married and did not raise a family.

Does an artist need love?

"It was a coincidence and a bit of fate, but there were loves, but there were disappointments, too, the moment I took off my white robe and said I did not want to work in aviation anymore, I chose this path of agony."