Ivan Schwebel
1932, West Virginia, USA - 2011, Jerusalem, Israel
Landscape in the Negev Desert

Original Hand-Signed Etching

Artist Name: Ivan Schwebel

Title: Landscape in the Negev Desert

Signature Description: Hand-signed in English lower right

Technique: Etching

Size: 25 x 34 cm / 9.84 x 13.39" inch

Frame: Unframed

Condition: Very good condition

Artist's Biography:

Ivan Schwebel, painter, born 1932, USA, died 2011 Jerusalem.

His Work 

Ivan Schwebel brought a unique, cinematic Expressionism to the Israeli art scene. Unlike the abstractionists of the "New Horizons" movement, Schwebel remained fiercely dedicated to the figure and the narrative, often blending contemporary reality with myth and history. 

Style -

The "Stage" Composition: Schwebel often treated the canvas like a theater set or a film frame. He frequently used architectural elements—balconies, windows, and Zion Square in Jerusalem—as a stage where dramatic, sometimes surreal, events would unfold. 

Juxtaposition of Eras: One of his most famous techniques was placing biblical figures (like King David) or Hollywood icons (like Greta Garbo) into the gritty, modern-day streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Draftsmanship and "The Line": His style is characterized by a nervous, energetic, and highly skilled line. He often left parts of the canvas "unfinished" or sketched-in, creating a tension between the detailed figures and the raw, white space of the background. 

Vibrant, Emotional Palette: He used color to denote mood rather than local accuracy. You will often see bold primary colors—reds, yellows, and deep blues—applied with rapid, expressive brushwork that feels both urgent and spontaneous.

Key Themes:

Jerusalem as a Living Character: Schwebel lived in Ein Karem and was obsessed with the light and stone of Jerusalem. He didn't paint it as a holy relic, but as a bustling, sometimes chaotic urban center. 

The Artist as Witness: Many of his works feature a "director" figure or a voyeuristic perspective, emphasizing the act of looking and recording. 

Cinema and Glamour: His fascination with 1940s Hollywood cinema added a layer of romanticism and "noir" atmosphere to his Israeli subjects.

Education
1953-55 with Kimura Kyoen whilst serving with the U.S.Army in Japan
1955-61 Institute of Fine Arts, with Philip Gaston
New York University. Published two books

Environmental Sculptures
Environmental works in Jerusalem: Book of Samuel; Tel-Aviv: Movie stars in Tel Aviv. 

Ivan Schwebel was an American-born Israeli artist who blended modern and ancient Jewish imagery and American cultural icons in his art.
He was born in West Virginia in 1932.
He joined the US army during the Korean War, and when the war ended, was sent to Japan by the army with the amorphous title of “information officer.” It was there that he began painting, taught by a Zen master-painter in Kyoto, Kimura Kyoen. The Japanese influence can be seen in his landscape paintings and in his dramatic compositions.

When he returned to New York he intended to study painting at New York University on a scholarship from the US Army. A meeting there with the American painter Philip Guston convinced him not to study further: Guston said it could “waste” him. He studied art history instead and painted at night. After finishing his Bachelor of Arts, he went to the Institute of Fine Arts for three years. He quit before getting his masters.

Ivan Schwebel then traveled in Europe awhile before moving to Israel in 1963. He found a stone house in the hills of Ein Karem, a village on the fringe of Jerusalem, where he lived for the rest of his life – adding on rooms as his family grew.
Though he worked also in screenprint, most of his prints were in the field of etching.
His works combined realistic depictions of the Israeli urban landscape and figurative imagery based on biblical iconography. His etchings often served as a base for oil painting.

Ivan Schwebel's paintings are set in the urban environments of modern Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York, working from photographs, and often including biblical and Jewish legendary figures, such as King David, Job and the Matronita. 
In Schwebel’s best work, the paint speaks for itself: the pools and explosions of rich color, achieved with pigment that he would grind and mix himself, the luminous figures emerging out of dark shadows, the quirky, dramatic compositions.

Israel did not embrace Schwebel as an artist. He was committed to his art and produced a huge body of work, which related to Israel, past and present, to Jewish themes and Jewish history.
In terms of originality and skill, he was one of the best painters working in the country. But his intrinsically romantic approach to painting was increasingly out of kilter with the rather tough, pragmatic local art scene; his work was different not only because of the lovers and flowers that often appear in the work or the dreamy narratives, but also because of his emotional style of working.

Schwebel was renowned for fusing images from different time periods in his paintings. He famously depicted biblical figures, such as King David and Job, in urban Israeli environments, such as Zion Square and modern Jerusalem.
His works about the Holocaust combine different vignettes of Jewish history – the Spanish Expulsion, the ghettos and the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem skylines. Colorful and expressive, his pieces have been interpreted as commentaries on Israeli society and politics, and they have been exhibited in the Israel Museum and in museums and galleries throughout Israel and the US.

He had major shows over the years – at the Israel Museum, Tefen, and at the Ramat Gan Museum; his work had been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum and is represented in their collection.

Ivan Schwebel died on July 13th, 2011 in Israel.

Solo Exhibitions

2010 Safe Place, The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan
           The Inescapable, The Bar David Museum for Art and Judaica, Kibbutz Bar’am
2005 Schwebel, Afula
         Schwebel - City of Love, Bernard Gallery, Tel Aviv
1999 Schwebel's Grand Hotel, Municipal Haifa Theatre
1998 Pain and Passion, The Red House, Motza
1996 David - The Books of Samuel and Kings, Peer Fine Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
         Schwebel - Starting on LaGuardia Street, Peer Fine Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
1994 Seasons in the Judean Hills, Yad Labanim Museum, Petach-Tikva
1993 Seasons of Judea, Navon Gallery and Art Centre, Neve Ilan
1991 Schwebel The Sealed Room January-February 1991, Mayanot Gallery, Jerusalem
1990 Schwebel's at the Movies, Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, Jerusalem
1989 Schwebel Jerusalem - Tel Aviv, The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park
         Recent Works - Oil and Etchings, Mayanot Gallery, Jerusalem
1987 Reworked Small Works, Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv
        “The Arena of Jerusalem” – Schwebel’s Book Launching Event, Reuven Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv
1986 Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv! Dizengoff Center
1984 Paintings, Artists' House, Jerusalem
1983 Schwebel, Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv
1979 Early Manifestations of the Free Standing Painting, Gallery Gimel, Jerusalem
1977 From the Mann Auditorium Walls, Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv
1974 Paintings – Drawings, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion
         Solo Exhibition, Dvora Schocken Gallery, Tel Aviv
1973 Recent Paintings, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv
1971 Ivan Schwebel: Artist in Studio, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
         Designs For a Bus Stop, Dvora Schocken Gallery, Tel Aviv
1969 Schwebel - Eleven Paintings, Mabat - Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
1963 Ivan Schwebel - Solo exhibition, Dugith Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

Group Exhibitions

2016 Dialogue: Sidon Rothenberg and the Print Workshop Artists, Jerusalem Print Workshop
2014 Group exhibition, Jerusalem Print Workshop
         From the Joseph and Daniela Lipschitz Collection, Open University Gallery, Ra’anana
2013 Man and Landscape, Omer Open Museum
2011 A Personal View, Haifa Museum of Art
2008 Jerusalem: Surface Fractures, Artists' House, Jerusalem
2004 The Art of Aging, The Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, New York
2002 Group Exhibition, Time for Art - Center for Israeli Art, Tel Aviv
2001 Drawing Aspects in Print, Jerusalem Print Workshop
1996 ''We Prefer Jerusalem Above Our Chief Joy'', Yad Labanim Museum, Petach-Tikva
         Artists Messengers of Peace, Artists' House, Jerusalem
1995 Tribute to Collector Arie Dobron, Paintings, Petach Tikvah Museum of Art
1994 Re Versal - Works from the last 20 years Gimmel Gallery, Gimmel at Mishkenot Art Gallery, Jerusalem
         The Printer's Imprint: Twenty Years with the Jerusalem Print Workshop, Jerusalem, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
          Art Focus - 1994 - Three Artists – Etching, Gallery Kibutz Eilon
          Art Focus - 1994 - Etchings from the Kabri Print Workshop, Cabri Gallery of Contemporary Art
1993 Homage to the Jerusalem Print Workshop, Shaar Zion Library, Beit Ariella, Tel Aviv
1990 Metropolis, Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art
1989 1967: The Amiricanization of Israeli Art, Bograshov Gallery, Tel Aviv
1986 Landscape and Nature: Contemporary Israeli Prints from the Collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, High Court of Australia, Canberra, Australia
         There Are No Bad Animals: Animals as Motif in Works of Art, Mobile Group Exhibition, Man and the Living World Museum, Ramat Gan
1984 Two Years: Israeli Art, Qualities Accumulated II (Two-Dimensions), Tel Aviv Art Museum
1983 Tel Hai 83, Contemporary Art Meeting, Tel Hai
1981 Israeli Prints from the Burston Graphic Center, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
         Trends in Isreali Art 1970-1980, International Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland
         Process and Print: An Exhibition of Working Proofs, Jerusalem Print Workshop
1980 Retrospective 1966-1980. Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv
1979 The Israeli Grafotec, Shaar Zion Library, Beit Ariella, Tel Aviv
1973 Jerusalem Artists - Exhibition and Proceeds to the Voluntary War Loan, Artists' House, Jerusalem
1969 Art Festival, Painting & Sculpture in Israel 1969, The Exhibition Grounds, Tel Aviv
         220 x 125, Maskof Red Blue Mezzanine, Artists' House, Jerusalem
1968 Combined Arts - Painting, Poetry, Music, Engel Gallery, Jerusalem.

A Biographic Sketch:

“Born in West Virginia, October 29, 1932, then raised until six in Cochran, Georgia. A divorce brought my mother, my two older sisters and I to the Bronx, Gates Place, opposite Van Cortland Park, where I was raised until breaking out to play baseball, study acting and go to the army during the Korean War. I hardly ever saw my father who had substituted his Yiddish-Polish accent for a southern drawl very quickly. People actually paid to hear my accent when I was 6.

At 19, The US Army was like a grant for me. I was sent to Japan when the war ended in Korea. There, after telling an officer some nonsense about my journalistic experience, I spent almost two years in Public Information. Japan thrilled me. It awakened talents that lay buried for several years. I began to paint and managed to study with a Zen master-painter, Kimura Kyoen in Kyoto. "Study" is incorrect.
The man loved me, even showed my work in a giant temple because my black and white brush drawings contained nothing of traditional art. It did have the excitement achieved when one draws without preconception. The Army kept giving me leaves to be rid of me. I often lived in a Buddhist temple run by a woman priestess whom I loved. A painting of her and I is in "Models".

I returned to N.Y. considering myself a painter but was frightened to just do it, so with the GI Bill I went to New York University. There I met Philip Guston who told me it's best not to teach painting because it could waste you. Therefore, I studied art history while painting at night. After the B.A. I went on to the Institute of Fine Arts for three years. I quit just before my M.A.

I left N.Y. to get my son from my wife's Greek family in Sparta. I failed to achieve this so I bounced around Europe for a year. I came to Israel in the winter of '63 and have remained ever since. My hillside home and studio in the outskirts of Jerusalem was found immediately, as was another wife. After ten years we had two children. My wife died in 1989. I since remarried, making two more children.

I have actually taught drawing, very recently for two years, convinced by my wife to do so because "there are beautiful girls there". What soon occurred was that I grew fond of the youth of Israel, kids back from the hell of military service. I got fired because I gave everyone a 97 regardless, except one. He got 98 because he brought two bottles of wine to our end-of-year party. I made them 3 big exhibitions of their works on hate and the torments of the times to insure they knew about the serious potentials of painting.

Yearly I and family visit N.Y. for a short spell. In the early 90's I even took a loft on 20th Street, painted and managed to pay expenses through the sale of paintings. However, the scuds of the Gulf War and the births of our children made trips impossible. Had I an agent, perhaps I would have maintained it. But I have not met the agent or gallery that could sell Houdini self-liberating while suspended over Canal Street, or the Bronx stick-ball three sewer hitter, especially since my work fits no popular style or fashion. And who's to handle
David fighting Goliath on Times Square?”

Ivan Schwebel

Additional Information:

An artist from the New York School shipwrecked on a hill near Jerusalem
By ANNE SASSOON / The Jerusalem Post / 08/23/2011

IVAN SCHWEBEL DEVOTED HIS life to painting: he put everything he thought, felt and lived into his work – including, during the last years, his experience of aging. He entitled this last series of paintings “A Safe Place,” referring to a particular part of the forest near his home in Jerusalem. And when he suddenly died on July 15, while on a walk with his beloved dog, his family knew that was where they would find him.
He must have expected just a brief interruption to his painting as he left behind him half a mug of coffee, an open newspaper, and wet paints. It was a romantic, almost filmic ending for an artist whose work is both romantic and filmic – in style as well as narrative.
Schwebel, which is how he preferred to be addressed, was an indefinable maverick.

Born in America in 1932, he joined the US army during the Korean War, and when the war ended, was sent to Japan by the army with the amorphous title of “information officer.” It was there that he began painting, taught by a Zen master-painter in Kyoto, Kimura Kyoen. The Japanese influence can be seen in his landscape paintings and in his dramatic composition. But when he returned to New York, a meeting with the American painter Philip Guston convinced him not to study further: Guston said it could “waste” him.
After a year travelling in Europe, a love affair with an Israeli brought Schwebel to Israel in 1963: the love affair ended, but he stayed. He found a stone house in the hills of Ein Karem, a village on the fringe of Jerusalem, where he lived for the rest of his life – adding on rooms as his family grew.
His studios were like interconnecting caves with their stone-flagged floors, uneven walls and domed ceilings, lit up – or so it seemed – by the glowing colors of his paintings.
Israel did not embrace Schwebel as an artist. He was committed to his art and produced a huge body of work, which related to Israel, past and present, to Jewish themes and Jewish history. In terms of originality and skill, he was one of the best painters working in the country. But his intrinsically romantic approach to painting was increasingly out of kilter with the rather tough, pragmatic local art scene; his work was different not only because of the lovers and flowers that often appear in the work or the dreamy narratives, but also because of his emotional style of working.
He, in turn, was not in sympathy with nor very interested in Israeli artists and their struggle to discover and create an identity.
He was on his own path. As an artist, he became more and more a hermit and felt like the classic misunderstood loner – or so it seemed to me when I first met him twelve years ago.
“The art establishment and he were mutually rejecting,” his wife Adva tells The Report in an e-mail discussion, “as he hated formalities and politically correct behavior.”
Yet Schwebel did not go unrecognized.
He had major shows over the years – at the Israel Museum and Tefen, and last year at the Ramat Gan Museum; his work had been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum and is represented in their collection. And when he was reviewed by the critics – which was not often – it was with respect.
Yet I was surprised to discover that an artist of his caliber was not included in mainstream exhibitions and that, indeed, it was rather difficult for him to find ways to show his art at all. After 48 years in the country he remained an outsider.
Larry Abramson, who is very much in the mainstream of Israeli art, curated an exhibition of Schwebel’s work at the Jerusalem Print Workshop in the early 1980s; in the accompanying text, he described him as “an artist from the New York School ship-wrecked on a hill near Jerusalem.”
“That is how I see him,” Abramson tells The Report. “Out of place, stranded in a foreign context, out of touch with the culture around him, but also with the ‘mother culture’ he left behind. This is, of course, a very romantic condition, hence the romanticism of his every move in art.”
IN SCHWEBEL’S BEST WORK, THE paint speaks for itself: the pools and explosions of rich color, achieved with pigment that he would grind and mix himself, the luminous figures emerging out of dark shadows, the quirky, dramatic compositions.
Although the narrative was important to him, it’s the vitality and inventiveness in his paintings that give them their power. Having to do without an art community to share and bounce off ideas is a disadvantage to all solitary artists and, like most of them, Schwebel’s painting went wildly off course at times. His work could become illustrative, sentimental or confused but never boring or predictable.
In a bigger, less intensely focused country, there might have been more space for Schwebel the artist – I imagine him succeeding in a place like Sweden or Greece, where art can be emotional and without irony.
Schwebel was erudite, with a passion for the bible and Jewish and Israeli history. He delved into all of it for his subject matter, bringing together characters and narratives regardless of time, and setting them in modern- day Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, the Judean hills, or New York City. He liked to play with ideas, and thoroughly mixed his visual metaphors. He showed David and Bat-Sheva next to a Nazi deportation train, and Job despairing over his relationship with the Palestinians. He based his characters on photographs of himself, friends and family, or movie stars.
On his website, he describes a series of paintings about anti-Semitism in which the Holocaust is merged with the Spanish Inquisition: “Abarbanel who tried to negotiate with Ferdinand and Isabella is reincarnated in Rumkovski – the German appointed Head of the Lodz Ghetto. The bridge connecting two parts of the Ghetto is spanned over a present-day Tel Aviv cityscape.
Deportation trains travel up Jerusalem’s center and along Bronx streets. The Spanish Queen and an Inquisition victim wait on the platforms...”
In a series entitled “The Situation,” Schwebel is direct and graphic, depicting some of the horrors of the suicide bombings that hit Jerusalem in the early 2000s, and protesting the deaths of innocent people as well as the brutal interrogations to which Palestinians were subjected. He was a strong supporter of the Parents’ Circle, a grass-roots organization of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis.
His “Tel Aviv” series, in contast, is fun: “Chen Cinema” shows a couple of actors who seem to have stepped out of an old romantic movie to cuddle in the shabby street outside the cinema. In his final “Safe Place” series of paintings, he goes beyond self-conscious narrative to create his own Garden of Eden: a private environment in which a man and a woman – or the artist and his Muse – are able to encounter each other in a more meaningful way. Couples wander through a river, lie in a grassy field, float in a cave. In one painting, the woman appears between the trees to discover the man lying lifelessly on the ground in the clearing that Schwebel referred to as his “Safe Place.” The man is based on a self-portrait and is festooned with flowers like the drowned Ophelia.
Eerily, it is as if in this painting Schwebel was able to foresee the manner of his own death.
He is survived by his wife, Adva, five children and six grandchildren.

Ivan Schwebel | FSP – Free-Standing Painting
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art

Curators: Aya Lurie, Ori Drumer
Jan. 14, 2023 - June 17, 2023

More than a decade after Ivan Schwebel (1932–2011) passed away, this exhibition seeks to renew the acquaintance with the artist and his work. Through the vast archival material he left behind, and among the hundreds of his paintings, drawings, engravings and work journals, a total, febrile artist is revealed, for whom painting was an existential need and a refuge.

Schwebel was born in the United States. In 1963, after years of wandering – between Kyoto, Paris, New York, Athens, Cordova, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem – he settled in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem. His paintings featured in exhibitions at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, and more. While his talent was immediately recognized, his frustration mounted as he gradually found himself working increasingly outside the mainstream.

While researching the exhibition, we studied Schwebel’s archive of works and documents, and particularly his work journals. These journals reflect his life much as a storyboard reflects a movie, at times like a graphic novel. Many of his paintings depict Old Testament figures. These paintings, full of pathos, convey creative urgency. Etchings or landscapes (urban or natural) are used as a substrate for painting, much like an architectural film set, combined with drawings and laying of paint. All of these produce a staged event, edited in a non-linear manner – a painting space consisting of a mixture of techniques and layers, combining different times, spaces, sites, and places, past alongside present, and at times also alongside future.

In Schwebel’s work there is a fundamental connection between the act of painting and the world of cinema, the photographed image and cinematic editing. The cinematic cut creates an utter and immediate transition from one field of view to another, a jump back and forth in time and space. Schwebel recounted that for him the canvas was like a cinematic screen that allows the impossible to happen. He often painted large curtains on either side of the canvas, as in an old movie theater, delimiting the imaginary space.

In Schwebel’s mind, images of current affairs ran wild side by side with episodes from Jewish history. Thus, for example, his paintings show images from old documentaries and photographs from the Holocaust period – figures of humiliated Jews and Nazi soldiers –along with images representing the expulsion of the Jews from Spain through the grotesque figures of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (possibly referencing Fellini, whose films he admired); antisemitic iconography; various figures from the history of art; and American cultural and cinematic icons, highlighting his affinity with popular culture.

In his FSP – Free-Standing Painting project from the 1970s, Schwebel constructed walls and placed them at various sites in Israel. The Free-Standing Painting might also be seen as a representation of the painter himself –standing free and apart. The walls, which were supposed to serve as a support for landscape paintings, come across as drive-in screens that stand in isolation, at once rooted in the site and alien and distinct from it. Schwebel envisioned creating a similar project throughout New York City, as evident from a series of images he conceived with renditions of urban collages that combined photography and painting. These plans, which never came to fruition, bring to mind the rhetoric of billboards, and underline Schwebel’s strong urge to link together art with everyday life and the street.

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