YEHOSHUA GROSSBARD
Yehoshua Grossbard (1900-1992) was born in Poland, in a town near Warsaw. He came to Israel in 1939 and settled in Haifa, where he lived almost all his life, first in Hadar HaCarmel and later in Neve Sha'anan. He worked as a house painter for a living. His paintings focus on cityscapes, mostly Haifa's, and still life
The houses in his paintings are always portrayed from the outside - walls, balconies, windows and blinds, with no figures and only very little greenery; sometimes a fragment of the sea glimpses in the background. Despite the absence of people, his paintings are saturated with humanity and warmth.
Without any pathos and hoisted muscular arms, Grossbards's...
Yehoshua Grossbard (1900-1992) was born in Poland, in a town near Warsaw. He came to Israel in 1939 and settled in Haifa, where he lived almost all his life, first in Hadar HaCarmel and later in Neve Sha'anan. He worked as a house painter for a living. His paintings focus on cityscapes, mostly Haifa's, and still life
The houses in his paintings are always portrayed from the outside - walls, balconies, windows and blinds, with no figures and only very little greenery; sometimes a fragment of the sea glimpses in the background. Despite the absence of people, his paintings are saturated with humanity and warmth.
Without any pathos and hoisted muscular arms, Grossbards's painting is proletarian in the profound sense of the word.
Modesty and simplicity characterize both the painterly language and its subjects: the houses of Wadi Salib and the alleys of Wadi Nisnas, a kitchen table and a loaf of bread.
The formal reduction is not the austere, severe kind, but rather one that exudes softness and bright colors; the threshold of abstraction is always anchored in the concrete. In many respects, one can see Grossbards' painting as the perfect Haifa synthesis of the Red City ethos and the Mediterranean light.