The artist Haya Graetz Ran’s exhibit, “About Pioneers and Bears in Afula”, presents an artistic means to a renewed discussion about the issue of the image and status of the pioneer woman and society’s attitude toward her at the beginning of the settlement of Afula and the Izrael Valley. The feminist Post Modern dialogue allows us to examine the place of the pioneer woman, the mother and the woman who fulfilled herself. This dialogue rises out of Graetz-Ran’s Post Modern backward glance that examines if indeed the pioneer woman had the right to choose self-fulfillment within the masculine world of control and power, in the early days of settlement, providing her with a leading role in the Post Modern dialogue. Haya also turns a critical glance toward Israeli society and the legacy of violence and cycle of blood that accompany us to this day.

As an act of critical tribute toward Israeli reality, the artist chose to paint the image of the pioneer woman from period photographs. The picturesque stance corresponds with the stance of the masculine photographer who “stages” the pioneer women in romantic, feminine poses in order to market them to Diaspora Jews as postcards aimed at collecting money for purchasing “Plots of Land in the Homeland”. Graetz-Ran rises up against the attempt to beautify the harsh reality experienced by the women, plants protesting images, for example, the image of a diaphragm, black flags, girls beside the guardsman on horseback, and more, in opposition to the viewpoint of the photographer, and entices the viewer to delve with her into the personal codes and identifying marks that are in tune with her ideological social/feminist world view.

These women, pioneers, workers, identified by their dress as members of the working-class, grasp tools and represent the society of women in which gender equality would be preserved. Haya Graetz- Ran’s creative world moves between the public-social sphere, in which she turns the spotlight on a renewed examination of the attitude of masculine, macho Israeli society toward the woman, and that of her personal-private sphere, in which the field of creativity combines personal statements which grow out of her world view – that correspond with private memories and research carried out over many years about the lives of women pioneers as revealed in Valley archives and in meetings with pioneer women. According to her – “Each series of works shown in the exhibit has both a hidden and an open relationship to my personal biography, which runs parallel to the history of the founding of the State of Israel.¹ The job of “cover-up” and hiding of “the painful truth” has transformed into a kind of survival kit for the generation of mothers, most of whom relinquished their personal fulfillment – and imposed the weight of their hopes and missed opportunities of fulfillment onto the younger generation.” The dualism that characterized the responsible generation of mothers in the early period of settlement, the concern for children in contrast to their concern for the homeland, is the idea that connects all of the paintings through the figure of the mother, present-absent in depth in Graetz-Ran’s creations, and whose spirit is reflected in the figures of other women in her works. The paintings lead us on a kind of retrospective path, from the point of view of the artists as an adult woman and to memories she retains from her childhood, and these memories lead to physical and emotional territories – memories at once both personal and collective.

The realistic style of the figures and the Valley landscape create a feeling of serenity at first glance through the delicate outlines and design, as a harmonious wholeness is achieved through minimalism and paucity of details. Nevertheless, the relationship between the figure of the woman and the picturesque space expresses separation and distancing from the surroundings, emphasizing their loneliness and longing, their internal worlds filled with suffering and frustration, the inability of the women to speak of their true distress. The use of animals in Haya Graetz-Ran’s works provides variation and allows a type of communication. In the past, the artist included animal figures in her works, such as a rabbit, hedgehog, meerkat and pig, each of whom represented experiences drawn from her subconscious. The figure of the terrifying bear that appears in the series shown in the Afula Municipal Art Gallery, “About Pioneers and Bears in Afula”, leads to other places that correspond to stories from Haya Graetz-Ran’s pioneer father, of bears in the snowy forests of “Mother Russia”.

The artist points out: “The Russian bear that bursts out and stands looking at the pioneers who are ‘making roads’ was born with my feelings today as one observing the contemporary reality of Israeli society whose bindings have come loose, and in the feeling of the failure of my generation that was born in Israel. There is a sensation of cessation and inability to break out of the never-ending ‘cycle of blood’ that we have bequeathed to our children and grandchildren”.

Haya Graetz-Ran utilizes tools as the base for her creations, tools associated both with female and male territory, a used cutting board as the base for a painting, with marks of knives and time engraved in the wood fibers by brush strokes, emphasizing the rough texture on the inner parts of the women and their bodies, and, on the other hand, a plasterer’s trowel, identified as a masculine tool used for plastering that forms an additional base for her work. The conflict expressed in the use of these tools and the metaphoric connotation arising from it, stress the expression of defiance of conventions of the time that influenced the way the artist, Haya Graetz-Ran, was educated.

Ruti Kalimi, Curator

¹ Haya Graetz-Ran was born in 1948

Is it surprising to meet a bear in the Izrael Valley? Legends tell that hundreds of years ago you could meet bears and tigers, and perhaps even lions, in the mountains of Israel. The most recent sightings and witnessing of the presence of bears were noted in the North of Israel as late as the beginning of the twentieth century. Today it seems impossible to grasp that, and it remains a fantasy. Like legends and tall tales, in Haya Graetz-Ran’s paintings, everything is possible, even a meeting between pioneer women paving roads and bears. The connection between history and the present, between reality and imagination, are the complex artistic strategies Graetz-Ran adopts, in order to get across her deeply seated message, along with aesthetic artistic messages, and, no less, messages of feminism and local culture.

Not one of the details depicted in Haya Graetz-Ran’s paintings is unintentional. These paintings are not intuitive – they are calculated to tell the story of the Land of Israel and the people who acted here at the beginning by presenting them in a contemporary, critical, sober context, that offers a penetrating look at complex reality.

The aim of the paintings is to reveal layers of culture that were created in Israel over nearly one hundred years. The connection to the Valley with its landscapes and the story of the pioneers who built it is a frame story among several, that she accumulates one at a time. Simultaneously, she reminds us of forgotten stories of heroes from the past, and brings them back to our consciousnesses, especially those of unknown heroines from the past.

Pioneer women and bears are two opposing images, when considering the Land of Israel. The unusual connection between the two is the basis for the works in the new series shown in the exhibit. The pioneers depicted in many of the paintings of recent years are the heroines who disappeared from the history books. They are the spiritual mothers of the women who left their safe homes in Europe in order to found and give birth to a new nation in faraway villages, out of unfathomable commitment to Jewish culture and later – Israeli culture. These pioneers created the strong connection with the Valley in their hard, insufferable physical labor, such as paving roads while breaking rocks into gravel. They renounced personal relationships in order to be part of an ideology that at times caused their deaths. For bravery they did not win thanks, and certainly not glory.

Graetz-Ran brings back these pioneers to awareness and examines their images in unrealistic contexts, in the world of art. She examines the reality in which they existed, and tests it, while basing the paintings on old photographs that she finds in archives and abandoned family albums. The photos document their lives and their histories, real or staged, and are the basis for this work that is realistic in its artistic characteristics, while patently unrealistic.

This contradiction is the critical base for all of Graetz-Ran’s works. Throughout the years of realistic painting she continues to research the hidden artistic methods in painting based on reality. Her painting digs deep into the beautiful layers of paint and leaves the viewer with unfulfilled feelings of difficulty in grasping the strange connections, such as the bear and the pioneers. These connections encourage thoughts on that connection, but no less on the feasibility of these absurd situations that comprise reality in the Land of Israel, then just as now.

Nevertheless, Graetz-Ran’s painting is one based on historical photography – direct and simple yet beyond its being documentation or reconstruction of pictures from the past – it constitutes a reminder and criticism of perceptions fixed in the artistic consciousness, that are only a reflection of the social and cultural condition. Questions concerning place, questions concerning the female condition and female presence in culture, are a significant part of the various layers to which she attends in her painting and which raise a profound discussion.

The photographs carefully chosen by Graetz-Ran are not just photos of a random event – they are a document of an existential condition representing an individual mental condition that sheds light on the national condition. Nonetheless, in those times multitudes of additional photographs were made, these survived and came into Graetz-Ran’s hands, and she took great care to save them from the albums, and we learn much of what is told, and even more on what is not told from the photographs. The background stories are frequently more complex than what is present in the abstract and the snap photo itself. A clear example of this is the story of the pioneer Shoshana Bogin; the paintings based on photos of her, form the base for Graetz-Ran’s previous exhibit at Mishkanot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem (curator Raz Samira, 2014).

Nothing is random – all choices force the viewer, decades later, to deal with the past, and no less with its fixations, patterns and thoughts. They force the viewer to express one’s stance directly and to look eye- to-eye at the most personal perceptions in relation to women and in relation to Israel or this embroiled land where we live and work.

As a direct extension to a description of the impossible connections, Graetz-Ran examines the relationships between representations excluded from the historical story. Alongside the pioneers, there is an additional series shown in the exhibit, of young women carrying jugs on their shoulders. This image, that in years to come became one of the central images of the period of time marking the boundary between romantic Orientalism to that of pioneers from the Land of Israel, and was frequently found in the early Israeli art, as demonstrated by Nurit Canaan-Kedar in her articles and an exhibit she curated (Tel Aviv Land of Israel Museum, 2014). These paintings constitute a direct continuation to the ways of portraying women in Israeli art and women in Biblical-scene, Bedouins or Oriental Jews in character or in subject. The connection between the young woman who brings a drink, fulfilling physical needs connected to women’s work – constitutes a contradiction to the pioneers who splinter rocks into gravel. Here the association is with the traditional roles of young women and women. The contradiction between the two representations substantiates what Graetz-Ran describes as “the deepening of the feeling of the gap between the ideal pioneer to the reality of the Land of Israel”. Even during the period of romantic Orientalism or in the time of the pioneers, who ignored their physical and mental difficulties and challenges, Graetz-Ran’s goal is to represent the voices of the others, those marginalized from the central flow through which the stories can identify the cracks in the ideal story.

The cracks about which Graetz-Ran speaks are present in a clear, concrete form on the wooden plaques, some of which are painted on. The boards marked by furrows that are transformed into part of the artistic design, represent the furrows in the lives of the pioneers, as much as the ideologies unfulfilled completely. The cutting boards attached to trowels and to souvenirs from the Flea Market together represent the material aspect of the spiritual and ideal world left unfulfilled, as experienced in the 40s and 50s of the twentieth century.

The pioneer women are enscribed on these unconventional surfaces, and they are stamped for eternity in a place where eternity has been neglected. The furrows in the field are today furrows and clefts on the surface of the wooden plaques. And when a painting is painted on canvas, then the furrows are carved on the women’s faces – these heroines hidden from the Zionist narrative.

Hagai Segev