The Legacy of Rafi Lavie

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The quickest reaction to the death of Rafi Lavie, who passed away on Monday at the age of 70, was seen a month ago. Christie’s annual auction was held in Tel Aviv just four days after an interview with Lavie was published in Haaretz, in which he spoke openly about being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a month earlier. At the event, two of Lavie’s paintings were sold for $23,000 and $24,000, respectively - twice the previously estimated sums. This was a record high for Lavie in a open auction. One of the buyers clearly stated that the awareness of his pending death affected the purchase.

In a meeting with him, Lavie said he traded Bianca Eshel Gershuni these paintings years ago in return for jewelry she designed. When asked whether he was disturbed by the fact people were selling paintings they received as gifts or the result of a trade, he responded: “Apparently they’ve grown tried by the piece and that’s fine with me. The most important thing for me is that my painting will be hung in as many places possible and that people will see them. A person who sells my work doesn’t enjoy it anymore, and whoever buys it does so out of love. That’s what’s important.”

In the interview, Lavie appears weary, gaunt and aware of his pending death. As always, he had an amusing story on the subject. This time, it pertained to a dedication on a print by Yehezkel Streichman, which hung in Lavie’s kitchen. “Streichman and I argued for years over which one of us would be first to die,” Lavie said. “He was already my teacher in elementary school and even back then, when he was 30, he would always grasp his stomach and say, ‘I’m going to die’ and was like that his entire life. One day we were sitting in Givon Art Gallery and he repeated, ‘ay, ay, ay, I’m going to die. He was 80 years old at the time, and I said to him, ‘Streichman, I’m going to die before you.’ So he whipped out this print and wrote, ‘To Rafi, this is the last time.’ Until one time it really was the last time.”

Lavie passed away in his home, just like he wanted. He left behind him his wife Ilana, two sons - the elder, Yoav, principal of Ankory High School in Ra’anana, and the younger, Aviv, a journalist and sports commentator - and five grandchildren. His relatives say his final days were especially excruciating. In his last weeks, he couldn’t eat anything, and in his final days he also didn’t drink. On Tuesday two weeks ago, he still held one of his famous music nights, in which everyone listened to works together. Ten days ago, he sent in his last classical music column for Achbar Ha’ir (which comes out tomorrow). That same day he also stopped listening to music.

“The moment he stopped enjoying music, due to physical pain, it was clear that the end was near,” says a member of the family. “His whole desire to remain at home, to die at home, was because all of his life he listened to music and occupied himself with the little things he loved in his apartment, between his four walls. He wanted to prolong it as much as possible up until the last moment. This was what mainly made life worth living for him.”

The day before last, at 1 A.M. when he couldn’t fall asleep, he told a close friend, ‘I don’t want to see the rising dawn.’ He died on the evening of that same day. Immediately after he died, his family members notified his close friends, who arrived at his apartment in the middle of the night.

Among them was the curator Yonah Fischer and his wife Nehama, curator Sarit Shapira and her partner filmmaker Amit Goren, artist Yair Garboz and Michal Ne’eman and her partner, musician Yossi Mar Haim. They held a sort of party and reminisced.

Garboz recalled the heart surgery Lavie underwent at age 44. While Lavie lay in the intensive care unit, Garboz ran to the record store Alegro on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv to buy him a record he really wanted. When he arrived at Alegro, the salesman said, ‘we only received two copies, and Rafi Lavie already bought them over the phone from the intensive care unit.”

It’s hard to write a eulogy for Lavie, who was an artist, critic, teacher and father figure for many generations of artists. It’s hard to think of an Israeli artist with such a powerful influence on Israeli art. His innovation was expressed in a unique way of thinking, chutzpa, the new air he infused in the 1960s art scene. “It is you, in my eyes, who created the sensual intensity here: the sensitivity of the wild line, alternately slow and rapid, the beauty of that same mud we call material. You attained the exemption from being bound to your image … It wasn’t radicalism, some kind of formalism, it was inside of you,” wrote curator Yonah Fischer in the catalog for Lavie’s retrospective exhibition at the Israel Museum in 2003.

What else made Lavie so prominent and relevant? He always made sure to be in the heart of action, even after retiring in 1999, after decades of teaching art. He continued to be up-to-date, to form ties with young artists, and trade works with them. The last exhibit he visited, about a month and a half before his death, was Gil Marco Shani’s “Red Chest” of the young generation.

He continued to renew and draw attention to himself, whether with a new exhibition, which was always accompanied by a provocative interview or by contradictions he created, almost intentionally, in the things he said. He was cynical and biting but at the same time sensitive and romantic, he was a painter who hated to paint and a leader who denied (at least on the outside) his leadership. He embraced the thesis about meager material attached to him by Sarah Breitberg-Semel. However, the 1980s and years later saw a completely different thesis by Sarit Shapira, who portrayed him as a storyteller and symbolist.

Lavie, one of the decisive figures in the formation of modernism in the Israeli art scene, was not only an important artist but also a curator, a music and art critic, and a teacher to four generations of artists. He was also one of the founders of the important group Ten Plus in 1965, which aimed to shock the art world, allow young artists to expose their work, and bring art closer to everyday life.

Much has been written about Lavie over the years. About his work, his childish style, his big mouth and his passion for classical music (expressed in his Achbar Ha’ir column), his scribbling and jabbering, his untidy Tel Aviv look which he was known for, and the great love between him and his wife Ilana whose name and silhouette frequently appeared in his work. The name Rafi Lavie became a concept, a term in the Israeli art world.

In the periodical Hamidrasha, which was dedicated to Lavie when he retired, editor Naomi Siman Tov published a list of associations that arose from his name. It included, among others, “the abstract and lyrical, collage, modernism, Tel Aviv, the Midrasha [Beit Berl Academic College], school, 1960s, arts, Rafi’s students and especially the girls, the plywood, the scribble, the pencil, the leaders, posters, notes, geranium, words, Aviva Uri, meager art, the sabra, Arie Aroch, Rafi, the guru, Rafi, the non-guru, Rafi, the critic, Rafi, the persona, Rafi’s home, the collections - and Rafi and music, of course.” In conclusion, Siman Tov wrote: “The real Rafi will forever evade words. The fantasy remains. Invented on the one hand, full of passions and impulses on the other.”

He had many admirers of all ages. The ritual of trading with him was a kind of right of passage that every artist aspired to. This was how his collection was formed, which included 300 pieces. When Lavie and his wife moved to a ground floor apartment on Oliphant Street in Tel Aviv last year, he loaned some 250 works to the Museum of Art in Ein Harod. This year, which Lavie said was the best year of his life, he managed to trade works with many young artists: Gal Weinstein, Ruti Helvitz, Avner Ben Gal, Ruti Ben Yaakov, Alona Harpaz, Gil Shani and Amon Yariv.

Lavie also had more than a few critics, who spoke against his dominance (some even called him a “dictator”), his artistic ideology and the way he disregarded artists whom he didn’t like. In the same periodical dedicated to Lavie, Yaakov Mishori claimed that Lavie said to ignore the visual text. “In more than a few cases, there was the impression that works of art were an illustration to the text,” wrote Mishori. “In more severe cases, the work of art became unnecessary, like some dangling limb dragging behind a canonic literary citation. There was an unhealthy detachment between the words and the drawing, which had bitter implications.”

As for the question of what Lavie changed in Israeli art, Rabina says, “Israeli art is a small, enclosed field, existing in an aggressive occupying chauvinist country, and this field sprouted a secular and enlightened tribe leader, an unmistakable feminist supported by strong and outspoken women. In this aspect, Rafi’s finger was pivotal in blocking the whole in the dam against the violence and chauvinism, in which our culture exists in. In essence, the father figure of Israeli art is in essence a mother figure.”

Lavie contributed his body to medicine, therefore taking away the option of holding a funeral with many participants and eulogies. This didn’t prevent friends admirers and former students from showing up at his apartment on Oliphant Street upon hearing the news of his death yesterday. On May 26, works from his personal collection and from friends’ collections will be exhibited in Givon gallery. “I chose works that are usually part of a series, or that sometimes go unnoticed,” said Lavie in his final interview. “Pictures that aren’t always noticed, and when they’re displayed alone on the wall there will be an opportunity to pay a little more attention to them. They deserve it.”

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