Shepherd with Lamb
Bezem (d. 2018)’s art, which once gave expression to his immigration to Palestine, the loss of his parents in the Holocaust, and his sense of rebirth in Israel, was dramatically transformed after his son was killed in a terrorist attack in 1975. Bezem left Jerusalem and moved to Tel Aviv before spending periods abroad. Here, as in many of his later works, his self-portrait appears: now as a bearded shepherd walking in the fields with a lamb under his arm (perhaps a reference to his dead son), with a huge vase on his shoulders filled with burning plants.
Credits
Photo by Andy Abrahamson. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, www.puckergallery.com.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10.
You may also like
Untitled, 1996 (from The Soldiers Series)
This photograph of a bare-chested young man flexing his muscles in front of an army tent is one of the best-known images in Nes’s “Soldiers” series, an exploration of Israeli identity and masculinity…
Former Tajik Barbers with Their Israeli Customers
In 1978, anthropologist Frédéric Brenner began traveling around the world with the aim of creating a visual record of the Jewish diaspora at the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of his…
“Nine Out of Four Hundred”: Erasing Mizrahi History
Artist Meir Gal’s photo of a 1970s Israeli Jewish history textbook exposes how few pages acknowledged Mizrahi and non-European Jews.
Guggenheim Bilbao
Located on the Nervión river in Bilbao, Spain, the Guggenheim Bilbao is a realization of the principles of deconstructivist architecture, a movement that emerged in the 1980s and sought to break from…
If One Day during Purim, Everybody by Chance Will Disguise Themselves as Orthodox Jews, Will the Messiah Come?
This photograph of two Jews reduces them to an abstraction, a single black shape, in a composition that includes the round shapes of manhole covers, the curving black lines of a street grating, and…
Monument to Jewish Holocaust Victims, Salonika, Greece
Glid’s memorial for the Jews of Salonika, Greece who were murdered in the Holocaust is modeled on Menorah in Flames, his 1990 monument for the murdered Jews of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Both depict a tree…
You may also like
Untitled, 1996 (from The Soldiers Series)
This photograph of a bare-chested young man flexing his muscles in front of an army tent is one of the best-known images in Nes’s “Soldiers” series, an exploration of Israeli identity and masculinity…
Former Tajik Barbers with Their Israeli Customers
In 1978, anthropologist Frédéric Brenner began traveling around the world with the aim of creating a visual record of the Jewish diaspora at the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of his…
“Nine Out of Four Hundred”: Erasing Mizrahi History
Artist Meir Gal’s photo of a 1970s Israeli Jewish history textbook exposes how few pages acknowledged Mizrahi and non-European Jews.
Guggenheim Bilbao
Located on the Nervión river in Bilbao, Spain, the Guggenheim Bilbao is a realization of the principles of deconstructivist architecture, a movement that emerged in the 1980s and sought to break from…
If One Day during Purim, Everybody by Chance Will Disguise Themselves as Orthodox Jews, Will the Messiah Come?
This photograph of two Jews reduces them to an abstraction, a single black shape, in a composition that includes the round shapes of manhole covers, the curving black lines of a street grating, and…
Monument to Jewish Holocaust Victims, Salonika, Greece
Glid’s memorial for the Jews of Salonika, Greece who were murdered in the Holocaust is modeled on Menorah in Flames, his 1990 monument for the murdered Jews of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Both depict a tree…