Jean David Many Faces



Jean David was a painter and graphic designer with international reputation, who exhibited extensively in Israel, Europe, and the USA. The last comprehensive exhibition of his work was held at the Tel Aviv museum in 1974. The exhibition at The Open Museum in Tefen and Omer and at the Rubin Museum in Tel Aviv is a first opportunity after many years to make renewed  acquaintance with his oeuvre, to look into the sources of inspiration and influence of his imagery, and to trace the evolution of his style as a painter and as a designer.



One cannot do justice to Jean David's work without viewing the total oeuvre and seeing the unity within the diversity. In each of the fields that he was creative in- painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, applied graphic design, and murals- he worked with sincerity and with a almost sensual love of technique, and in each of them he left his imprint As a designer, David to large extent set the tone for the representative image of Israel abroad, by means of tourist posters and of his works in the ZIM passenger lines and for El Al. Hence a renewed acquaintance with his oeuvre also enables a reexamination of the image of Israel that was shaped in this country during the fifties and sixties in an attempt to replace the heroic pathos of the State of Israel's first years.



As curators of the exhibition we were privileged to enter the artist's studio in Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv - a studio which has remind unchanged, although unused since the artist's death in 1993. Nevertheless something of artist's spirit is preserved there, and not only  in the works themselves, but also in the delivery of personal items that he accumulated over the years, and in the raw materials that remain.David's collections attest to culture with broad horizons, and to a youthful adventurous spirit, as well as to his humor and his love of life. His wife Suzy ,whose identification with his life-project stirred us, filled in much of the picture for us.



Despite of the wealth and diversity of Jean David's oeuvre throughout all its period, no book documenting it has been published to this day. The works particularly unknown to the public are his late pastel paintings from the 1980s, in which he arrived at a refined compactness, in the sense of a little that contains much. Hoping that the newsletter will expose the breadth of Jean David's oeuvre and illuminate his uniqueness as an artist.