Avni’s life was short – he was only 45 at the time of his death in 1951 – and his major artistic activity took place in the 1930s and 1940s. The artistic background of his work thus extends from the end of the Modernist shift in pre-independence Israeli art to the entrenched hegemonic trend of universalist abstraction. Against this backdrop, Avni forged his own style and artistic identity as an artist focused primarily on “introverted” or introspective images – a “chamber painter” of interiors, portraits, and intimate landscapes. Like other artists of his generation, Avni formulated a new local style of painting that was profoundly rooted in the French artistic tradition, and influenced by the contemporary School of Paris. It is a style focused on personal and emotional expression yet founded on pictorial and artistic values that dictate the painting’s composition, incorporating both the artist’s skill and the painting’s atmosphere. Moreover, the style adopted and adapted for the local scene was perceived to be not only a modern and universal language, but one that also bore “Jewish” attributes, which, it was felt, were ripe for revisiting. Accordingly, Avni’s paintings are intimate, emotionally charged, and dark – and they are typically of interiors, still lifes, portraits, and intimate landscapes. Avni’s predilection for intimate interior views is both a genre and an ideational outlook – one of painting intimate painting at close quarters.
Beside his artistic work, Avni nurtured the pedagogical aspect of art education, which he saw as a mission of utmost social value and cultural importance. In 1936, he founded the Studia, or, to give its full official title: The Studia for Painting and Sculpture under the Cultural Committee of the Tel Aviv Workers’ Council. The Studia was established under the auspices of the Histadrut (trade union organization) and thanks to Avni’s connections in Mapai (the then ruling Labor Party), with the goal of “providing its students with a perfect education, in theory and in practice, in the field of plastic arts, and to spread the artistic education to the masses.” The Studia soon became a major artistic hub in Tel Aviv, and many of the most important Israeli artists began their careers as its students. After his death, the Studia was renamed the Avni Institute, which bears his name to this day.
Avni’s artistic outlook was consistent throughout his life. In one period he was seen as original and advanced, and in another as conservative and even old-fashioned. This change affected him not only during his lifetime, but posthumously, as well – in the form of disregard by museums, in his absence in historiographical writings, and in oblivion from public memory. Exactly seventy years after his death, this exhibition and its accompanying book offer us an opportunity to become acquainted with Avni’s paintings.
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