News
Painting by Tova Berlinski Added to Museum Collections. Gift to Museum from an Oświęcim Native
The artist, who was born in Oświęcim and now lives in Jerusalem, has denoted one of her paintings to the Museum. It is an untitled depiction of a single gray flower in a glass vase. In tones of gray and black, the composition, measuring 100 x 70 cm., was made on paper using mixed techniques.
Tova was born in Oświęcim in 1915 as Gusta Wolf, the daughter of Samuel Wolf, a Hasidic rabbi, and Gizela Horowitz Wolf. Tova was the eldest of six children. Jews made up a majority among the more than 10 thousand prewar residents of Oświęcim. Tova Berlinski has fond memories of the years she spent there, and of her contacts with the city’s Catholic residents.
She emigrated to Palestine in 1938, and studied at the art academies of Jerusalem and Paris. She won the Jerusalem Prize in 1963, and received the prestigious Mordechai Ish-Shalom Prize in 2000 for her lifetime contribution to the growth of art.
Tova Berlinski has shown her work in Israel, the UK, the USA, and the Netherlands. Her work was presented in Poland for the first time at the On Love and Death exhibition in Poznań in 2006. In the same year, her work was shown at the Oświęcim Jewish Center.
On Tova Berlinski’s Work
Tova Berlinski has not always painted such dark, foreboding pictures. Earlier, her work sparkled with color, first reflecting a fascination with children’s colored drawings. Later, she moved on to colorful abstraction with figurative allusions, and, finally, to landscapes.
Dark, sometimes black flowers have been her theme for some time now. She dedicates them to her parents and siblings, murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz—less than two kilometers from the family home.
The painting donated to the Museum features a lonely glass vase holding a solitary flower devoid of all beauty. As the art critic Bogna Błażewicz wrote, “flowers usually symbolize beauty in the painting tradition. They are depicted above all for their decorative value. Berlinski’s plants, painted or sketched in a nervous gesture, have no life in them. They have bloomed in spite of everything and turn gray in an accusatory way on the surface of the painting. Their beauty is cancelled, extinct, turned to ash. A few spots of light, sliding over the petals, reflecting in the glass vessel, are a tenuous connection with life. Perhaps it is only a wish, or perhaps new hope will rise from the ashes. Like a phoenix…”
