Mordecai Ardon

Mordecai Ardon (born Max Bronstein in Tuchów, 1896 – Jerusalem, 1992) was an Israeli painter, often regarded as the most important painter in Israel's history. Born in Tuchów, then in Austria-Hungary and now in Poland, he worked for roughly seventy years, blending modern expressionism with abstraction and with the older masters he admired, among them Rembrandt and El Greco.

Between 1921 and 1925 he studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar under Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, whose influence stayed with him throughout his life. He then spent about a year working with Max Doerner in Munich, learning painting techniques from earlier masters. The tension between classical craft and avant-garde experiment defined his mature style.

In 1933 he emigrated to Mandate Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. He taught at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design from 1935 and directed it from 1940 to 1952. He then served as artistic adviser to Israel's Ministry of Education and Culture until 1963. From the 1950s he built his canvases from a system of symbols drawn from Kabbalah, the Bible and everyday reality, aiming to give the present a cosmic dimension. "Bird near a Yellow Wall" (1950) reflects his engagement with the Holocaust, a theme few Israeli artists addressed at that time.

Ardon believed a painting should be judged only by its own elements: color, composition and interaction, free of political messages or literary meaning. He received the UNESCO Prize in 1954 and the Israel Prize for painting in 1963. As a teacher he influenced pupils such as Avigdor Arikha and Yehuda Bacon, and he is often seen as the father of the regional approach in Israeli art. His stained-glass cycle "Isaiah's Vision of Eternal Peace" in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem is among his best-known works. "The Woodpecker of Time" sold at Christie's in 2006 for $643,200.