What does an art show have to do with Israeli democracy?
Chapter 5: Asim Abu Shakra: So, what about those cactuses?
(This is number 5 of a series of posts I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks about the background to an art exhibition that will be hanging at the museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod until May 2023. The show is a retrospective of the works of five artists from one extraordinary family: the Abu Shakras of Umm al-Fahm.
I’m an American-born journalist on the staff of Haaretz English Edition who has been living in Israel since 1987. I’m Jewish, but I have long been interested in learning about the country’s Palestinian population. They have contended with countless challenges, which continue to this day, but this is their home, and they aren’t going anywhere, although that is something that some parts of the Jewish population still doesn’t understand.
Earlier chapters:
Link to Chapter 1: What does an art show have to do with Israeli democracy
Link to Chapter 2: An artist in search of the sublime
Link to Chapter 3: “Umm al-Fahm!? Is it even safe to go there?”
Link to Chapter 4: “Apparently, this used to be a Palestinian village”
To me, the Abu Shakras, their birthplace, and the art gallery in the city that’s associated with them, tell a story that goes beyond art. Call me naive, but I think that story can point a way forward to reconciliation among Israelis. Writing not long after the November 1 election, I know how tempting it might be to think that “all is lost.” But this is our shared home, and we don’t have the option of losing faith. Maybe this newsletter will serve to provide readers with reason to be more hopeful. dbgiht@gmail.com )
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Would it be possible to speak about Asim Abu Shakra without talking about his paintings of tzabar, or prickly-pear, cactuses? Of course not. During the last few years of his cruelly short life – Abu Shakra died in 1990, at age 28 – many of his canvases depicted this plant, in a variety of states, including in a flowerpot seated on a windowsill. Abu Shakra was hardly the first artist living in the Land of Israel-Palestine -- and that includes the other painters in his family -- to incorporate this common plant into his work. But by the time he adopted the Opuntia ficus-india (the scientific name for this common cactus that probably only made its way to the Levant from Central America by way of Europe, after being brought there by Spanish explorers), as a subject for artistic examination, it was already saddled with political significance, as both Israeli Jews and Israelis of Palestinian citizenship had long seen it as their own.
Asim Abu Shakra was an extraordinarily talented painter who seems to have been born to create art, and who some have even said died to create art, speculating that the cancer that killed him was caused by the inhalation of toxic turpentine fumes in the small studio space where he worked and slept during his years as an art student. His background, his family, and the obstacles he faced in becoming an artist, all of these also contributed to the mystique that surrounds Abu Shakra, more than three decades following his death. But it was also his enigmatic political identity, as a Palestinian who was obviously ambivalent, if not torn, between his identities as Palestinian and Israeli, in an era that didn’t leave room for an artist to carry around multiple, and sometimes battling, identities. Viewers looked at Abu Shakra’s cactuses and wanted to know what he was trying to tell us, whose side he was on. They still aren’t sure of the answer
Asim Abu Shakra, one of the five subjects of the “Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place: Artists of the Abu Shakra Family” exhibition at the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, was born on November 11, 1961, the seventh of the 10 children of Salah and Rokiyya Abu Shakra. The brothers Walid, Said and Farid Abu Shakra were his first cousins (their fathers were brothers) and they grew up together. (Karim Abu Shakra, the fifth of the artists represented at Ein Harod, is a nephew of Asim.) By the time Asim was born, their families no longer lived around a common courtyard in Umm al-Fahm, but the cousins still spent significant amounts of time together.
Although the Abu Shakra family is relatively small, the families of the clan were upwardly mobile, and succeeding generations have been well represented in Umm al-Fahm, Israel’s third-largest Arab city, as professionals, merchants and civil servants. In the case of Salah and Rokiyya’s sons, two of them followed the path of their father and became police officers, while another, Raed, became an Islamic preacher and politician. The Israeli public knows him as Sheikh Raed Salah, the fiery founder of the breakaway, separatist Northern Branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, which the government outlawed in 2015.
Because his parents wanted their son to attend a “respectable school” (as Asim told Ronit Matalon in a 1989 interview in Haaretz), Asim attended high school in Afula, a Jewish city a bit up Highway 65 from Umm al-Fahm. But he felt out of place there, and after some time decided to return to his hometown to finish school. That was characteristic of this shy and modest young man, as he told Matalon: “It was always like that: the desire to come back to a place that was safe and familiar.” It was a tendency of push-and-pull that continued throughout his life. He lived and worked in Tel Aviv, but, he said, “on balance, my primary allegiance” is to Umm al-Fahm, which is where he returned to die.
At the same time, he was drawn to study and make art, having been exposed like his cousins to the informal art lessons that their older brother Walid offered to them when he was he was home on weekends from art school in Tel Aviv, in the late 1960s. By the time Asim came of age, Said had also started studying art in Tel Aviv: He and Walid both pursued degrees at the Avni School of Art and Design. When Asim moved to the city, it was to enroll at the Kalisher Higher School of Art. Kalisher, which closed a decade ago, was an unconventional institution that eschewed both the standard curriculum and the standard admissions requirements, such as a high school matriculation certificate, of more academically oriented art schools like Bezalel Academy or Hamidrasha School of Arts.
In a short, Hebrew-language film, “Kalisher, Mon Ami,” that accompanied a recent exhibition of works by Kalisher alumni owned by the Haaretz Collection of Israeli Art, we learn that Kalisher students were something of a self-selected group: All an aspiring applicant needed to do to be admitted was show up for an interview. Artist Maya Cohen Levy, who studied and later taught at Kalisher, describes it in the film as “an outsider school attended by outsiders.” It was a good fit for Asim.
For an Israeli Palestinian, there was an extra level of outsiderness to contend with. In the film, Asim’s cousin Farid Abu Shakra, who began his studies at Kalisher a year after him, and with his encouragement, recalls how, coming from “a place that was closed” – meaning not only Arab-Muslim society in general but also from the conservative Muslim environment of Umm al-Fahm – “to a place that was so open,” required “undergo[ing] a metamorphosis -- mentally, culturally and also in terms of identity.”
Asim received a scholarship from the school for his tuition, but still needed to work to cover his living expenses, and for a young Arab in Tel Aviv, that often meant washing dishes, or something equivalent. Not that there were many landlords interested in renting a room to an Arab; even today, that is not something to be taken for granted. For Asim, the problem was resolved when the school’s director, Zvi Ben Dov, set him up with a room in the school that he could use both as a studio and as a place to sleep. Asim resided there for close to two years, bedding down each night, it is said, in a sleeping bag.
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So, what about those cactuses?
At the time of Asim’s death, more than three decades ago, Israeli historiography had reached a level of maturity that someone like Benny Morris could publish a book like “The Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” documenting what the impact of Israel’s War of Independence had been on every Palestinian town and village, and on the cities with mixed populations. As a historian proficient in both Hebrew and Arabic, Morris combed the archives to find contemporary records and reports, including those of the Israel Defense Forces, documenting the battles, and describing the circumstances behind the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homeland. It wasn’t by and large a story of massacre and rape, but atrocities did take place. More to the point, as has become clearer as more documents are declassified, the leaders of the new state had used the war as an opportunity to encourage or even expedite the departure of most of the country’s indigenous population. Their villages were soon bulldozed over, and their land expropriated by the young state, whose population would double in less than a decade, as it absorbed more than a million Jews, whether they were survivors of the Holocaust or citizens of Arab countries that responded to Israel’s establishment by expelling their Jewish citizens and confiscating their property.
One of the hundreds of weird and in this case unsettling things I learned after moving to Israel in the late 1980s was that if you encounter a patch of sabra plants – prickly-pear cactuses – in your travels around the country, you have probably come across the site of a onetime Palestinian village. Often, the area will also have piles of building stones, or even the remaining lower layers of demolished homes, or agricultural terraces on the slope of a hill. These too are signs that not too many decades ago, this was where a Palestinian-Arab settlement stood, and that its physical memory was not successfully effaced.
None of this should be a surprise, but if it doesn’t make one at least a little uncomfortable, then one is probably doing an unhealthy amount of repressing. Nonetheless, when Asim Abu Shakra began producing paintings of cactuses, there were those in the Israeli art world who didn’t quite understand what he was up to. After all, wasn’t the word “tzabar" – the Hebrew word for prickly pear cactus, and for the Arabic “sabar” – also the metaphor that the Zionist movement had adopted to describe the character of the rough-edged but down-to-earth “New Jew” being created in Israel: The Sabra – native-born Israeli – was said to be prickly on the outside, but inside was soft-hearted and sweet.
The late artist and art historian Kamal Boullata wrote extensively on Abu Shakra, and specifically on his and his cousin Walid’s use of the cactus in their art. He notes that the appearance of the image of the prickly pear cactus coincided with the origins of secular Palestinian art, which evolved out of two centuries of icon painting by Arab Christians. Writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 2001, Boullata described Nicola Sayigh (1863-1942), a painter of religious art in Jerusalem who, anxious “to free himself from the rules of iconography … found in the voluptuous sight of the peeled prickly pear his most inviting subject.” Later, after the Zionists succeeded in establishing their state, Boullata says that the cactus disappeared from Palestinian art, to be replaced by the Jaffa orange, which “epitomized the sense of their homeland’s loss.”
The Palestinian identity of Israel’s Arab citizens was still on the defensive in 1990. Before the Oslo Accords (1993), before the “events of October 2000” and the second intifada. It was also years before the “Future Vision” documents of 2006, in which a group of Palestinian-Israeli leaders laid out their conditions for retooled fully egalitarian state “of all its citizens.” When Asim Abu Shakra depicted cactuses -- sometimes in the wild, sometimes in a pot, and once, near the end of his life, a potted cactus that is thin, gray and looking near death -- Israeli Arabs still didn’t talk openly about the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe,” as they refer to the events surrounding the founding of Israel), and kept their heads down for the most part, politically. And that’s what was expected of them. Even in 2006, the “Future Vision” vision was dismissed almost totally by Jewish society.
In 1994, only a few years after Asim’s death, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work at its Helena Rubinstein Pavilion. As if it had some doubts about the propriety of turning over a large solo show to a Palestinian artist, simultaneously, the museum mounted an accompanying exhibition it called “Sabras in Israeli Art, 1910–1990.” One critic noted with irony that, “It is difficult to avoid the feeling that there was an intention here to strike a balance, to present the Zionist point of view on the myth of the sabra as well, because, with all due respect to [Abu Shakra] and his paintings, the myth of the sabra is ours, and he will never be able to rob us of it.”
Perhaps the museum was anticipating reactions like that of art critic Uzi Agassi, who reviewed the catalog of the Abu Shakra show in the Haaretz Books Supplement. Agassi, responding to Boullata’s research into the history of the sabra in local art, rejected attempts to turn the artist into a Palestinian spokesperson, or even to assume that his use of the cactus image was an expression of national identity. For that, Agassi received a sharp rebuke from curator and art historian Tally Tamir , who had been a teacher and friend to Asim: “Abu Shakra, Agassi claims, is a good artist; and referring to his Arab identity ‘detracts from the beauty’ of his paintings,” she quotes Agassi as saying, before she shifts to a more sarcastic mode: “Really, why bother to recall that Asim Abu Shakra is an Arab painter? Why not just enjoy the beauty of his paintings? Why not refer to the sabra -- the national symbol of the new Israeli -- as if it were a geranium, a cactus like any other, or alternatively, a bouquet of roses?” To Tamir, that attitude could only be described as “obtuseness and blindness, even of real moral impudence.”
As to the question of Asim’s political consciousness: Asim Abu Shakra was an artist through and through, not a maker of political posters, and, as Tamir noted elsewhere, he “fastidiously maintained the purity of his artistic statement.” At the same time, to Tamir it was obvious that, Abu-Shakra's talent lay in his ability to “unit[e] an artistic image with the expression of political feelings, thus producing a clear and impressive statement.”
In a biographical piece about Asim in Haaretz in 2013, at the time of a major retrospective of his art at Tel Aviv’s Chelouche Gallery, Tamir told Eitan Bouganim that there were days when Asim would show up at classes and fall asleep, having worked through the preceding night. “But from the first moment I knew that this was the guy, asleep or not, whom it was worth investing [effort] in.” And indeed, writes Bouganim, word about Asim’s talent made its way around town, leading curators and other artists beat a path to Kalisher to become acquainted with the hot new artist.
Asim had his first bout with cancer in 1988, two years after finishing Kalisher, where he was now teaching. He underwent treatment at Hadassah Medical Center, in Jerusalem, and his illness went into remission.
By early 1989, Farid told me, Asim was returning to himself, and the two resolved to visit a one-man show of Farid’s at the Artists House in Jerusalem. Asim had missed the show’s opening when he was still hospitalized, but now he was a free man. He and Farid went first to Hadassah so that Asim could undergo a follow-up blood test.
“We went to Ein Kerem, and the test results came out clean,” says Farid. “We got on the bus, and the whole ride [into town], we were singing, ‘clean, clean, clean!... We had a real feeling of celebration and joy, because he was free of the cancer.”
Later, at the exhibition, recalled Farid, Asim announced, after looking at his cousin’s works, which characteristically included images of cats and sunflowers and scarecrows: “’You know what? For a long time I’ve been thinking about painting cats.’”
Farid, who has painted many a cat during his career, says he told him to “Go for it. What are you waiting for?”
And so, said Farid, “The first work that Asim did of a cat was a result of my exhibition at Artists House.” But the method he used was different than anything Farid had ever employed. “It involved painting the entire image and then covering it with a thin blue wash.”
Farid said that seeing Asim’s innovation “was like magic for me. He took my cat – I had given him the cat as a gift -- and in return he gave me another gift,” namely a method for treating a canvas that changed its atmosphere completely.
Farid is at pains to stress that it was normal for the two of them to borrow and copy from each other regularly. They shared an apartment, and also money and clothes, but it also included their work and ideas. Sometimes, they would doodle on one another’s work. Farid leads me over to his archive, where he has his career organized in large binders. He shows me pages from Asim’s sketchbooks that remained in their flat after Asim’s death, and he points out the liberties they allowed themselves. Sometimes it was something as simple as drawing a moustache on a face the other had been experimenting with, and sometimes it would be something that changed the image completely. According to Farid, after his cousin’s death, Asim’s family made claim to notebooks he had left in the flat, and even to scraps of paper with his markings on them. It was one of several conflicts that arose in the family as Asim’s immediate family belatedly came to understand just how much the art world valued Asim Abu Shakra’s work. Fortunately, the family got beyond the bickering as time passed, and all parts of it cooperated in the Ein Harod retrospective. However, because most of Asim’s paintings were sold off to private collectors early on, much of it is not available today, even for temporary loans to shows like the current one.
Unfortunately, the clean blood test indicated only a hiatus in his illness, and by the end of 1989, Asim’s cancer had returned, this time terminally. That’s when he returned to Umm al-Fahm, to his parents’ home. He died on April 5, 1990, on the way to the hospital. Curiously, his cousin says that he didn’t visit with Asim during his last two months, and was not present at his funeral.
“I couldn’t meet him,” he explained. “Because if I had been with him when he died, then for me he would really have been dead. But for me, he’s not dead.” Farid says he carries on a regular dialogue with Asim, who also appears in his dreams. “Physically, he isn’t there for me; physically, he’s no longer alive. But in spirit, he’s with me all the time. I talk with him all the time.”
The Palestinian writer and translator Anton Shammas, who today lives in the United States, where he teaches comparative literature at the University of Michigan, wrote a brief piece for the catalog of the 1994 Tel Aviv Museum exhibition “Asim Abu Shakra,” which was curated by Ellen Ginton. [An earlier version of this post misattributed the source of the first appearance of that essay.] It reads in part:
Someone had to move the cactus to a flowerpot.
Someone had to shake us all up and tell us: It’s over and done with; that there is no way back from here, not to the map nor to the land; that, instead, we are to stay on the windowsill, a foreground for the painted clouds that do not stir or vanish or rain; that only in this way is memory kept: you take the past and condense it into a brush stroke, you take the three-dimensional thorn and memorialize it in a painting, you take the homeland landscape and turn it into a practical image that is easy to carry around.
Nobody thought of this before: / here’s the homeland, hanging on the wall. / That it is possible to go on only like this. / That now it is possible to go on.