Fima Roeytenberg; abstract painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Abstract painter whose work reflected his varied life in
China, France and Israel
Dalia Manor
Monday November 7, 2005
The Guardian
One of the last of his generation of abstract painters, the
Israeli-Parisian artist Fima, who has died in Jerusalem aged
90, moved between places and cultures more than most. Born
and brought up in Harbin, China, he had a multicultural
background that enabled him to develop a personal idiom
which sat naturally within the universal language of
modernist art. "It is only when I travel on my canvas that I
feel at home," he said.
Efraim Roeytenberg, commonly known by his nickname Fima, was
the son of Russian-Jewish parents. His father, an engineer
who worked on the construction of the Eastern China railway,
had settled in the country 10 years earlier. Harbin, with a
Russian community that grew considerably after the 1917
revolution, was already a Russian-Chinese city: Fima went to
a Russian school, where he also learned Chinese.
In 1933, after attending secondary school, he moved to
Shanghai, a thriving cosmopolitan city with its own Russian
colony and a growing Jewish community. After a short attempt
at studying architecture, Fima turned to art and began
studying with a Russian painter and a Viennes portraitist.
He soon joined the Russian Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai,
and later taught drawing there. He also studied Chinese
calligraphy and became interested in Chinese philosophy. It
was this part of his education that would prove significant
for his career.
He made a modest beginning with a 1947 solo exhibition at
the Jewish Recreation Club in Shanghai and a couple of group
shows, but his career in China was cut short when, in
February 1949, shortly before Shanghai came under communist
control, Fima left for the young state of Israel.
His encounter with the new country was a difficult
experience. To earn a living, he was forced to work as a
construction inspector in the mass building projects of the
post-independence years, and had little time for painting.
The brilliant Mediterranean light made his attempts to paint
even harder, and the local artistic community did not
particularly welcome his figurative, anecdotal drawings
along Chinese lines. But it was in Israel during the 1950s
that Fima made contacts with contemporary art and gradually
developed a new language of painting.
In trips to Italy (1954) and to Paris (1956) he encountered
the European old masters and modern art. By the end of the
decade he was gaining a reputation, and critical, as well as
some commercial, success. His 1960 exhibition at the Rina
gallery in Jerusalem, owned by the American dealer Bertha
Urdang (known for supporting contemporary and avant-garde
art), sold out, and led to his discovery by the French
critic, Jacques Lassaigne.
This meeting resulted in Fima's move to Paris in 1961, where
he later joined the Jacques Massol gallery. He was to remain
in Paris for the next 41 years (returning permanently to
Israel in 2002), exhibiting in the French capital and
abroad. But he kept his Jerusalem studio, and his close
contacts with the Israeli art scene, by exhibiting regularly
at the Bineth gallery and by taking part in numerous export
group shows of Israeli art, such as the 1964 Art Israel
shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
With the support of art historian Avram Kampf, Fima
exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1972, and was
later included in the wide-ranging survey From Chagall to
Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, held at the
Barbican Centre, London, in 1990. His one-man shows at the
Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1970), and at the Tel Aviv Museum
(1976) helped establish his status in Israel, although he
always remained a bit of an outsider.
But the move to Paris had not been a smooth one. After
stopping painting for a while, Fima turned to his Chinese
roots, drawing on the spirit of the Tao and on the swift
brush strokes of calligraphy to find his own voice. Unlike
some American abstract painters who were inspired by Chinese
calligraphy, his calligraphic strokes bear a strong
biographical element - with memories of Shanghai street
banners - and he was never indifferent to the meaning of
these signs.
"Fima's choice", argues art critic and curator Patrick
Javault, "is also ethical. Through it, he signifies his
rejection of a certain mythology of the painter as inventor
of an action language. He may act on the canvas, but he does
not exalt action itself above other fields of human
experience (such as thought or meditaion)." Indeed, the
meditative quality is what distinguishes his painting, in
spite of certain formal similarities, from the tactile and
gestural Parisian abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s.
No doubt, Fima's development and success is strongly linked
to postwar modernist painting, with the shift of focus to
the act of painting and the painted surface. But he was
never dogmatic about abstract art, continuing to paint
flowers or animals, mainly in watercolours.
In 2004 Fima returned to China for the first time on the
occasion of an exhibition of his work in Hong Kong. He
continued to paint until a month before his death. He is
survived by his wife Kaarina and five children.
· Efraim 'Fima' Roeytenberg, artist, born December 22 1914;
died October 16 2005