New art exhibit salutes work of pioneer Isaac Alexander Frenkel

His son would later recall that he had always been an atheist, even though he did address themes related to Jewishness and Judaism after the Holocaust, in an effort to bring back to life the ravaged world of Eastern European Jewry.

In 1910, at age 10, Isaac moved to Odessa with his parents. In December 1915, he enrolled in the Odessa Art College. In 1918, he took lessons at the studio of Alexandra Exter, a painter who would later immigrate to Paris. According to the artist’s son, he began to sign his works “Alexander” instead of “Isaac,” out of admiration for her. It was at Alexandra Exter’s studio that Frenel gained his first experience as a theater artist, co-designing costumes for dancer Elsa Krüger.

A shocking wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms swept Ukraine in 1918-1919, perpetrated by Ukrainian warlords, units of the UNR army, the Whites, and the Bolsheviks. Frenel’s former classmate and friend from the Art College, Joseph Constantinovsky (he later shortened his name to Joseph Constant, 1892–1969), lost his father and brother, who were murdered in the town of Elisabetgrad (present-day Kropyvnytskyi). Joseph Constantinovsky described a scene he witnessed in Odessa during those days in a book titled Les Traqués [“The Ones Who Were Chased Down”], published in French under the pseudonym Michel Matveev: “A mounted armed group is approaching at a steady pace from the railway station, waving a huge banner. Although I am already used to such encounters, this one leaves me speechless. I stop, baffled by the words in black across the red background: ‘Hail the revolution! Death to the Jews!’”

Such encounters shattered all hopes for a brighter future, so Constantinovsky decided to go to Palestine/Eretz Israel; Isaac Alexander Frenkel accompanied him on the journey. In 1919, they were among the Jewish intellectuals leaving for Palestine/Eretz Israel on board the steamboat Ruslan. Some of the 686 passengers of that steamboat would go on to become prominent figures who played a major role in Israeli scientific, cultural, and social life, such as prominent historian and literary scholar Joseph Klausner (1874–1958); dancer, choreographer, and artist Baruch Agadati (1895-1976); co-founder of the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Arie Dostrovsky (1887-1975); and the chief physician at Hadassah, Dr. Chaim Yassky (1896-1948), who was killed in the Arab attack on a medical convoy bringing supplies to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.

Frenel’s life story is not just that of a talented artist and one of the pioneers of modern art in Eretz Israel in the 1920s and 1930s but also an example of the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. Despite his young age, just after his arrival Frenel quickly assumed a leading role in the association HaTomer, which formed the kernel of the first art gallery in Tel Aviv. In those years, the Jewish community in Palestine consisted of only several tens of thousands of people; there were no museums or universities in the country, thus it had little to offer an aspiring young artist.

Therefore, in early 1921, Frenel followed Constantinovsky to Paris. Initially, he lived in abject poverty, and sometimes even had to sleep in the street. According to one story, he owed his life to the renowned artists’ patron, police commissioner Léon Zamaron (1872-1955), who is said to have found him sleeping under a bridge, with a diploma issued by the Odessa Art College in his pocket.

Frenel spent a total of nine years in Paris, in 1921–1925 and in 1929–1934. He found shelter in the now famous La Ruche [“Beehive”] on Montparnasse, where he met Chaim Soutine, Mikhail Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Mane-Katz, and many other Jewish émigré painters from the Russian Empire. Upon returning from Paris, he opened his own studio in Tel Aviv. Operating under the auspices of the Histadrut, the studio soon became a center for training painters in the new Jewish city. Many of the foremost Israeli painters from the generation of the state founders – such as Moshe Castel, Ziona Tajar, and Mordechai Levanon – studied and honed their skills there. After Israel’s War of Independence, Frenel became one of the founders of the Artists’ Quarter in Safed, together with Moshe Castel, Arieh Allweil and other artists. In 1973, Frenel established an open museum for all art lovers in his home.

With the exception of a brief period in his youth, when he was influenced by Cubism, Frenel maintained a lifelong attachment to the Expressionist style of painting, which had been beloved by the foremost Jewish painters active in Paris in the interwar period. His former student Moshe Castel, too, was an Expressionist painter in the 1930s.

The two were close stylistically, as well as personally and artistically, at this time. Castel eventually chose to leave that style for a more Modernist and avant-garde aesthetic, joining the Ofakim Hadashim [“New Horizons”] movement, whereas Frenel remained loyal to the art style in which he had excelled back in Paris. In fact, until 1958, when Mané-Katz moved his center of life to Israel, Frenel had been the most prominent representative of the Jewish “School of Paris” in the Jewish state.

Like Castel, Frenel left Paris shortly before the German invasion. He would testify 40 years later: “The Holocaust was a terrible blow for me. When I came to Eretz Israel and to Safed in particular, what attracted me was the mystery, the Kabbalists; all that is fabled, beautiful, and pure around Safed – actually, the heavenly Safed – without the rebuke of Jerusalem. The Galilean light, with the infinite vistas – that is what drew me. And then, suddenly, the disaster, the national disaster of the people of Israel, the disappearance of six million Jews. The entire Diaspora vanished. All this Jewry, which is actually closest to me.”

In parallel to his participation in major exhibitions, art fairs, and salons in Europe and beyond, Frenel worked for many years as a theater artist (mostly at the Habima and Ohel theaters, the latter of which has since closed). He also excelled as an engraver, with most of his engravings dedicated to Safed, and created stained glass windows.

Frenel won the prestigious Meir Dizengoff Prize five times (in 1934, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1948). His works, which had first been exhibited in the museum space exactly 100 years ago (at a group exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem in 1924), were eventually acquired by prominent museums in Israel and abroad, and nowadays they are included in the permanent collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For several decades, he worked with galleries in Paris and London, which arranged solo exhibitions of his art on an almost annual basis.

He also exhibited in various cities in the US, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, and elsewhere. In 1977, a major exhibition of Frenel’s works took place in Amsterdam. In July 1978, the Orangérie du Senat in Paris hosted his solo exhibition, inaugurated by the president of the Senate, Alain Poher.

In a radio interview, a journalist once asked Frenel: “You work about the same number of months a year in France and in Safed?” The artist replied: “Yes. But I can say that even though I am in the West, my soul is in the East,” adding, “I am convinced that the Israeli public accept and understand me better.” ■