הרולד רובין

Harold Rubin

אמן רב-תחומי, צייר, אדריכל ומוזיקאי, הציג עשרות תערוכות יחיד באירופה, ארה"ב ודרא"פ וישראל. רבים אומרים שהוא מצייר כמו נגן ג'אז מחונן. נוטל רעיון בסיסי, סטנדרטי, ומאלתר איתו סיטואציות דרמטיות, בעלי חיים, חיילים, נשים, ילדים, ציורי מערות ועוד. שפת היצירה שלו היא דחוסה, עזת מבע, פוליטית, חברתית ומלמדת על הצורך הכפייתי שלו ליצור

 

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Born: Friday 13th May 1932 .

Introduced dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Israel, Europe and USA

Enrolled as an architecture student at the University of the Witwatersrand, he completed his professional studies after further education in London.

Rubin's creative endeavors in South African society during the 1950s and 1960s dissented against the apartheid-era

Rubin organized his own jazz group in the 1950s, snuck into black townships, and played alongside black musicians. Rubin's visual artwork was first exhibited in 1956.

Rubin's most controversial project on the South African art scene of the 1960s was My Jesus, a provocative rendering of the crucifixion in which Jesus Christ appeared as a nude black figure with the head of a monster.  The work contained the inscription "I forgive you O Lord, for you know not what you do" – a sardonically reversed "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do" .

The controversial image was put on display at a Johannesburg gallery in 1962. The exhibition caused such furor that the government sent the police to shut down the exhibition and referred its artwork for an examination by its censorship board. Rubin became the second South African to be charged with blasphemy

Acquitted in court of the alleged blasphemy in March 1963, Rubin protested the repressive political environment by leaving the country for Israel and quickly reestablished himself in Tel Aviv. Rubin was employed as an architect on projects in Israel and abroad and taught at an academy of architecture and design between the 1960s and his retirement in 1986

Rubin began creating visual art as a critique and commentary on the  militaristic aspect of Israeli society as early as the 1960s. The anti-war subject was a prime subject of Rubin's work during the 1980s – a decade witnessing the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the tensions aroused by the increasingly visible peace movement, and marked by the creation of such works as The Anatomy of a War Widow (1984), a series of twenty-two black-and-white pictures. The caustic Homage to Rabbi Kahane, which portrayed the outspoken ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane as a Jewish Nazi, was pulled off the wall by a Knesset member when hung at a Haifa gallery in 1985.  The proceeds raised from an August 1987 exhibition and auction of art by Rubin and other Israeli artists at the Meimad Gallery in Tel Aviv were donated to a fund for educational activities and promotion of the values of democracy and freedom of speech dedicated to Emil Grunzweig, an Israeli teacher and Peace Now activist murdered in 1983 by a grenade thrown at a Jerusalem peace rally

 Rubin's drawings and paintings have been exhibited in Israel, South Africa, the United States, and Germany since the 1960s.

Awarded the Landau Award in tribute to his contributions to jazz music in 2008, he continues to play jazz with musicians of the younger generations in Tel Aviv.