Photo: Adrien Sina/Courtesy Tura Milo, Paris
In 1965, the artist Myriam Bat-Yosef, who died at the age of 92, presented the performance Éryximaque in Paris, together with the Uruguayan dancer Teresa Trujillo and the lettrist poet François Dufrêne. Trujillo, her body painted by Bat-Yosef in psychedelic patterns, rolled and threw similarly decorated diabolo-shaped stools across a triangular space with white walls, while Dufrêne sang a syncopated, alliterative text.
The performance, which fused surrealist ideas with the psychedelic, pop art sensibilities of the time, was particularly a rejection of Yves Klein's ladies' pinceaux (female brushes), who in 1960, their naked bodies painted blue, obediently followed their master's directions to press themselves against the canvas. For Bat-Yosef, a contemporary of Klein, his Anthropometry performances merely reinforced the old binaries of man/woman, artist/model, active/passive.
A small, early painting by Bat-Yosef, The Morning After (1951), shows a crouching adolescent girl, naked, vulnerable, hiding her face. Within twenty years, this body would become hybrid, performative, confident and free.
When Bat-Yosef arrived in Paris from Israel as a student in 1952, her painting was conservative: landscapes and portraits with a wealth of Cézanne and a nod to the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka, corresponding to the teachings of her émigré European masters and unchanged by the aging authorities at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Her breakthrough came with a year of study at the Florence Academy of Art in 1956, and a visit to the Venice Biennale that year. There she was not only exposed to the international avant-garde art of the time, but in the same year she met and married the Icelandic artist Erró (then called Ferró, born Guðmundur Guðmundsson), and became acquainted with his Paris-based surrealist artist. environment. Her realistic style gave way to spontaneous, subjective expressions in various media that called for female self-exploration and political freedom.
The story continues
"Pure psychic automatism... the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and beyond all moral or aesthetic concerns," was promoted in the first surrealist manifesto of 1924. For male surrealists, women were muses; late Surrealism was more sympathetic to female creativity, and in the 1950s female artists, including Bat-Yosef, began to emerge from the shadows of their better-known partners.
Her work developed in the psychedelic 1960s, with new stimulants and new visions. Lectures by Krishnamurti, during a period of enthusiasm for India and hippie culture, merged in Bat-Yosef's imagination with memories of Pushkin's illustrated fairy tales, read to her by her Lithuanian grandfather.
In 1965, Bat-Yosef expanded her practice into performance and painting bodies and objects, such as with Érixymaque, which was staged for the Fourth Paris Biennale, and held two exhibitions with the gallerist and collector of surrealist art Arturo Schwarz in Milan.
The year before, Schwarz had made an edition of eight of Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp's ready-made urinal, with Duchamp's approval. Man Ray was another of his artists. Bat-Yosef took his well-known iron sculpture, Cadeau (1921), and reproduced it covered in psychedelic patterns, replacing the original points along the central surface with painted images that suggested female genitalia.
She expanded her production to painted environments, such as in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1971. For this she created the large-scale, anti-military installation Hell and Paradise (or Exile and the Kingdom).
Hand-painted, empty Mirage jet fuel tanks appeared floating in flight, high on vertical pylons above the museum promenade. Arab women from East Jerusalem and Jewish students from the Bezalel Art Academy were commissioned to paint 500 cork spheres, installed in a glass cube in the Hell section. Their collaboration suggested a more hopeful future.
Born Marion Hellerman in Berlin, the son of Yosef, a teacher and later member of the Haganah (a Zionist paramilitary organization later incorporated into the Israeli Defense Force), and Godda (née Promnick), a beautician. She moved with the family to Jaffa, Palestine, in 1934. Her father died two years later, and her mother took her to Paris; at the outbreak of World War II they returned to Tel Aviv.
There she visited the Avni Institute. In 1942, she adopted the name Myriam Bat-Yosef (daughter of Yosef), in honor of her father.
Compulsory military service preceded her departure to Paris for the second time, to the École des Beaux-Arts. She avoided the army's call-up at the time of the Suez Crisis in the Middle East through her marriage to Erró, accompanying him on trips to Iceland and discovering its dramatic landscape and resonances with her own Lithuanian Jewish heritage.
There she showed as María Jósefsdóttir, with many exhibitions, including at the National Museum, Reykjavík, in 1963.
Bat-Yosef's success did not sit well with her husband. "Erro tells me that if I want to be a painter, I cannot be a wife. I choose to be a painter," she said. The couple divorced in 1964.
Returning to her Israeli identity, she began to incorporate Hebrew characters into her drawings, of which she had an exhibition at the Sydow Gallery, Frankfurt, in 1964, the first exhibition of an Israeli artist in Germany since the war, according to Bat-Yosef. .
In 1967, for a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Israeli Art, New York, she created an environment of painted sculptures and drawings in response to Israel's Six-Day War, which had begun on June 5 of that year. The following year she left for Jerusalem, where she remained for ten years before becoming disillusioned with Israeli politics and returning to Paris for the third and final time in 1980.
Her colored ink drawings and paintings from this period, such as Antiracism (1980), with fiery peripheral tongues, explicit images and lightning-fast zigzags around a central empty void, are perhaps among her finest works.
A monograph was published in 2005, for which I wrote an extensive essay about her performance pieces.
Her last exhibition, Désir, took place in Nogent-sur-Marne, at the Maison Nationale des Artistes in 2018, but her last performance took place after her death, with her burial in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
There, according to Bat-Yosef's wishes, a continuation of My Last Will, first performed at the Ramat Gan Museum in 1990, was completed. Her body was painted according to her instructions; her self-designed patterned costume was reflected in a work of mirror fragments, broken in half and placed on her bier, along with beautiful flowers thrown by brightly dressed mourners; and excerpts from the original film were projected.
She is survived by her daughter Tura and a granddaughter Eloise.
* Myriam Bat-Yosef (Marion Hellerman), artist, born January 31, 1931; died October 8, 2023
