ISRAEL/FILE: Fifty-six years after it was painted on his studio wall, a forgotten mural by Dada artist Marcel Janco is being restored in the Israeli artist village of Ein Hod

Record ID: 397357

  • Title: ISRAEL/FILE: Fifty-six years after it was painted on his studio wall, a forgotten mural by Dada artist Marcel Janco is being restored in the Israeli artist village of Ein Hod
  • Date: 27th February 2012
  • Summary: EIN HOD, ISRAEL (RECENT) (REUTERS) EIN HOD ARTIST VILLAGE AS SEEN FROM A DISTANCE RESTORER ELI SHALTIEL WALKING TO MARCEL JANCO'S STUDIO SIGN READING 'M. JANCO' VARIOUS OF MARCEL JANCO'S STUDIO
  • Embargoed: 13th March 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: Arts
  • Reuters ID: LVA7GYW68JKIBBXJR9CQZFVHJ25E
  • Story Text: An undertaking born out of an art-lover's curiosity and involving modern archaeology and state-of-the-art technology, is bringing back to life a forgotten mural by a prominent Romanian-Israeli Dada artist, Marcel Janco.
    Two years ago, the Janco Dada museum in the artist's village of Ein Hod, northern Israel embarked on a restoration project of his studio.
    Old, black-and-white photographs of Janco at work were used as a reference by the museum workers in the restoration process. One of the photos showing walls of the studio painted in an unusual, asymmetrical pattern, prompted museum officials to call in restoration experts and ask them to investigate what was hidden behind.
    A two-day expert debate turned into a two-year adventure, in which a forgotten mural, emerged from underneath dozens of layers of paint and plaster.
    Marcel Janco was born in Bucharest in 1895. During his studies of architecture in Switzerland he joined "Cabaret Voltaire", a nightclub in Zurich where the anarchistic art movement known as Dada was born.
    Dadaism proclaimed contempt for conventional art and sought to shock critics by encouraging the use of non-conformist and irrational ideas.
    The movement produced and influenced artists such as Frenchman Marcel Duchamp and American artists Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.
    After immigrating to Israel in 1941, Janco began working for the Israeli government's planning authorities. In the early 50's, he established the Ein Hod artist village, on the ruins of Ein Hawd, an Arab village whose residents fled during the 1948 war.
    Calling upon Israeli artists of all sorts and styles to join him, Janco founded a close-knit community, still vibrant today and offering visitors tens of workshops, galleries and museums.
    After his death in 1984, Janco left behind hundreds of oil paintings, sketches, and architectural plans. The recently discovered mural on his studio wall, showing three women in the nude, is an unexpected bonus.
    Restorer Eli Shaltiel, a painter himself, has turned the project into a personal mission.
    "I suddenly reached a black dot, I continued to expose it further and we realized it is in fact a line. I continued following that line that day, following it wherever it will take me. I already realized it is a painting, and was very exited. At the end of the day I exposed a fragment of about 30X30 centimetre, showing some kind of shape made of lines. Retroactively it was a knee and a small part of a breast," Shaltiel tells of his first day in the studio. The preliminary find prompted Shaltiel to investigate further, until he found an image of the hidden mural in an old film about Ein Hod, filmed in the 50's or early 60's.
    Using the video as a reference, Shaltiel started to peel off the layers of paint and plaster which have been covering the mural for over 50 years.
    It took him over six months to reveal the treasure hidden underneath.
    "Actually we expected that there won't be any signs of the murals, because they were made 50 years ago and the walls were painted dozens of times since. So it's really a miracle that we could find traces of those wonderful murals," Janco Dada museum curator Raya Zommer-Tal told Reuters Television.
    The museum holds transcripts of village board meetings, which proved invaluable in discovering the circumstances surrounding the origins of the mural. According to the transcripts, Ein Hod artists had painted tens of murals in the village studios ahead of the 1956 Purim ball. Purim, the Jewish mask festival, was a big event in Ein Hod with artists honouring what they believed its 'Dadaist nature' with many creative art initiatives, Among them was Janco's idea to decorate the interior and exterior walls of his studio especially for the ball, says Zommer-Tal.
    "This was done by Janco in the 50's and he knew he was going to paint over it. It wasn't done as something that a museum should exhibit it. And this is a different kind of a work of art, that you do and you know that you are going to demolish it. And we also found protocols about it, because there was a time that they wanted to leave it, but Janco said 'no, I don't mind. I am an artist but its ok to re-paint a work or art'," Zommer-Tal explained.
    Preliminary tests on other walls in the studio have proved that other murals are still hidden under the layers of paint.
    The restoration works have so far cost an estimated 100,000 NIS (27,000 US Dollars) and a similar amount is needed to continue.
    Another mural discovered in the studio but not yet restored shows four masks and names of three known Dada artists, members of the Zurich group. Although not yet confirmed by the experts, the museum believes the murals may bear hand-written signatures of artists Hans Arp, Tristran Tzara and Francis Picabia. Another revealed but still to be restored mural, features a painting of a face on a human buttocks, an example of Janco's unique sense of humour.
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