אוסף יוחנן אשכול
Yochanan Eshkol Collection
Aharon Giladi
1907 - 1993
Aharon Golodetz, later Giladi was an Israeli painter, born in Hummel, Belarus in the Russian Empire to a wealthy family.
He studied at the Leningrad Academy of Art from 1923 to 1926 when he was exiled to Siberia for Zionist activity.
Following his immigration to Israel in the 1930s, Giladi co-founded the Afikim Kibbutz
At the end of his work day in the Kibbutz, Giladi would spend his time painting, with the support from the Painter Haim Attar.
Many of his works include themes which relate to family life in the Kibbutz. He often painted in the company of Mordechai Levanon and Shimshon Holtzmann, who joined him on excursions to paint the Kineret Lake landscape.
"We dipped our brushes in the same paints and painted the same landscape. But, finally, we produced three very different paintings. Mordechai Levanon’s was spiritual, like a prayer to the creator, Shimshon Holtzmann’s was springy, joyous and lighthearted, whereas mine was dark, heavy and dramatic.”
His oil paintings depict a grass-roots Israeli atmosphere and landscape. Giladi claimed to be painting from an emotional place – an intuitive painter.
Throughout all of his works, he maintained a leaning towards figurative painting, even when his paintings became more abstract. Abstraction was a means of “Purification from the affliction of day-to-day materialism”. However, the subjects of his paintings were derived from day-to-day life: human landscape, images of Kibbutz life and representations moments from family life.
In 1942, he published a book of sketches with a foreword by the Hebrew author and poet Lea Goldberg. In 1948, Giladi left the kibbutz and moved to Kfar Saba.
From the 1950s, Giladi lived and worked in Kfar Saba and Holon. He was a member of the group “New Horizons” and presented his work in many exhibitions in Israel and abroad. He also published an album of drawings of the laying of the oil pipeline between Eilat and Beersheva with a foreword by David Ben-Gurion.
His Paintings appear in the collections of the most distinguished Museums in Israel as well as in the Museum of Modern Art, Miami, U.S.
Awards And Prizes
1954 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture 1958 Dizengoff Prize 1957 Prize, Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil 1960 The Histadrut Prize
In The Negev. Watercolur and Ink.. Signed 1960
Historical Context
Soviet Exile
While there are no widespread record of mass exile of Zionists to Siberia in the 1920s specifically due to Zionist activities, there were instances of persecution and emigration of Zionists from the Soviet Union, including some who were initially arrested and then permitted to leave.
This was because in the 1920’s the Soviet government viewed Zionism with suspicion and actively persecuted Zionist organisations and individuals, leading to mass arrests in 1924 with up to 3000 jewish people a day being arrested.
In response to the growing persecution, a proposal was made by a prominent pianist, David Shor, to allow arrested Zionists to emigrate to Palestine instead of being imprisoned or exiled, a solution which was facilitated by the British who controlled the Mandate of Palestine. In total in the region of 1300 were allowed to emigrate through this process.
Historians estimate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953