by In Paris in 1965, the artist Myriam Bat-Yosef, who died at the age of 92, the Uruguayan dancer Teresa Trujillo, and the lyric poet François Dufrêne presented the performance Éryximaque. Trujillo, her body painted by Bat-Yosef in psychedelic patterns, rolled and tossed similarly decorated diabolo stools across a triangular, white-walled space, while Dufrêne sang a syncopated, allegorical text.
The performance, which melded surrealist ideas with psychedelic sensibilities, was the pop art of the time, notably a repudiation of the work of Yves Klein. femmes-pinceaux (women’s paint brushes), who painted their nude bodies blue in 1960, and obediently followed their master’s instructions to push themselves against the canvas. For Bat-Yosef, a contemporary of Klein, his Anthropometric performances only reinforced the old binaries of male/female, artist/model, active/passive.
In a small, early painting by Bat-Yosef, The Morning After (1951), a huddled adolescent girl is depicted, exposed, vulnerable, hiding her face. Within two decades, this body would be hybrid, functional, confident and free.
When Bat-Yosef came to Paris from Israel in 1952 as a student, her painting was conservative: landscapes and portraits indebted to Cézanne and a nod to the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka, responding to the teachings of her émigré European masters and not change by the aging authority figures at the École des Beaux-Arts.
She emerged with a year’s study at the Florence art academy in 1956, and a visit to the Venice Biennale that year. There, as well as being exposed to the international avant-garde art of the time, she met, and married the same year, the Icelandic artist Erró (then Ferró, born Guðmundur Guðmundsson), and was given into a surrealist based in Paris. milieu. Her realistic style gave way to spontaneous, subjective expressions in various media that demanded women’s self-examination and political liberation.
“Pure psychic autism … the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reasons and outside of all moral or aesthetic concerns”, was promoted in the first surrealist manifesto of 1924. For male surrealists, women were mules; Late surrealism was more sympathetic to women’s creativity and in the 1950s, women artists including Bat-Yosef began to emerge from the shadow of their better known partners.
Her work evolved in the Psychedelic 60s, with new inspirations and new visions. Krishnamurti’s readings, during a period of enthusiasm for India and hippie culture, were combined in Bat-Yosef’s imagination with reminiscences of Pushkin’s embellished fairy tales, which she had read to her Lithuanian grandfather.
In 1965, expanding her practice to the performance and painting of bodies and objects, for example with Érixymaque, staged for the fourth biennale in Paris, Bat-Yosef held two exhibitions with the gallerist and surrealist art collector Arturo Schwarz, in Milan.
The previous year, Schwarz had produced, with Duchamp’s approval, an edition of eight of Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp’s flat urinal piece. Man Ray was another of his artists – Bat-Yosef took his famous iron sculpture, Cadeau (1921), and reproduced it covered in psychedelic patterns, replacing the original spikes that ran along its surface with painted imagery. central showing female genitalia.
She extended her production to painted environments, for example at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1971. Because of this she created the large-scale, anti-militaristic installation Hell and Paradise (or Exile and the Kingdom).
Hand-painted jet-painted Mirage fuel tanks appeared suspended in flight, perched high on vertical masts above the museum plane. Arab women from East Jerusalem and Jewish students from the Bezalel art school were commissioned to paint 500 cork spheres, installed in a glass cube in the Hell section, suggesting their collaboration with a more hopeful future.
Marion Hellerman was born in Berlin, to Yosef, a lecturer and later member of the Haganah (a Zionist paramilitary organization that was later incorporated into the Defense Forces), and Godda (nee 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; they returned to Tel Aviv when the second world war broke out.
There, she attended the Avni Institute. In 1942 she took the name Myriam Bat-Yosef (daughter of Yosef), in honor of her father.
Compulsory military service left before she left for Paris a second time, for the École des Beaux-Arts. She avoided conscription during the Suez crisis in the Middle East when she married Erró, accompanied him on trips to Iceland and discovered its dramatic landscape and its own Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry.
There she performed as María Jósefsdóttir, with many exhibitions, including in the National Museum, Réicivík, 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 can’t be a wife. I choose to be a painter,” she said. The couple divorced in 1964.
Returning to her Israeli identity, she began depicting Hebrew characters in her drawings, which had an exhibition at the Sydow Gallery, Frankfurt, in 1964, the first exhibition by an Israeli artist in Germany since the war, according to Bat-Yosef. .
In 1967, for a solo show at the Israel Art Gallery, New York, she created an environment of sculpture and painted drawings in response to Israel’s six-day war, which began on June 5 that year. She left for Jerusalem the following year, staying there for 10 years before straying into Israeli politics and returning to Paris in 1980 for the third and final time.
It could be argued that her colored ink drawings and paintings of this period, such as Antiracism (1980), of ferocious peripheral language, overt imagery and a lightning bolt surrounding a central white void, are arguably among her best works. .
In 2005, a monograph was published, for which I wrote an extended essay on her performance pieces.
Her last exhibition, Désir, was held in Nogent-sur-Marne, at the Maison Nationale des Artistes in 2018, but her final performance took place after her death, with her funeral at Père Lachaise cemetery.
Then, according to Bat-Yosef’s wishes, a continuation of My Last Will was completed, which was first performed at the Ramat Gan museum in 1990. Her body was painted according to her instructions; there was an echo of her self-designed dress, patterned in a work of mirror fragments, broken in half and placed on her bier, together with magnificent flowers thrown by brightly dressed people; and excerpts from the original film were shown.
She is survived by her daughter, Tura, and granddaughter, Eloise.
• Myriam Bat-Yosef (Marion Hellerman), artist, born 31 January 1931; died 8 October 2023
