The essay “Tartakover: Between Collection and Creation” was first presented by curator and researcher Batia Donner at the 2018 symposium 'Collecting the Past', held at the Haifa Museum of Art. It was recently edited for Madaf and was intended to be published online in honor of the inauguration of the David Tartakover Design and Visual Information Library at Beit Ariela—an event that was scheduled for this month but postponed due to Tartakover's deteriorating health. The essay is now published following the passing of Israel’s preeminent graphic designer, Israel Prize laureate David Tartakover, at the age of 81.
For years, Tartakover had collected local ephemera—various items and graphic materials aimed at different time ranges, which, when no longer useful, are doomed to disappear from sight and mind. Since the second half of the 1970s, he has collected posters, games, toys, and illustrated children’s books, greeting cards, postcards, printed street signs, sketches, and examples of typography, photographs, packaging, and the like. His act of collecting, classifying, and researching is for the purpose of preserving the visual aspects of local everyday life and exposing them to the public in their original forms and as references in his work.
Part of the materials in the collection were designed by graphic artists such as Franz Kraus, Pessach (Istvan) Irsai, and Peretz Rushkewitz, while others were created by anonymous designers during times of scarcity and austerity. Yet all of them alike respond to cultural codes resonating with everyday life at different times. They offer attentiveness to the quotidian, preserving a kind of transient knowledge stored as personal memory by a certain generation. When these materials make their way into Tartakover’s works, they create capsules of memory to reclaim attention for moments that have faded from historical memory.
“On Purim 1954, I dressed up as an advertising column,” Tartakover recalled. “My classmate Roni Levy completed the disguise as a poster hanger. We got the posters from the Kahana ticket office. We pasted them onto two rounded sheets of Bristol paper, creating an "advertising column".1
Even then, the ten-year-old child knew what he wanted to be. On top of the advertising column was a poster by the Shamir Brothers with the words: “Learn a profession,” and the guarantee spelled out below: “Good pay, interesting job.” “Like a yeled tov yerushalayim [a good Jerusalem boy],” wrote Lahav Halevi, “he [Tartakover] adopted the [Labor] movement’s recommendation to learn a profession and, like a good designer, he already signaled, at the age of ten, that he wanted people to look at him not so much to see him but to hear what he has to say.”1 In the afternoons, he would go around collecting posters from Jerusalem ticket offices and travel agencies that had a variety of materials from airlines and shipping companies. And when he enlisted in the IDF, he already owned a collection of Independence Day posters and was aware of their importance.
After his military service, Tartakover studied at Bezalel for two years and then at the London College of Printing, where he completed his studies. Upon his return to Israel in 1969, when working at the Arieli Advertisement Office, he used to travel around on Fridays to various locations looking for the local school where he assumed there would be a stationery store nearby. He began buying printed items, children’s books, tin, wooden, and cardboard toys, and collecting graphic materials that reminded him of his childhood. When he opened his first studio in Tel Aviv at 115 Ibn Gvirol Street, he began frequenting an old stationery store nearby. There, he purchased books by the illustrator Peretz Rushkewitz and first discovered the Barlevi board games.
Already in the early 1970s, Tartakover was aware he was collecting items that people did not consider valuable. In 1977, he published Shana Tova – One Hundred and One Greeting Cards for the New Year, a book featuring a thematic sampling of his collections. The book drew attention to the importance of those transparent everyday items we tend to ignore. And at the same time, details from the greeting cards began appearing in his works.
In 1979, he curated the exhibition Herzl in Profile: Herzl's Portrait in Applied Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, accompanied by a detailed catalog. In this first-of-its-kind exhibition in Israel, Tartakover pointed to a trend change in the bounds of the museum, which enables the displaying of items of popular culture and sees itself as providing a public service by exposing and preserving the material culture of the society that produced it.3
From the exhibition's catalog
In those years, he came across the booklet Applied Graphics in the Land of Israel (1938). The booklet’s jacket, designed by Franz Kraus, and other posters by the graphic artist published in it, brought Tartakover to Kraus’s door. He suggested the veteran graphic artist deposit the posters in his possession at the Tel Aviv Museum, and later, in 1981, they were displayed in an exhibition Tartakover curated at the museum. Through the act of displaying posters in the “sacred” space of the museum, Tartakover raised the Israeli poster to the status of artwork, imbuing it with symbolic capital.4
Tartakover began to accumulate materials as well as systematically gather information about graphic artists. He conducted interviews with graphic artists and their heirs and visited printing houses that printed posters, receiving copious materials. When writer and Eretz Israel researcher Shlomo Shva pointed out to him the statue of Diana atop a store opposite Café Kasit on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv and its creator, graphic designer Pessach Irsai, Tartakover went to great lengths to locate Irsai’s widow, who entrusted him with a collection of posters and sketches by this extraordinary artist.
Even as an adult, he could still recite texts that accompanied the illustrations: “This is a commercial vehicle, small in stature and full of purpose. It brings both food and drink to the shops.”
From David Tartakover's Collection
Over the years, he collected items that related to his work as a designer and which served as references in his own designs. In this way he designed the album covers for Arik Einstein and Chava Alberstein, introducing illustrations, children’s toys, “prizes,” or cards with dried flowers, and in 1984, he created a series of posters of Tel Aviv personalities based entirely on references from his collection.
One can look at the connection between Tartakover’s collection and his work through two analytical models: one is based on a distinction indicated by Eran Dorfman between the two ways of spelling the Hebrew word yom-yom (every day): yomyom—written as one word, and with a hyphen, as yom-yom. The other leans on Jacques Lacan’s three-dimensional model.
By questioning the notion of everyday, Dorfman distinguishes between the two Hebrew spellings: while yom-yom reflects a repetition of the daily mold of actions—like movement, thought, and speech—that constitutes our everyday life,5 the word yomyom merges the separate days into one and does not differentiate between them.6
This is a static foundation. And metaphorically, it is the retrospective gaze that Tartakover applies to the fabric of memory of his contemporaries by collecting and presenting generic design items that were part of the visual and conscious world of the generation.
The former, yom-yom, points to a distinction between one day and another, to a movement, and to the possibility of formulating a narrative. This is a dynamic foundation that constantly builds itself, and is based on movement, action, and repetition, on continuity and change.7 This concept applies to large parts of Tartakover’s critical work. Here he constructs a narrative sequence using a database of identifiable local images, fusing and confronting semantic and temporal fields while seeking to draw attention to ethical aspects and to value shifts that happen over time.
Tartakover’s collections are mainly printed items of graphic design, products of everyday life in Israel. In certain parts of his work, alongside borrowing images of items from the past, he made use of images taken from current media, appropriating them to his collection. In broadening his perspective, he expanded the boundaries of the collection and observed every day as a legitimate and relevant source of images and idioms, and part of his vocabulary.
Lacan’s three dimensions—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—offer an additional way to observe the affinity between Tartakover’s collection and his creative work. The imaginary dimension in the collection is represented by the items that echo Tartakover’s childhood memories as a generational memory, hiding a promise for the future. Collecting in this sense is a journey of homecoming, an attempt to return to the sense of unity and wholeness of childhood’s innocence. Tartakover does not usually collect official historical items, but rather everyday items, common, routine materials, bearing the visual codes of his generation’s consciousness. These are recruited in his works as typical nostalgic, somewhat naive, signs that convey innocence and longing for other times.
Lacan’s symbolic dimension moves away from the sense of autonomy of the innocent gaze, touching the crystallizing awareness of a sense of belonging to a collective and the development of a consciousness that rejects the distinction between individual and collective. Tartakover points a finger at this symbolic dimension. He seeks to clean the patina from familiar images and direct the viewer’s gaze to ethical aspects and to national and universal values. By rendering a symbolic dimension to images and objects in his collection, Tartakover implies a strategy reminiscent of the act of symbolization in Christian painting, which aims to bring about redemption, that is, to repair what was spoiled.
In his design of Simchat Torah flags, in the ceramic wall in Neve Tzedek, or the series of cultural and intellectual heroes, Tartakover presented a historical narrative, with the help of which he askes to expose the values encoded in familiar historical and contemporary icons. His working premise is that once upon a time it was good here, while the arrows of his criticism are aimed at the present.
The highlight of this strategy can be identified in the series of 21 posters he created based on the text of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State (1988). Through a process of sorting, reorganizing, and interpreting items from the collection, he created collages that bring together different times by presenting visual references which became fixated in collective memory, and confronting them with selected phrases from the Declaration of Independence.
Although the symbolic dimension is present in all areas of our lives and has overwhelmed us more after the information revolution and massive surplus of media images, it is not without boundaries. Beyond it is located the real, which cannot be represented or symbolized. Lacan’s real dimension touches on rupture, on trauma that cannot be transcribed or conceptualized.
Everyday Israeli life is built on traumas, which are present daily and continuously in the lives of every single citizen of the state. Parts of Tartakover’s work touch on the encounter with trauma, with the dimension Lacan calls the real, that which cannot be conceptualized. In the series of posters he created to mark “Thirty Years of Occupation, 1967–1997,” he chose to gradually obscure the iconic victory photograph of Dayan, Rabin, and Mota Gur entering the Old City on June 7, 1967, turning it into a symbol of the failure of the occupation. To conceal, erase, and seal the iconic image, he harnessed the ambivalent sign of the three Xs (the number 30 in Roman numerals and the international symbol for erasure or cancellation) in addition to a collage of layers of color, texts, and images, which he chose to overlay atop the original image, covering it until it was barely recognizable.
Erasure, sealing, and silencing is the strategy he employed in many other works, including the series “Stain” (2003–2004), where he imprinted a blood-red cartographic silhouette of the occupied territories over the portraits of Herzl, the father of Zionism, and of active politicians. This stain is presented as a blind spot, as a stain that disrupts sight and impairs visibility of the portrait, but is inseparable from it. This action is aimed at revealing an imprint of the real in the portrait of the public figure and stains it symbolically with a layer of red paint that blurs vision and disrupts recognizable visibility.
In one of the first works in the series, Tartakover presented a self-portrait as a statement of his moral position and commitment as an artist. This work can be seen as a precursor to the series “XL Forty Years of Occupation (2007),” in which Tartakover covered protest posters he had designed over the years with a screenprint. The protest movement’s failure is the trauma, which he sought to blur in an attempt to seal the pain and avoid looking directly at the gaping wound.
Touching upon the real occurs here through the depth dimension—it is no longer a declaration of protest against the injustices of the occupation but rather covers it up, directing the gaze inward to what has been hidden, and through the accumulated layers of patina, it seeks to locate the scars of the occupation in the occupiers’ existence.
Tartakover sought to distance himself—in his collections and in his work—from the common discourse and instead places at the center memory and intimate personal experience as a point of departure. His collection is like Proust’s madeleines, an accumulation of memory capsules that treasure past times, worldviews, and feelings. Throughout the years, his work has maintained a dialogue with items in the collection and especially with the ethical aspects encoded in them. All of them bear his stamp and serve as mediators between his personal gaze and his work, whether they function as markers of time and place in the works, and also when they are presented as ethical markers, or as subjects of criticism.
Footnotes
- David Tartakover, Tartakover (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2011), 423. ↑
- Lahav Halevi, Ibid. ↑
- See Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections (Oxon: Routledge, 2011, 182. ↑
- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). Trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984, 2010): 7. ↑
- Eran Dorfman, “The Repetition of the Everyday.” Theory and Criticism 45 (winter 2015): 13 [Hebrew]. ↑
- Dorfman, “Repetition of the Everyday,” 13. ↑
- Dorfman, “Repetition of the Everyday,” 16. ↑
Batia Donner is a visual culture scholar, editor, and lecturer. She has curated dozens of thematic exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the Tower of David Museum, the Eretz Israel Museum, the Haifa City Museum, the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa, and the Janco-Dada Museum. She has published books, articles, catalogs, and research focusing on art, architecture, design, photography, and their connections to culture in Israel.
