Reuven Rubin

Reuven Rubin

Still life with Red Shoes, 1920s',
Oil on canvas, 61X46 cm.
Signed.
The authenticity of the painting has been confirmed by Ms. Carmela Rubin, Reuven Rubin Museum, Tel-Aviv.

This is another early oil painting by Reuven from the time he had just came to Israel (1923) wishing to become naturalized in the local view. This is evidenced by more than anything by the pair of red slippers, which not only emphasize their presence in the room, but also their relative size with the rest of the connector. Maybe they represent the painter who is observing his new environment and the present absenteeism.

Indeed, the red slippers concept will repeat itself in different versions in his self and family portraits from his first decade in Israel. in all, the red slippers (Anaphylaxis is the Greek term that is also naturalized in Hebrew for soft slippers made of felt) were designed to highlight the yearning for roots and the feeling of home and identity which was a burden to that generation, the generation that had "the pain of two homelands" as the poet Leah Goldberg had referred to at that time.

Reuven was enchanted by the bright Mediterranean light, by the blue skies that clouds sailed in them like fish swimming in the sea and from eastern symbols in the spirit of orientalist romance that was prevalent in Europe in the 19th century and echoed to the first half of the 20th century. So is the minaret (the muezzin mosque tower) towering over the white domes of the buildings and also the Arabian straw stool on which a glass vase with a green branch and a yellowish fruit (watermelon or melon?) Are prominently placed. All of these items, which look out through the opening to the balcony and to the landscape, testify to the wish of the new and primordial world in its simplicity (see, the implicit vegetation) typical of Reuven's paintings of that decade.

This formal element of image within image refers also to the dialectic of the interior and exterior as part of the interference process in the New World. The "Still Life" items, the fruit and vase on the balcony (or on the windowsill in other paintings), act as intermediaries between the outside and the inside. Notice the parallel between the round shape of the fruit on the stool and the white stone domes, between the vertical of the blue vase and the protruding sky of the muezzin tower, and at least color wise, the parallel between the slippers and red shingles on the roof of the house overlooking in the distance. Reuven, connects the interior with the outside, and thus his painting expresses not only what he sees, but also his inner self in the sense of the feeling that the view evokes in him.

The duplication in the composition seems intended - even implicitly - to confirm the "artificial" and illusory nature of the work of art, which even as a reflection of realistic mirrors, such as the painters highlights, it has an independent existence and is separated from them.

Reuven took this painting with him when he traveled to the United States for the second time in 1928, to exhibit it along with many others in an exhibition in New York. The painting remained there. what remains in Reuven's collection was a black and white photograph of the painting. having been hidden in a private collection in New York for nine decades, the painting is now being rediscovered in its natural surroundings and in its many colors.

Carmela Rubin.