Ira Reichwarger | Sculpture

Ira (Irina) Reichwerger was born in Moscow in 1951 to Zoya Vasilyevna Ryleyva, an artist, and Alexi Alexandrovitch Tatzi, an architect and absentee father.   Ira and her older brother, five years her senior,  were raised with the help of their maternal grandmother, a common practice in Soviet Russia, while her mother supported the family by working as a sculptor of civic art.
Ira was immersed in the creative process as a young child and began to study formally at the age of seven; she was exposed to masterworks of the history of art and developed her talents in painting and drawing. In retrospect, Ira claimed that though she started her art education when she was so young, it gave her the technical foundation for and confidence in her drawing. Nevertheless, it limited her by stifling her creativity, which in later life made it difficult to break the boundaries of her classical education. “In order to develop a good eye and steady hand in drawing one must start early.  The Russian method is based on discipline and the development of technique.  The difficulty with this type of education manifests itself as a problem with the artistic expression of freedom, openness, understanding and daring. We developed technique without feeling or emotion, with the result that few of us grew artistically beyond the mediocre.”1

The turning point in her life came in 1967, at age 16, when Ira met Jan Rauchwerger, a young up-and-coming artist, who at the time was helping aspiring artists who wanted to gain admission to the Academy of Art in Moscow.  Competition for entrance to the academy was fierce and Ira joined a group of prospective students under Jan’s tutelage.   Ira and Jan became romantically involved and she was admitted to the academy, studying under Jan’s mentor, Vladimir Weisberg. During this period Jan made the choice to emigrate to Israel and before completing her course of study, the couple made Aliya, arriving in an absorption center in Safed in 1973, right before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War.

The young couple was welcomed into the artistic and Russian-speaking communities of Safed, easing their transition into their new life in Israel. Among the established artists who took them under his wing was Aharon Giladi, and Jan’s work drew praise from some of the foremost artists in Israel, including Joseph Zaritsky.  As a result, Jan was offered a teaching position at the Avni School in Tel Aviv.  Ira, on her own during the week, began to construct and create dolls. She said of that period, “I was bored. I observed the people around me, all shapes of humanity, their anxieties, hopes and despair, and so I began to create dolls from the materials at hand - rags, cotton wool and discarded socks.  In the beginning I created these dolls as gifts for my friends.  Later I tried to sell my work, to supplement my family’s income.”2

Ira’s mother herself constructed dolls and as a young child Ira loved watching the doll-making process: the creation of human and animal figures made from fabric stuffed with cotton, sewn with delicate stitching by a loving hand with a knowing, sensitive and expert eye. “My mother worked in animation and created dolls for each movement, primarily of animals, characters from childhood fables.  I remember her sitting beside my bed at night and sewing.  I substituted nylon stockings for fabric and instead of animals I create women”3.

While still in Russia, Ira created hand-made dolls as a hobby, to give as gifts to friends.  In Safed this tradition was transformed into a form of artistic expression and a means of making a living.  The technique was that which she had learned at her mother’s knee and developed in Russia, but the emphasis in the characterization changed. Instead of making dolls solely based on historical figures or characters from folklore, Ira’s dolls were instilled with life and movement; they are sharp-eyed, humorous fabrications examining, expressing, celebrating and commenting on the human condition.  The dolls, representing the aristocracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all their preening finery, are akin to fowl, with distended breasts resembling a peacock or tom turkey in the midst of courtship.  Through her attention to detail and the use of banal everyday materials - fabric and cotton wool - the characterizations in the dolls distill the complexity of social, cultural and psychological relationships.

Ira’s work did not limit itself to mere representations of the nobility, historical figures and characters from national and native myths.  Her encounter with the local culture exposed Ira to the multifaceted layers of Israeli society, which began to be reflected in the continuing development of her work as an artist. She derived her new inspiration from her own personal encounters, mostly in Safed and Jerusalem.  A meeting with Jan’s Hassidic relatives inspired the fashioning of a family grouping of sculptures, each individually expressing in a humoristic way it’s own sense of self as an individual, creating an original group portrait, where each element represents a rich, full, and complete world, at once heartfelt and true to its humanity.
Ira’s most complex sculpture grouping was also one of her last works in this medium.  She completed the work in 1975, during a period when her artistic focus and development had moved on to concentrate on the female nude.  In an interview with Ayala Gordon, Ira relates that the source for the work was a sketch depicting the preparations behind a group photograph at a friend’s wedding. She was attempting to create a group through a prism where “each individual portrait stands alone: each characterization is expressed through the positioning of each figure”. She explained that the positioning of the figures is so crucial that “it is impossible to calibrate limbs and reposition them as you would in a regular doll; they are soft sculptures which are only to be observed.”

By 1973 Ira was already creating soft sculptures of the female nude or the female form draped in diaphanous cloth.  As it was not well documented contemporaneously, it is difficult to establish the chronological record of the creation of her work. It seems that “Nymph,” one of her female figures, was created in 1973 at the beginning of her acclimatization in Israel as a resident of Safed.  In the next two years, she developed an individual artistic language and technique, a world of unique female characterizations, sensitively fashioned from nylon stockings and cotton wool on wire frames. She felt she had found the perfect fusion of media – raw material, artistic language and subject matter - that opened up new directions and infinite possibilities in her art – those that deal with the questions posed by the plastic arts, created by women about women.

In the beginning I saw my dolls as an amusing hobby, but I soon realized that I was able to express myself more fully through these dolls.  I build them on a bent metal wire frame to which I bind cotton wool with fine string.  I then cover each doll with a nylon stocking.  Finally, I sculpt the facial features with the use of fine embroidery and complete the final positioning.  I feel that sculpting in soft materials, ones that most women use, are especially suited to the creation of art by women; most of the figures I create are female.4

The move to Bat Yam in 1974, made it easier to cultivate relationships in the center of the country.  Gallery owner and cultural arbiter Tzvi Noam, the director of Levik House in Tel Aviv, mounted a show of the work of Mordechai Rauchwerger, (Jan’s father) in 1974, followed by a show of Jan’s work in 1975.  Thus, after mounting the moving exhibition by a new immigrant artist from the Soviet Union, for which there was great anticipation, and which was also a tribute to the artist’s father, Tzvi Noam chose in 1975 to exhibit the original work of Ira Reichwarger.  The risks behind this undertaking were twofold; not only did the show feature the artistic work of a new female immigrant, but her art did not respond to the modernist conventions of the local art scene.  The Levik House gallery was on Dov Hoz Street in Tel Aviv, in an area that included most of the leading galleries of the period, generating traffic by art lovers day and night.  At the center of the exhibition was a grouping that pointed directly to the meaningful artistic path Ira had chosen: soft sculpture on a grand scale, the naked female form, art at once sensual and original. Along with her monumental work, the gallery also exhibited her other soft sculptures, representing historical and folk figures, as well as her group portraits in a separate wing.

It was evident from the exhibition that Ira Reichwarger was forging her own artistic language, blazing a new and fresh artistic vision in her work. Beginning with that first exhibition, she developed (with a nod to the female experience) a groundbreaking fusion in the plastic art of high sculpture, defining a relationship that heretofore was not part of any artistic discourse.

In that same year, 1975, Ira offered to sell her art through the Maskit Chain, at 75 Israeli liras per work of art.  The chain made a counteroffer of 20 liras per piece, which Ira rejected. Just two years later she was approached by Horace Richter, a Jaffa gallery owner, who offered her 200 liras for each individual work and mounted a comprehensive show of her art.

The show at the Dalson-Richter gallery in Old Jaffa, opened in the spring of 1977 and was a turning point in her work and a breakthrough that is hard to fathom today.  Ira Reichwarger was only 26, a new immigrant, barely four years in the country.  In this same period she had learned a new language, moved her household from Safed to Bat Yam and become a mother, giving birth to two children, Miri, in 1975, and Moti, in 1977.  Her artistic output was impressive; the Richter show was a success and she was profiled in the local press. Richter exhibited earlier works from the Levik show, alongside newer ones - daring and expressive nudes.  In a separate exhibition space, body parts were on display - vast pelvises on legs, displayed on the ground: an artistic vision standing on its own.

These works of art do not create a dialogue with the artistic traditions of the genre of doll-making, but rather with a uniquely rich cultural memory and contemporary art.  If Ira’s nudes were initially connected to famous masterworks and specific artists (for example “Touches” 1975), the work gradually developed its own independence, apart from any specific model. Ira infused her soft materials with the upholstered memory of hundreds if not thousands of years of artistic expression depicting the human body and the female form: prehistoric figurines, the sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, Venus and Nike, and painting (Renoir and Modigliani).  Ira’s reclining female nudes recall ancient patterns of the female figure that represent  the forces of nature, fertility, the reign of power, the might of rivers and the thrones of kings, embodying at once, the mythological and the historic.

As her work proceeded in the latter half of the seventies, it became evident that Ira’s nudes did not dwell on the nude, but rather on the relationship between the nude and the naked. Hers is not the idealized female form aesthetically suspended in time, the attainment of the ideals and the virtues, in perfect proportion, part and parcel of a hierarchal world view. Ira’s female nudes fill the art world with the breath and life-force of women who experience their essential nakedness as part of themselves and not as part of any representation of a cultural or symbolic order. Her classical art training and exceptional talent for observation allowed her to develop precision in depicting the female body, but the nudes that she created deride the pinnacles of achievement in high art.  These nudes spring forth from a pictorial memory which Ira made all her own. She manipulated these artistic tropes, moving between the classically elegant to the grotesque, forcing a mutation of the classical canon of proportion, trailblazing a new figurative logic for the relationship of scale and proportion between the head,  limbs and torso, shifting the medium, the memory of marble and cast bronze, into cotton wool and nylon.  If the meaning of life is change – decay and rebirth, the constant change of material and form – then Ira exposes a life force touched by art that signifies the fragility of the human condition over time through her choice of perishable materials. The monumentality of her nudes do not denote eternal life, but rather are composed of small moments, temporary and fleeting, with an emphasis on vitality and survival as life forces. In contrast to the studied seriousness that permeated modern Israeli art of the period, these works are infused with humor and an erotic coquettishness, with an emphasis on the tactile nature of the work.  Sculpture crafted from cotton wool and nylon stockings became flesh and blood, celebrating dimples and folds of flesh; the women whisper sweet nothings, demonstrating female solidarity and a lust for life.

The artist Ruth Schloss, who revealed this vision of womanhood through her work, obtained a key to the gallery during the exhibition of Ira Reichwerger’s work.  She made a habit of arriving each morning to sketch the figures in the show, before they were open to critics and the  public at large, deriving inspiration from Ira’s work.

Eight years later, in 1985, Ira Reichwarger presented a show called “Meet the Artist” in the Youth Wing of the Israel Museum, a show in which she broke aesthetic boundaries and ties to artistic tradition.  She gave expression to the dimensions of the “unheimlich”, the outcast, the complexity of the human condition that rarely found expression through Israeli art.

Mordechai Geldman (see interview with Jan Rauchwerger on pages 108-95 of this catalogue) skillfully described the work exhibited at the Israel Museum:
Sculpture noted for its delicacy, introversion and sensitivity.  Their softness – bordering on the amorphous – is of flesh poised against the pressures of life, but the softness is also of the spirit – the power of dreams.  Man is made of dreams as much as he is composed of flesh and blood ( “the stuff that dreams are made of”  according to Shakespeare in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream) and the stuff of dreams – the human imagination – it is resilient – it is the blueprint for the life of man and for the natural world which surrounds him.  Man’s imagination transforms the world.

Ira’s sculpture is laden with the sadness that stems from the constraints that define the human condition.  They attain this through the temporal nature of the human body and face, the idealized formality of shape and symbolic pose. This is reinforced by the subject matter in Ira’s sculpture, not just by the amorphous nature of the soft materials she uses.5

An additional exhibition, “The Countess Chapachoula,” was noted for its exceptional collaboration between the artist and the fashion designer Tamara Yovel-Jones.   It was a smashing success both with the public and with the media.  The show opened in 1982 with extraordinary buzz.  The invitation from the 13 ½ Gallery in Jaffa read:

Ira Reichwarger and Tamara Yovel-Jones cordially invite you to celebrate the wedding of The Countess Chapachoula, 85, to her 8th husband.  Please come dressed in appropriate attire.

In inviting the public to attend dressed in “appropriate attire,” there is a hint of longing tinged with irony, fantasy and the gulf between the here and the there. A daily meeting of neighborhood women dispelled any idea that Ira and Tamara would create something that would discard the grayness of her local neighborhood by means of the displays of fancy from other worlds. In discussions and through their joint endeavor, they developed a gallery of archetypal woman, each given a name, wardrobe and individual character - a world of cultural and psychological associations.  Seven larger-than-life figures were exhibited, constructed from cotton wool, through a special technique developed by Ira, clothed in costumes designed by Tamara Yovel-Jones.  Each was cast to type:  Chapachoula, 85, wore a diaphanous lace frock with décolletage revealing her sagging breasts; an aging widow married to who-knows-what-number husband, who has not lost her zest for life. There are Madam Rose, stout and tastelessly attired in pink; the be-rouged, be-ribboned and buckle-and-bow-bedecked Mrs. Peacock, elegant with an elongated neck; and the English Nanny, with a sour face and the tweeds to match, and more.

In an interview with Emmanuel Bar-Kadma, Ira stated: “The technique is different.  The sculptures must be supported by internal metal skeletons. These females are not just inanimate; they possess a character that is both satirical and caricature.   You must consider, when contemplating their positions, the scale of the head and their facial expression.” 6
In a further interview she stated that “the conflict between self delusion and reality is what makes satire.”7
In spite of the show’s success, the glowing reviews and throngs of visitors, the Israeli arts establishment did not consider her work part of the context of contemporary art.  Ira’s work was exhibited in group shows of works based on the medium of textile or fiber, as in a 1982 show at the Jerusalem Theater and again in 1984 in “Soft and Hard”, a touring exhibition of accessible art which Reviva Regev curated. Her exhibition “Meet the Artist”, at the Israel Museum, was a three-person show, exhibiting her work along with that of two other artists, Chava Epstein and Reut Ben Shachar, who shared the common practice of creating dolls from cotton wool. The exhibition and the catalogue that accompanied the show were important but did not free Ira from being pigeonholed as a creator of textiles that were not considered high art.  The narrow formalistic nature of the Israeli art establishment at that time did not consider the rich trove of alternative media a form of artistic expression in high art.  Today, it is not difficult to imagine a joint exhibition of Reichwarger with the work of Ayelet Carmi, a contemporary artist whose paintings of naked women revel in the naturalness of the ordinary and project a life force – not unlike Ira’s women.  This connection to local or international art would have exposed the unerring quality of Ira’s work and its exciting and uplifting ties to contemporary art.

Ira separated from Jan in the 1980’s.  Telila Ben Zakai wrote, “Love ended but admiration endured.  She still sees in him a great artist and teacher, and it weighs on her.”  During the last years of her life, she found it difficult to create and drank heavily.  She died in 2001, at the age of 50. Much of her work can be found in collections in Israel and abroad.  Not all her works have been kept in optimal conditions.  For this exhibition at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Jan tirelessly worked on conservation, stabilizing the sculptures and restoring deteriorating cotton wool.  The works on display underscore the rare quality of Ira Reichwarger’s work as a sculptor who knows how to capture movement, a master of nuance blessed with a sharp eye, sensuality and boldness.  Today it appears that that that the local artistic discourse at the time was not mature enough to open itself up to the new foundations that were being formulated as the basis of art created by female artists. During this time Ira was expounding on the solidarity of women through her work, using the expressiveness of women, illuminated from within with a knowing and wise smile, sharing nobility and grace.  Ira Reichwarger found in her art a fragile domain where experience and thought were not distilled through the prism of a masculine deterministic language – a construct where the place of a woman is a reflection of a man’s.  Women who create do not lose their subjectivity; they are alive and well and reflect a new understanding of life and the world.  The mainstream of the local art scene did not have the necessary tools to truly evaluate and appreciate Ira’s individual language and voice.  The time has now come to analyze the innovative ways in which Ira Reichwarger explored experience and identity as she deconstructed conventional political and social structures.