Mordecai Ardon Lot n° 38

was born in Poland in 1896. Between 1921 and 1924 he studied at the Bauhaus Art School in Weimar Germany but with the rise to power of the Nazi party he fled to Palestine in 1933 where he made his home. After the Second World War he learned that he lost his entire family except for his brother who managed to escape. This experience had a strong repercussion on his life and work. Parable of 1 x 1 is one of a number of works undertaken during the late 1940s and early 1950s which have a strong biographical note. It is a portrait of the artist as a young man reclining on a table in front of him holding a card while his head rests on the other hand fingers partly covering his right eye. On the desk is a complex labyrinth made up of a trap and a mouse. As Arturo Schwartz explains "In all his portraits it is apparent that Ardon is more interested in rendering spiritual identity rather than merely physical appearance The emphasis is not on photographic realism but on the sitter's psychological complexities. Ardon's self-portraits and portraits are a... commentary upon the innermost feelings of his model." In 1951 Ardon painted two self-portraits. In both works "...Ardon abandons the figurative approach and instead relies on a complex net of cryptic but telling details.." (A. Schwartz. Mordecai Ardon The Colors of Time Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem Museums 2003 p. 61) The cryptic details of the portrait are as Schwartz states open to interpretation. He believes that they have to be interpreted in relation to the question of moral perfection after the war. These can be seen in one of three aspects- abstract moral personal or artistic- which seem to overlap in this painting. The key to interpreting the painting is the symbolical meaning of the trap mouse and card. The mouse represents in Ardon's symbolism the Jews hiding from their persecutors; the trap is the "invisible traps" that a person is con Oren Migdal fronted with during his daily life while the card is the frailty of our e