Jacob’s Ladder

Shalom Moskovitz (Safed 1887–1980 Safed)
Safed, Israel, ca. 1965
Color lithograph, h. 18 3/8 x w.  26 7/16 in.
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, gift of Nancy M. Berman and Alan J. Bloch, 2018.14

The artist who became known as Shalom of Safed began to paint relatively late, at the age of fifty-five. By his seventies, he had attained the rank of the foremost international representative of Israeli primitivist painting.

For more than half a century before taking up art, he worked at various crafts, mainly watch-making, but also as a stonemason and silversmith, and led a quiet and religious life. He came across painting accidentally and started to paint subjects closest to his heart, the events of Jewish history, as narrated in the Old Testament and elaborated in the Talmud and other books. Shalom considered himself a “historical writer” rather than an artist, retelling the stories from Genesis and Exodus. He inserted scriptural verses and other legends to ensure clarity. His works often “read” like Hebrew with movement and sequence running from right to left, from top to bottom. Shalom claimed that he did not work from his imagination, yet there is humor as well as imagination in his vivid colors and rearrangement of narrative elements.