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The New Barbizon’s interest in underprivileged groups stems from their being immigrants themselves and living in a so-called «alliance among others» (Bartosh 2014: 6; Guilat 2017: 272–273). However, the New Barbizon paintings invite an additional interpretation. The dissonance between the subjects and the style produces a grotesque caricaturist effect, which creates «realistic caricatures» of Israel’s life and society.

These strong Fauvistic colors applied to severely socially complicatedsubjectsaddachildishaspecttotheworks.«Childishness» is an important characteristic of Israeli’s culture in general and art in particular. It allows the artist to present fresh ideas, to be rude, critical and honest, but at the same time to hide behind the childish lack of responsibility (Zalmona 2010: 241–242). The childlike, or more accuratelyadolescent-like,boldattitudeexistsinmanyNewBarbizon works. This attitude is especially focal in Cherkassky’s paintings. Agood example is her 2013 paintingThey Eat Russian Lard23 (а сало русское едим) (fig. 7): one sees a realistically painted supermarket shelf with cheeses and sausages together. This is a recognizable scene of Russian supermarkets in Israel. On synthetic grass, meant to convey pastoral feelings, one can see many Russian products.Above each product is a label giving its name in Russian and Hebrew and its price. Two white hands with polished red nails pick up a sausage

23 This painting is not a part of the New Barbizon production. However, I believe it is a good example of Cherkassky’s approach, which profoundly influences other group members. Notably, the translation of the painting is not mine. Interestingly, on her Facebook page Cherkassky-Nnadi entitled the work in English «We eat Russian Lard», while its title in the Rosenfeld Gallery, which represents the artist, is «They Eat Russian Lard». This difference in the pronoun manifests different attitudes: Cherkassky’s title includes her in the action of eating with the «Russians,» while the gallery’s title means that the painter refrains from eating lard.

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to slice for a customer (i.e. the viewer). The painting is very colorful, with a distinct contour. The seller’s red figure behind the shelf looks flat, while her hands look round and three-dimensional. The scene is familiar and commonplace, but at the same time heavily sarcastic.

In this painting inscriptions, typical of Cherkassky-Nnadi, form an integral part of the work. Furthermore, the interplay between the Russian brand names and their problematic Hebrew translations is clearly evident. For example, the round pink sausage at the front of the painting is labeled a milk sausage (молочная колбаса), a familiar type. Similarly, it lies close to the cheeses as if it were a real «milk» product. The Hebrew translation, naknik halavi, is an oxymoron for an Israeli Jewish viewer: a milk sausage cannot be, since these are two opposites in kosher food rules.

Another example is the Cherkasskaya sausage (колбаса Черкасская) – again a real brand that puns with the artist’s surname. Some of the Russian labels carry – or are meant to carry – rich-living connotations. Examples are купеческая колбаса (merchant’s sausage), деликатесная (delicacy sausage), and so on. The labels’ translations or transliterations into Hebrew leave them incomprehensible to Israeli viewers. This actual practice creates an alienation effect (Фиалкова 1999).

The title of the painting «а сало русское едим» (we eat Russian lard) is a paraphrase of Sergei Mikhalkov’s notorious verse «а сало русское едят» (they eat Russian lard), explicitly used in the USSR against political dissidents and implicitly against Jews. Unlike its original pro-state meaning, in Cherkassky’s work it becomes an impudently dissident declaration against the Jewish state. The saying takes the pejorative nickname of the FSU immigrants’ svinoedy (свиноеды; pork eaters) and turns it into an identity statement.

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The title of the painting, written in Russian on the canvas’s lower right corner, becomes an integral part of the picture. Since its main viewing public are Hebrew-speaking, the title becomes incomprehensible. Even the Hebrew or English translations lose the title’s reference to Mikhalkov’s verse and its explicit anti-state meaning.24 The deliberate and impudent use of an incomprehensible language is similar to adolescent audacity on the one hand, and to a practice in contemporary Russian postmodernist fiction on the other (Uffelmann 2013: 181, 184).

Most authors who have written about the New Barbizon group refer to their subjects, but the painters prefer to speak mainly about their style and painterly practices. After working together for a long period they have created an identifiable style of colorful works that capture mundane and familiar scenes. Yet the painters also differ: Cherkassky’s works, as discussed above, are narrative and humorous. Lukashevsky focuses on portraiture as well as on the scenes’ mood, which is mostly gloomy and melancholic. Lukin’s works are more abstract and less colorful.

Most of the artists do not agree with their critics labeling them social artists who set out to create awareness of injustice by choosing socially and politically challenging places and subjects.They say that they were just looking for «interesting» themes, or as CherkasskyNnadi puts it, «blood, shit and sperm are our natural environment» (Cherkassky-Nnadi 2018). However, at least some of their recent projects definitely have a social agenda. In 2018 Anna Lukashevsky presented her project Realistic View which exposes Israeli capitalist society. It depicts an Israeli bourgeoisie, sitting in offices, training

24 Thisreferencewasabsentfromthepicture’sinterpretationinthecatalogue of Cherkassky’s Pravda exhibition at the Israel Museum (Lapidot 2018: 34).

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on treadmills, and buying goods. Lukashevsky indeed called it

Capitalist-Realism, as opposed to Socialist Realism (Frenkel Tene 2018).Cherkassky’sproject,dedicatedtotheBigAliyah(repatriation) of 1991 (presented in the Israel Museum as Pravda), is another example of this tendency. This preference for socially challenging themes and views is deeply rooted in Russian and Soviet art.

The New Barbizon painters in the context of immigration

The New Barbizon group is a very interesting case. On the one handitisalmostimpossibletoseethemasagenuinepartofaspecific artistic movement. On the other, the artists themselves emphasize their connection to Russian and Soviet art, modernist «Matisse-like» art, and the French realist Barbizon school. It seems that their need to ingraintheirartwithdifferentartistictraditionshasmuchtodowitha sense of displacement caused by immigration and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Various studies on the integration patterns of the generation 1.525 from the FSU in Israel show that their assimilation process in Israeli culture is only partial. Many members of that generation havebecomeglobalizedandbi-cultured,whileatthesametimethey continue to live in their own culturally isolated space (Remennick 2003, Niznik 2011, Rozovsky and Almog 2011). Tal Dekel studied the work of female immigrant artists of the generation 1.5 from the FSU, Ethiopia and the Philippines in Israel from social, political

25 The term 1.5 generation refers to immigrants who arrived to their new countries as children or adolescents after spending some of their formative years in the countries of origin (Remennick 2003: 40).

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and feminist viewpoints. Dekel’s findings for the «Russian» artists accord with the general approach to the generation 1.5. Some of them «erase» their past; others live in limbo between past and present. Many abandon their «Soviet» past but refuse to accept the new Israeli present. Others refer to the past in contemporary artistic language, for example, Anna Yam and Tamara Brodinsky (Dekel 2013: 13, 94).26 The New Barbizon group offers a reverse situation: a choice of traditional artistic language that manifests their otherness, combined with contemporary «Israeli» subjects. To my mind, this difference does not result from the fact that only two of the New Barbizon members belong to the generation 1.5. Zourabova and Lukashevsky immigrated to Israel as young adults, yet they too experienced an identity crisis in the 1990s with the collapse of the USSR.Together with millions of others, they rapidly lost their familiar reality and values and became exposed to the West head-on. Like immigrants, they watched their parents become incompetent,deeplydisorientedinthenewrealities(Гудков,Дубин и Зоркая 2011: 26–29).27

Integration into the new reality allowed the artists to resume their youthful style. I believe that the group gave them the possibility to dive into the exploration of the lost painterly technique, associated with a problematic past. In addition, it allowed them to focus on style and technique, not just the subjects.

Yael Guilat studied the appearance of the New Barbizon group in Israel in relation to the social and economic crisis of the precariat. She suggests that the precarious status of contemporary artists causes

26The Barbizon painters were not part of this study.

27Olga Kundina, who grew up before the USSR’s disintegration, differs from the others. Her artistic manner and worldview did not suffer dramatic changes.

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them to organize in groups, thereby overcoming financial instability (Guilat2017).ThisdoesnotseemtoapplytotheNewBarbizonartists since at first they did not perceive themselves as a group. However, itdidhelpthemgainfinancialstabilityandacquireamorerecognized status in the Israeli art world. As previously mentioned, four of the five artists teach painting at various institutions in Israel.All of them said that today they earn money from art sales and / or teaching.After participating in many exhibitions in commercial galleries, at art events, and in museum exhibitions, each of them won more fame.28 Nonetheless, the artists barely spoke about the amelioration of their financial status; they preferred to speak about finding their truth.

As mentioned above, Hayden White (1973) suggested that every historian present historical events according to one of the four genres: comedy, tragedy, romance and satire. Following this theory, the historian Boaz Neumann offered four narratives of the Israeli 1990s (Neumann 2008). The comic narrative presents those years as thedecadeofnormalizationofIsraelilifewhenIsraelisocietybecame civil instead of recruited to the Zionist ideal. According to the tragic narrative, Israel lost its Zionist dream, gave up on its people and became cynical and rough, while its nation broke up into mutually hating tribes. The romantic narrative tells the story of the 1990s as that of Israeli individuals, who against all odds became highly successful. Finally, the satirical narrative tells the story of ordinary people.Thesearethestoriesofthecontractworkers,theunemployed, the single mothers, the immigrants, the poor artists, the elderly, and the physically disabled – people who pay the price of the capitalist system. These are the narratives that populate the New Barbizon’s

28 Forexample,theTelAvivMuseumhaspurchasedKundina’sandCherkassky’s works, and the Israel Museum has purchased Cherkassky’s work.

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paintings.Yet this division into four genres seems too rigid and needs something more. I am aware of the term tragicomedy, but I prefer to coin an additional term: tragisatire. For example, in the works by Lukin and Zourabova (figs. 5, 6) we see African asylum seekers sitting in cafés in almost impressionistic mundane scenes. These are in fact White’s satirical protagonists. The pictures’dark bluish tones, as well as the figures with self-absorbed facial expressions, convey gloom. Nevertheless, the execution of the works does not call for social resistance (unlike, for example, German expressionists, who tried to convey tragedy by artistic means to shock the viewers and make them revolt). Lukin’s and Zourabova’s works are not tragedies and not satires; they are a combination of the two.

Conclusion

In 2011–2016 Cherkassky, Kundina, Lukashevsky, Lukin and Zourabova formed the New Barbizon group. This allowed them to introduce a new approach to realistic art in Israel: the tragisatire.The return to realistic «Soviet» practice provoked at least some of them to return to Soviet subjects. Cherkassky-Nnadi has recently completed her project, dedicated to the Great Russian Aliyah, and to Soviet Childhood, exhibited in 2019, in Fort Gansevoort Gallery in New York.AnnaLukashevskypainted«SovietHaifa,»portraitsandscenes from the life of the Hadar neighborhood in Haifa, where many FSU immigrants reside. Zourabova and Lukin paint the Israeli shikunim – cooperative houses that are very similar to the Soviet houses of their youth, the so-called khrushchievki.

For the last three years the New Barbizon has ceased to exist in its original form, namely as a group of five painters who paint togeth-

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er en plein air. Officially this happened after Cherkassky-Nnadi, the group’s living spirit, gave birth and ceased participating in the joint sessions. This coincided with her being busy with the preparation of her solo exhibition Pravda at the Israel Museum. At the same time, Kundina, Lukin and Zourabova explained that they wanted to return to their own subjects, which they did not see as part of the New Barbizon approach (Kundina 2018, Lukin 2018, Zourabova 2018). It is quite hard to analyze ongoing artistic events, but it seems that each of the artists had become more independent. At this point activity as a group may prove more restricting than inspiring.

The group had fulfilled its main purpose: it provided the artists a safe environment that allowed them to overcome artistic crises and to return to the long abandoned realistic painting. The artists exchanged ideas and techniques, and created their own approach to painting realistically (quickly identifying an interesting scene, on which they could later elaborate in their studios).Additionally, Cherkassky-Nna- di’s fame helped to establish painterly style in Israel as a valuable artistic approach. As this old-new realistic style re-enters the Israeli art world, it influences more Israeli painters, who absorb it in their works (e.g. Boaz Noy in Haifa, where Lukashevsky lives). It would be interesting to compare the New Barbizon’s approach to art with that of other artists who immigrated from the FSU to Western countries as adolescentsor youngadults. But thatthemeexceedsthe scope of this paper.

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List of the Interviews

Cherkassky-Nnadi, Zoya, 2018. Interview by author. May 2. Tel-Aviv, Israel (in Russian).

Kundina, Olga, 2018. Interview by author. March 15. Rosh Pina, Israel (in Russian).

Lukashevsky, Anna, 2018. Interview by author. March 12. Haifa, Israel (in Russian).

Lukin, Asya, 2018. Telephone Interview by author. April 16. Haifa. Israel (in Russian).

Zourabova, Natalia, 2018. Interview by author.April 17. TelAviv, Israel (in Russain).

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