Avram Kampf (1920–2016)

During the last Sukkot holiday, Avram Kampf, leading art historian, scholar of modern and Jewish art, curator, and educator, passed away. At the funeral, which was held in the artists' village Ein Hod, where he lived, family members, associates, colleagues, and former students gathered to pay him tribute.

Avram Kampf was a scholar with a vast knowledge of art, literature, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. A pioneer in his field, he was among those who introduced the study of art history at Israeli universities. He was a professor of Art History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the founder of the Art Department at the University of Haifa. During his long career as an educator, he taught many of the art historians and curators of modern and Jewish art who are currently active on the Israeli art scene.

Born in Poland in 1920 and raised in Vienna, Kampf studied at the Zionist Hebrew Gymnasium in that city. In 1936, following the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, his parents sent him to Palestine. For the next three years, he lived and studied in the Ben-Shemen Youth Village. He described himself as a youngster who spent most of his time reading, a characteristic that was highlighted in the short story Ghaffir (The Guard) by the renowned Israeli author S. Yizhar, which features Kampf as its protagonist.¹ Yizhar, who was a teacher at Ben-Shemen, succeeded in describing Kampf with subtle humor and a gentle touch, as we can see from the following excerpt from the story, which is a description of a guard at the Ben-Shemen armory:

They called him Avram. Month after month he was the guard on duty, and he felt good about that. [. . .] He had a pen in his hand and he had paper and he had a whole pile of books and he read and wrote as if that were a guard's sole purpose [. . .] until one day while he was thus engaged, the gentile [sergeant] came upon him and caught him [reading]: "What are you doing?" the gentile screamed at him in English. [. . .] "Why are you here; what do you have there?" "Milton, sir, Paradise Lost, sir," the young man answered, blushing and tense, in fluent English, which sounded like High German, and the sergeant gazed at him, amazed [. . .] as he had never heard about any Milton and he did not care about any lost or not lost paradise, except for Captain Milton, who was his superior officer.²

The story ends thirty years later, when the narrator sees Avram at the Hebrew University, once again "with many books under his arm and with the same smile, directed slightly toward you and slightly toward who knows where. 'Hello Avram,' I said, wondering how I remembered his name, and we shook hands, and spoke about bygone days"³

In the early 1940s, Kampf studied to be an electrician. He then worked for the Palestine Potash Company in Sodom (1943–1945), during which time he lived in a workers' camp, where he apparently developed a social consciousness that influenced his views and his outlook on life. He decided to study art education at the Art Teachers' College in Tel Aviv (1945–1947), after which he taught in a Labor Movement elementary school in Tel Aviv.

In 1947, Kampf left for New York to join his parents, who had emigrated from Vienna before the outbreak of World War II and whom he had not seen since 1936. It was there that he began his academic studies and launched his career. He graduated from New York University's School of Education and studied for his MA and PhD at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, respectively. His MA thesis was entitled "Chagall in Paris, 1910–1914." He completed his PhD dissertation on contemporary synagogue art in 1962 and then went on to a two-year postgraduate program at the Institute of Individual Psychology and also took courses in filmmaking.

Kampf held many of the renowned scholars he studied with in high esteem, among them Horace...