Avigdor W. G. Posèq (1934–2016)

Avigdor Posèq had a long, multifaceted life. He was born Victor (Vitek) Pisek in 1934 to a well-to-do intellectual family in Cracow. In August 1939, the family fled the coming war to Zamość, where they barely survived the Nazi bombing. In June 1940, they traveled to L'viv (then Lvov, ruled by the Soviet Union), from where they were deported and sent on a 2-week journey to western Siberia in a sealed freight car. During the winter of 1940–1941, they suffered from constant cold and hunger. Despite the hardships, Vitek's mother was able to find a professor among the deportees to teach the children. After a year in dire conditions, the Poles were allowed to leave Siberia, and in December 1941, at the end of a five-week journey in a crowded freight train, the family reached Uzbekistan. After months of living in one room in unhealthy conditions, they were sent to a refugee camp near Teheran, where Vitek was hospitalized for pneumonia with complications from which he almost died. After everyone in the family became ill, they were moved to Teheran, where they finally received proper medical care. In November 1942, they crossed through Iraq and Jordan to Palestine, arriving in December, and settled in Tel Aviv in 1943. There the boy slowly recovered his health and began to paint while attending a Polish-language school.¹

Upon graduation, when he was 13 years old, his mother arranged art lessons for him at Tel Aviv's Avni Institute with Joseph Schwartzmann, who had studied with Käthe Kollwitz in Berlin and who stressed the importance of a solid academic grounding in anatomy as well as in painting and drawing. Uncomfortable in the Herzliya Gymnasium because of his scant knowledge of Hebrew, Vitek enrolled in the Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School while continuing to study painting. In 1949 (at the age of 15), he exhibited as Avigdor Pisak in the Young Artists Show in Tel Aviv, and in 1951 he was included in the Art in Israel exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum. From 1952 to 1956, he studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, majoring in stage design so that he could support himself while he painted. Returning to Israel upon graduation, he worked in Tel Aviv for Habima (1956–1958) and the Zirah Theater (1957–1960), and in 1960 was art director for the Israeli film They Were Ten.²

While variously employed, he participated in group art exhibitions in Tel Aviv and held three one-man shows (1957, 1963, 1976), but Israeli critics could not accept his expressionist style with its strong symbolic content. Some of his paintings were influenced by the Holocaust, whereas others were inspired by his feelings of alienation as a child and an adult who felt a part of Israeli society, yet still an outsider. Many of his works depict depressed or bound figures and reflect a pessimistic view of mankind's fate.

In 1965, with the founding of the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Posèq began teaching a course on materials and techniques that fully utilized the knowledge he had acquired at the Brera Academy. Sponsored by Moshe Barasch, he also studied art history and literature, and in 1974 presented his doctoral dissertation, "The Lunette: A Study in the Role of the Arch-Outlined Format in the Design and Content of Italian Murals of the Renaissance." As the title suggests, what had started as a study of format of the kind that would interest an artist soon came to center on meaning, the subjects placed in lunettes, and the reasons for these choices. Posèq further developed this approach to subject and form in his book Format in Painting, which addressed not only the various formats of paintings throughout the ages, but also their connotations – such as the use of ceilings to depict heaven or the negative implications of placing images on floors, where people trod on them.³ He also explained painters' experiences of different formats...