Menashe Kadishman

'Sacrifices '

1982-1999
Ulrich Schneider

The life-inspired theme of sheep and flock is not the only one to be found in Menashe Kadishman's opus, which also researches the theme of Sacrifices, even in his abstraction and concept phases, binding the two topics together. Thus we find the beak of a bird of prey thrust deep into the flesh of the sacrificial victim, Prometheus, in the monumental 1966 sculpture Suspense that looms so imposingly in the sculpture garden of the israel Museum in Jerusalem. And the thousand names that Kadishman obliterated from the Manhattan directory with a felt-tipped pen in his 1972 conceptual piece Telephone Book
point to liquidated identities, to sacrifices. When Kadishman started working on figurative sculpture again some time around 1977, and more intensively in the early eighties, the sacrifice developed into a main theme. After hundreds of preparatory works in thin iron and brass sheeting, he use the cut steel drawing technique to create the works Sacrifice of Isaac (installed 1982, The Jewish Museum, New York and Tel Aviv Museums, Tel Aviv) and Mother Carrying her Sacrifice (installed 1983, hospital Tel Hashomer-Rabin Centre, Tel Aviv), Pieta (installed 1990), Prometheus (installed 1987), Mourning (installed 1987), Suffering (installed 1988) and Birth (installed 1990).
The approach typically adopted by Kadishman to his work is one that continuously modifies and paraphrases his themes over the years. The technical facilities of electronic calculation and flame cutting also enable the contours of large-scale sculptures to
be plotted with the spontaneity of drawings. Giving form to the drawing of course calls for an unfettered understanding in the artist's relationship with the steel workers and his decades of experience in tackling his theme and material. Recently, he has adopted the technique of folding his sculptures over large steel rollers to give them their shape. Yet however technical the process becomes, the critical phase of determining the figures, some of them in large formats, remains an act that the artist alone controls.
Like all Kadishman's sculptural work in sheet steel, the Sacrifice sculptures raise the principle of restraint, of leaving out and casting off, to an apogee. Thus Menashe Kadishman is still related to classical English Modernism today. In the case of
Birth, to name but one example, the sculpture captures that happy moment when the child comes completely forth amid the pain of the last travail.
The sculpture is restricted to the mother's screaming countenance, her unruly hair thrust back, the feminine shape of her breast, the released expression of the child's face and a bent supporting leg. The group's completeness is immanent.