Yitzhak Livneh

Waiting for the Barbarians

The exhibition takes its name from the title of C. P. Cavafy’s famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which opens with the lines:

“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.”

The exhibition features a group of paintings that at first glance seem to depict the back of a painting. In fact, they show the front side of a painting that was the target of a deliberate act of vandalism, in which most of the painting was cut out with an exacto knife and removed. The edges of the painting are still attached to the stretcher. The removal of the center of the painting exposes the stretcher, the cross bars that support it, and the white wall on which the painting was hanging.

Typically, the motivation for vandalizing paintings is ideological, whether political or religious. But painters also do this when they give up on a painting that did not turn out well. Art thieves who steal paintings from museums also cut the paintings along their edges, roll them up, and quickly leave the scene.

The act of destroying a painting is primarily symbolic. Its aftermath is first and foremost an unbearable sight. For this reason, in recent years various protest organizations have staged art vandalism spectacles. It seems that vandalizing masterpieces is the simplest and most effective way to harm and challenge Western culture. The vandalizing protestors gain media attention and perhaps also a platform for their claims and demands.

Early on in his career, Yitzhak Livneh used to work in a restoration studio, where he specialized, among others, in repairing tears in paintings until the damage became completely undetectable.

Yitzhak Livneh

October 2024

Yitzhak Livneh’s previous exhibition at Noga Gallery, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” held about a year and a half ago, dealt with depictions of ripped paintings. His current exhibition, “Something Befell,” is an additional link in his multi-year interest with depictions of destruction and ruins. The paintings depict states of crushing and crumbling, yet they are not landscapes of ruins viewed from a distant point.

The paintings in “Something Befell” lack a point of view and there is no distance or defined horizon line. There’s no distance between the viewer and the ruin – a state that no longer allows for a safe standpoint from which to contemplate the ruin and reflect on history or the fate of empires.

The exhibition opens alongside the launch of the third volume in the “Golden Notebook” series, published by the Bezalel Department of Fine Arts in collaboration with Asia Publishers. The series is a gesture of appreciation and recognition by the department toward artists of significant influence within the local art scene, and on the spirit and philosophy of art education – a field in which Yitzhak Livneh has played a major and central role. Livneh was one of the leading and most prominent lecturers in the Fine Arts Department for almost four decades.