The Place to Be

While often acclaimed as a premier Israeli artist, Itshak Holtz was actually born in Poland, came to Eretz Yisrael as a ten-year-old boy, and spent much of his adult life shuttling between the US and the Holy Land.

His family settled in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood in 1935, but even as a little boy back in Poland, his artistic talent had already manifested.

“My father, who was a hatmaker and a furrier, also drew very well, and he once drew me a picture of a horse and a sled. I was entranced,” Holtz related in a documentary about his work in advance of a 2012 exhibit at the Betzalel Gallery in Crown Heights. He remembered his own first public artistic effort when he was six — a sidewalk portrait in chalk of Poland’s then-president, Jozef Pilsudski. The passersby marveled at his ability to capture the man’s character, mustache and all. (“It was a pretty good likeness, too,” Holtz said.)

In Jerusalem he attended the religious-Zionist Tachkemoni school, where he was chosen as one of the boys whose weekly illustrations of the weekly parshah lined the hallways. Recognizing his talent, his parents encouraged him to pursue his art despite his father’s reservations about how he would make a living.

In his late teens, Holtz joined the Haganah to support the fight for the Jewish homeland, where he served mainly as a guard. At age 20, in 1945, he enrolled in the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (now the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design), Israel’s only art school.

In the early pre-State years, though, the school’s focus was on commercial art. The nascent country had a growing economy, and needed artists who could design ads and publicity for its industries. “Fine art was not a priority — there weren’t even classes in fine art or art history,” Holtz remembered. He studied lettering and poster design, and did a lot of commercial work to make some money, but commercial art never satisfied his desire to work in fine art.

During his years at Bezalel, Itshak met Ruth Beck, whose Czechoslovakian family had abandoned their prosperous knitting mill and fled the country three days before Hitler’s invasion. Ruth’s father sold toothpaste and soap door to door until he earned enough to buy a sewing machine and start over as a tailor. Having narrowly missed one war, the Beck family was not interested in staying around for the approaching War of Independence, and moved to New York in 1948.

Holtz followed in 1950, pursuing his art and his soon-to-be wife.

When Holtz arrived in New York, he registered at the Art Students League of New York. “It was the place you went to in order to become an artist,” says Richard McBee, a well-respected Jewish biblical artist, art critic, scholar of Jewish art, and fellow school alumnus, who was commissioned by David Segal to write about Holtz’s life and his artistic journey and contributions. “Each teacher had his own class, like his own fiefdom, so you could go wherever your sensitivities drew you and sample a broad variety of styles and techniques.”

Ruth’s family, who managed to reestablish themselves with a custom shirt business that later crafted shirts for celebrities, designers, and top-line professionals, helped out the young family as much as they could.

“I remember that when I was little, my parents really struggled,” says daughter Dr. Aliza Holtz, a biologist. “My grandparents and great-grandparents often had me over to their house for meals.”

Holtz, for his part, had to learn a new language and culture — he arrived in the US with only Yiddish and Hebrew and very little English. But he somehow got along, making friends with his instructors and learning from their work.

At the Art Students League, Holtz studied with Harry Sternberg, whom McBee characterized as “a people’s artist, very down to earth and left-leaning,” as well as Robert Brackman, known for his portraits of society figures. He later studied with Robert Philipp at the National Academy of Design, who encouraged him to pursue Jewish subject matter.

While Holtz was surrounded in art school by artists veering into more abstract, contemporary styles, these trends largely left him cold. “He was immersed in the tradition of the Old Masters,” Aliza says. “He was not a fan of Picasso and Chagall — he himself had a very different sensibility. He loved artists such as Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Corot, and Brueghel.

“When I was two, he painted a portrait of my mother. She sat 80 hours for that portrait, and it’s an incredibly beautiful piece.”

Take It to the Streets

During the first 15 years of his career, McBee recounts, Holtz took commercial art jobs and worked on his own projects in the evenings or weekends. He managed to sell a few works through a venue called the Little Studio on the Lower East Side, which opened in 1952 and displayed lesser-known artists. He even taught a little, as many artists do to make extra money, but all he really wanted to do was paint the subjects that intrigued his artistic vision.

“He always danced to his own drummer,” McBee remarks.

At the beginning, he accepted portrait commissions to help pay the bills. “Portraits were a way to make a living, but he would have preferred to paint the themes that touched his heart,” Aliza says. “Nevertheless, he was always able to capture the essence of his subjects.”

Finally, in 1965, Holtz found an “angel”: a fellow mispallel from his Washington Heights kehillah named Mendel Aviv. “Mendel offered to sponsor him,” McBee says. “He gave him money for support, bought him supplies, and told him, ‘Just paint.’ ”

Holtz took a studio on the tenth floor of 118 East 28th Street, and now had the freedom to devote himself wholly to his fine art.

It was around that time that Holtz began traveling to more bucolic locations around New York, such as the Poconos, the Catskills, New England, and Bucks County, to paint landscapes. These were working vacations for him, as much as his family urged him to relax. Holtz had never learned to drive, so Ruth would take the wheel. She enabled much of his career, keeping accounts of his sales, packing food for his painting expeditions, and taking care of all the household needs while working in her parents’ shirt-making business.

At that point, Holtz was primarily painting landscapes and street scenes, but his passion still wasn’t being fulfilled. He longed to return to the streets of his youth and create real Judaic art.

“I went back to Yerushalayim, and since I lived in Geula, not far from Meah Shearim, I’d go into the stores of the shoemakers and craftsmen. If they would let me in to paint them, I was thrilled,” Holtz remembered.

At a certain point, Itshak and Ruth decided to split their time between New York and Israel, where he’d set his easel up outside and paint. And then the crowds would come around, oohing and aahing. They would ask him, “Where can we buy these pictures? Where is your gallery?”

“There was once this old man who came around,” Holtz related, “and after everyone else left, he said, ‘You know, I look at this painting and it warms my heart. I walk down this street every day and I didn’t know I lived in such a beautiful place!’ ”

One day, as he pitched his easel on the outskirts of Meah Shearim, he saw a crowd of people getting ready for a wedding. And that became his famed “Wedding in Jerusalem” painting.

“In order to be authentic, to really grasp that feeling of Jewishness, you have to live that religious life,” Holtz would say. “It’s not something you can copy and put a price on.”

The Next Dimension

The opening of the Chassidic Art Institute in Crown Heights (CHAI), managed by Zev Markowitz, was Holtz’s opportunity to begin exhibiting his many paintings focused on Jewish subjects. The two men became close friends, sharing their passion for art and Yiddishkeit.

In the early 1990s, the Yeshiva University Museum held a show of Holtz’s work that helped put him on the map. It was organized by museum director Sylvia Herskowitz; Leonard Kestenbaum funded the catalog and lent paintings from his private collection. The exhibit ran for an unprecedented ten months, garnering Holtz much higher levels of fame and recognition. He called it “a turning point in my career,” even though by that point he was making steady sales and had become well-known. Some of his paintings won awards and were exhibited in other galleries; he himself once mentioned that some of his paintings sold in six figures, adding that he wished his parents had been alive to enjoy the nachas of his success.

While the Holtz family spent many years summering in Israel and wintering in New York, in 2010 Holtz, then 85 years young, closed his Manhattan studio and he and Ruth moved to Israel permanently, the most senior participants on a Nefesh b’Nefesh aliyah flight. By then, their son Arie, who had made aliyah in 1985 and had studied mechanical engineering at the Technion, was living in Israel with his wife and children.

After Holtz’s petirah in 2018, Arie took care of storing the remaining works, putting up a website and handling sales. “Most of the Judaica is gone,” Arie says, “but there are drawings and landscapes still available.”

Find the Light

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Aliza Holtz has a PhD in biology, but she’s also an accomplished photographer who says she learned from her father how to appreciate light and see the world like an artist. “When you look at a face, you see contours of light and shadow,” she says. “Most people just see the shadows in shades of gray, but my father would use greens or burgundies to create shadows. We perceive the world in three dimensions, but he had a way of representing the world in two dimensions that was even richer.

“And he taught me how to observe the quality of the light,” she continues. “The ‘blue hour,’ around sunset, was a time he loved, and different to him from dawn. The yellow light of daytime is warm and intense. In some of his paintings, I can practically feel the heat of the sun.”

A look through the new book shows Holtz’s passion for the many forms natural light can take. “Dusk,” a painting of a snowy Manhattan street (1977), shows the pearly tones of the fading winter light as lights begin to go on in offices and apartments. His scenes of Jerusalem are awash in Mediterranean sun, while a painting entitled “Jerusalem Sunset” (1977) captures the rose and gold tones of the setting sun as they gild the stone houses, bushes, and cypresses. Holtz painted chuppah and Kiddush Levanah scenes under the moon, augmented by the glow of torches and candles that give the colors the warmth of stained glass.  A painting called “Night in Safed,” which depicts an elderly woman walking through an alley lit only by a lantern, conveys a sense of the city’s mystery and stillness.

“There were times when my father would say, ‘The light is changing — I have to run and catch it!’” Aliza says. “But beyond that, he would ignore the weather or the time — he’d be ‘in the zone,’ as they say today.” (David Segal recalls that he once went out painting with Holtz in Israel on a 95-degree day. Holtz was already 85, yet he was so utterly absorbed in his work he didn’t notice the heat.)

When Aliza was a girl, her father would take her to New York art museums, training her powers of perception. “He’d talk about brushstrokes, and how they were used to indicate action in a painting,” Aliza relates. “On Shabbos mornings, his minyan would finish pretty early, and we’d go for a walk along Riverside Drive, with its view of the Hudson River and the Palisades, often stopping to rest on a bench. Someone would pass, and he’d ask me, ‘How many buttons were on that man’s coat?’ or ‘What color shoes was that lady wearing?’ It was a game, but it honed my powers of observation.”

At home, his studio was his inner sanctum, a place she could enter only with permission. It was filled with paintings, his supplies meticulously and professionally arranged. “He used to hold up a small glass lens to check that he had rendered the perspective correctly,” she recalls. Every painting was signed in his elegant, precise script.

Holtz never painted from photos, saying that he could always tell when someone else did. The camera lens, he said, distorts the image.

“He used photos only to record details,” Aliza says. “He wanted to paint a portrait of a flautist he met at an event we attended, and he asked me to take pictures of him, especially of the hands, so he could get the details of the hand positions right — he was a master of painting hands.”

When the family spent time in the Poconos, the Berkshires, and in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Holtz produced paintings of family picnics and woodland scenes, nothing was unworthy of his attention, from a forester to an old boat to a cat looking out at the viewer in a painting of his living room (the Holtz family always had a cat).

Unlocking the Narrative

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”

 —W. Somerset Maugham

While Holtz executed many landscapes and portraits, he’s best known as a genre painter, which is defined as an artist who paints ordinary people and their circumstances.

“The Yeshiva University Museum exhibit was what really defined him as a genre artist,” McBee explains. “Holtz was drawn to the real fabric of Jewish life, not just the ritual part, although he painted that, too. But you don’t find sentimental pictures of women lighting Shabbos candles, or many paintings of tefillin.”

For example, he says, one painting depicts a chassid falling asleep over his precious sefer on Shabbos. “This is a portrait, but it’s also a meditation on Shabbos, on learning, on being tired from the work week and then exhausted by the learning. His paintings always define a narrative, taking you inside the drama of a person’s life. His synagogue paintings are never simply a still life either — there’s always a narrative: an ode to the men learning Torah, an ode to the study hall.”

Holtz was not afraid to do paintings that might not appeal to art consumers. One 1951 work shows a butcher pushing his hand on the head of a cow, with beef carcasses hanging on meat hooks behind him and a bloody hatchet next to the head. He was not the first to be fascinated by this sort of tableau; Rembrandt and Soutine notably painted similar scenes.

A work from 1966 depicts a group of chassidim at a funeral in Jerusalem — again, not a typical choice of subject. Holtz painted street scenes, marketplace scenes, weddings, and shuls, in both the US and Israel. There are many pictures of tailors plying their trade, and men fixing clocks. “He was a real artist, a craftsman who got very involved in the specifics. He would roll up his sleeves and become a part of whatever he saw,” McBee says.

Despite his love of painting the chassidic world, Holtz himself was not a chassid. He was shomer Shabbos, clean-shaven, and always chose apartments that were close to a shul. Yet he was inspired to deeper levels of observance as he became close to his subjects in Orthodox and chassidic neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.

“He fell in love with the authenticity of the chassidic world,” McBee says. “It’s like he became a chassid by painting that world.”

Aliza Holtz says that while her father did not identify as a chassid, he had a deep feeling for chassidim and loved to paint them because he felt they had tremendous authenticity and character.

“My father felt they were able to celebrate the joy of nature, of family, of the Divine, while carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders,” she says. She characterizes her father as a very spiritual person, whose spirituality drove his art and vice versa. “He did his best to make the most beautiful art he was capable of, as a form of praise to Hashem for giving him that gift.”

Curiously, once his Talmud Torah days were behind him, Holtz never again painted biblical scenes. Perhaps he hesitated to depict people whose greatness we can’t begin to fathom. Or perhaps he simply felt more compelled to document the world he lived in.

It Was Never About Him

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

—Henry Ward Beecher

People often stereotype artists as self-involved. But while Itshak Holtz was at one with his art, with a sketchbook and pencil almost permanently attached to his hands, he was far from self-involved. Only a person of tremendous compassion and insight into the Jewish neshamah and human nature could depict ordinary Jews plying trades like sewing or butchering, or engaging in tefillah or Torah study, with such a depth of understanding and sensitivity.

Everyone who came into contact with him was impressed by his modest, unassuming, generous nature. “He was the sweetest, nicest man,” McBee recalls. “Everyone loved him.” He gave freely of his time and advice to younger aspiring artists and maintained warm friendships with his dealers and patrons. He was never wealthy, but he always kept a pocket full of change for tzedakah. And although he won many awards for his art, both in the US and Europe, he decided to stop entering competitions after 1992 in order to allow younger artists to gain recognition.

Aliza relates that during one of her father’s visits to Israel, while visiting a gallery, he saw a “Itshak Holtz” painting on the wall that, to him, was clearly a forgery. “Who did this painting?” he asked the owner.

“Itshak Holtz!” came the reply.

“I see,” Holtz said. “Would I be able to meet the artist?”

The owner arranged a meeting. The artist turned out to be a young Russian immigrant, struggling to meet the needs of his family.

“This is a beautiful painting, but it’s a copy of one of my works. I’m Itshak Holtz,” Holtz said. “Why did you copy my painting?”

“I really liked it,” the young man admitted, and apologized profusely.

“You should not copy other people’s work,” Holtz admonished. “You’re clearly a very good artist. Why don’t you paint from real life?” And with that, Holtz offered to mentor the young artist; he took him out and taught him to paint in his own voice.

Holtz was a man truly at one with his art, imbued with his calling. When he took the subway, he would sketch people around him, capturing their essence. In shul, in storefronts, he was ever ready to sketch anything that caught his artist’s eye. Even after breaking his arm at age 86, which made it impossible for him to raise his arm to paint, he continued to draw. As the sculptor Henry Moore once remarked, “There’s no retirement for an artist. It’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.”

During Holtz’s last days in the hospital, the rabbi of the Bridge Shul in Washington Heights, where Holtz davened for years before making aliyah, came to visit. Holtz asked him to please bring him a pad of paper and crayons. Even while ailing, he couldn’t stop making art.

“He painted until almost his dying day,” Aliza says. “It was part of him.”

Holtz’s opus is as timeless as the Jewish people he loved to depict. “It’s tremendously gratifying to see the book finally come out,” David Segal says. “It means that so many more people will be able to enjoy his work and appreciate his mastery.”

And while anyone who loves art can admire the work, surely it will be most appreciated by the people whose world he captured with such skill and depth.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)