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Yehuda Armoni – Homeland
Curator: Dr. Doron J. Lurie
“Man is nothing but the landscape of his homeland,” wrote the poet Shaul Tchernichowsky, reflecting on the deep bond between a person’s character and the landscapes of childhood and early experience. It is a pity that when the Russian-born poet wrote these beautiful words, he had in mind the plains of Crimea – the scents, the endless expanses, the rushing rivers, the church spires – and not the Land of Israel. On the contrary: when describing his first impressions of the Holy Land, where he spent the last twelve years of his life, he wrote with disappointment: “Oh my land, my homeland! A bare, rocky mountain…”
Despite this bitter sentiment, it is possible that Yehuda Armoni’s landscapes of Israel might have stirred even in Tchernichowsky a warm sense of home. I am thinking especially of Armoni’s paintings of the monastery at Latrun – Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, better known locally as the Monastery of the Silent Monks. After all, it is a fact that the poet met his death at Jerusalem’s San Simon Monastery, and only to avoid a national scandal was his body hastily transferred to Hadassah Hospital. Irony of fate: exactly ten years later, in 1953, Yehuda Armoni was born at Misgav Ladach Hospital, just 150 meters from that very monastery.
Indeed, as Tchernichowsky suggested, Yehuda Armoni is deeply connected to his homeland – Israel. This is evident not only in his long military service (approximately 25 years), but also in his landscapes of the country, and even in his family roots. He is a descendant of the Castel family (Castel → Palace → Armon (in Hebrew) → Armoni), who immigrated to the Land of Israel more than 500 years ago, following the Expulsion from Spain.
Let us return to the paintings. Yehuda Armoni specializes in landscapes. Some argue that there are landscapes more sublime for painting than those with which our country has been endowed: the groves of Tuscany and Umbria dotted with medieval towns, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the fjords of Norway, the eternal glaciers of Antarctica, the stalactite and stalagmite caves of Belgium, and so on. And yet, for many of us, there is nothing like our small country – better known as the Holy Land: The Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, Masada, the craters of the Negev (The Makhteshim), Solomon’s Pillars, and more.
Armoni, however, finds interest not only in majestic, biblical landscapes, but in the most banal fragments of scenery, in what Dr. Smadar Sheffi aptly termed the “trivial landscape”: Ben Shemen Forest, Latrun, Canada Park, the Ayalon Valley, and the Lachish region. And just as we cannot fully explain why the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer chose to stand facing a kitchen maid for six months, painting her as she pours milk into a bowl, so it is difficult to pinpoint what drives Armoni to paint, again and again, the same plastic-wrapped grapevines. Only the gods of the Muses know.
On the History of Landscape Painting
Landscape painting is one of the most familiar genres in art, alongside still life, portraiture, genre scenes, and history painting. In its early days, landscape was considered inferior to the other genres. In the Italian Renaissance, for example, landscape rarely served as the subject itself; it appeared mainly as a backdrop to works such as Madonna and Child. In contrast, Flemish painters like Bruegel had already devoted entire paintings to landscapes. Yet even these panoramic works still included human figures and were not “pure” landscapes.
Another significant chapter in the genealogy of landscape painting is the Golden Age of Dutch art in the 17th century. During this period, specialization became widespread. As a result, landscape painting as a general category was considered too broad and diffuse. Artists believed it was better to focus on one narrow subject and depict it exceptionally well, rather than attempt everything with mediocre results. Thus, great painters emerged who specialized in landscapes with cows in a meadow (Paulus Potter), moonlight scenes (Aert van der Neer), forests with a fallen tree by a waterfall (Jacob van Ruisdael), snowy winter landscapes (Hendrick Avercamp), urban landscapes with churches (Pieter Saenredam), seascapes (Jan Porcellis), and more. Similarly, one can distinguish between painters who favored calm, still landscapes and those drawn to dramatic, turbulent, even threatening scenery.
Painting Outdoors
Here I would like to comment on the many hardships involved in painting outdoors: sudden rain, wind (which can send the canvas flying), heat waves, and the like. A particularly extreme example belongs to Vincent van Gogh. In 2017, a conservator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, which houses his oil painting Olive Orchard (1889), discovered a grasshopper embedded in the paint—apparently trapped there while the paint was still wet and unable to escape. Indeed, already in 1885, Van Gogh described in a letter to his brother Theo his frustration with painting in nature: “When I sit outside and try to paint, suddenly a hundred flies come along, not to mention the sand and the dust.”
Yehuda is happy to join Van Gogh’s club, though he says that what mainly attacks him while painting outdoors are swarms of gnats. Landscape painting, it turns out, is not only about standing before the open space, but also about stubbornly contending with whatever lives and moves within it.
When a Landscape Wants to Sing
The scholar Dr. Mimi Haskin has compared Armoni’s paintings to poetry (Wisława Szymborska, Leah Goldberg, Tal Nitzan, Nathan Zach, Nathan Alterman). To my mind, they are no less akin to familiar songs we can hum without knowing when we learned them. Perhaps this is why, when facing the vegetation and blossoms in his paintings, what comes to mind is not a text but a melody.
As I look at the paintings, three songs play within me: “The Ever Green Mountain”(lyrics by Yoram Taharlev, music by Moni Amarilio), “Once there were Greenfields” (performed by the American group The Brothers Four), and Georges Brassens’s wonderful song “Au bois de mon Coeur”, better known to Israeli audiences in Ehud Manor’s translation and Corinne Allal’s rendition as “Somewhere in the Heart, a Flower Blooms.”
Capriccio: A Landscape That Never Was
One of the two largest paintings in this exhibition is titled Capriccio. It is no accident that the term evokes the word caprice. In painting, it refers to the depiction of a place that is entirely realistic and often recognizable, yet at the same time lacks any concrete anchor in reality. In other words, the place does not exist; it is created through a creative assembly of real elements – a connection of things not actually connected, but that could have been. Such an attempt requires great daring; some might say even hubris: an effort to improve upon the works of the Creator. Yet this phenomenon is well documented in art history.
In 17th-century Holland, painters such as Hercules Seghers and Jan van Goyen excelled in this genre. Seghers, in his “fantastic landscapes,” diverted rivers from their natural courses or added church spires where none existed, all in the service of a more compelling image. In the 18th century, three Italian painters – Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, and Giovanni Paolo Panini – also contributed significantly to the genre. The first two worked in Venice, while Panini was active mainly in Rome. Panini favored ruins and ancient buildings, creating paintings in which the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, Trajan’s Column, and the Pyramid (located at the opposite end of Rome) appeared together in a single scene.
The capriccio genre was particularly beloved by young English aristocrats on the Grand Tour, their educational journey to the cradle of classical cultures. Instead of purchasing a separate souvenir painting from each site, Panini would compose a single beautiful image, meticulously observing the laws of perspective and detail, containing everything they wished to take back to England.
Returning to Yehuda Armoni: until now, he has sought to depict with great fidelity and inner integrity exactly what his eyes saw in nature. But in his impressive panoramic Capriccio, he departs from this practice. At first glance, we seem to see the northern Arava, the mountains of Edom and Moab, the Dead Sea, and some ancient cliff reminiscent of Masada. In reality, Armoni borrows elements from different locations – primarily Timna Park and the Ramon Crater (Makhtesh) – and assembles them into a new landscape that does not exist in reality, in a kind of act of creation.
On Process, Technique, and Image
Much has already been written (especially by Dr. David Graves) about Armoni’s use of the sfumato technique (atmospheric perspective) formulated by Leonardo da Vinci. This is a method for depicting air and haze, which grow denser as objects recede into the distance. Dr. Graves has also analyzed the light, the painterly patches, and the color in Armoni’s work, and has emphasized the importance of the small paintings made outdoors on site.
By way of comparison, the painting Quarry in Lachish, shown for the first time in this exhibition, was created through a three-stage process: first, a quick but small painting (20 × 20 cm) made in nature; then a medium-sized version (40 × 40 cm); and finally, a studio version measuring 100 × 100 cm. When I look at this painting, I am reminded of the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1833: “The idea of destruction [referring to the felling of America’s forests with axes] is what gives the landscape its touching grace.” Regrettably, what is distinctive about Armoni’s painting is that the quarried area, painted in a glaring white, appears as a painful wound in the landscape, entirely devoid of any “touching grace.”
Stone Lions (The Lion Sleeps Tonight…)
It seems that recently our fate has been cast to live between the “Rising Lion” and the “Lion’s Roar” So even in this exhibition we managed to find a lion. In the painting “Monster Rock”, Armoni underwent an interesting process. He recounts that at first, he did not notice that the rock he was painting could—or might—resemble the head of a monster (a hungry lion dozing by the roadside, lying in wait for innocent passersby?). This later realization added a surreal dimension to an otherwise realistic image, while inviting the viewer to embark on a journey of interpretations and associations.
Allow me to take you on one such associative journey, one of many possible readings latent in the image. As we all know, in biblical times lions roamed the land. The story of Samson, who tore one apart with his bare hands, is well known. Today, however, lions in the Land of Israel are found mainly when they are made of stone or concrete.
Let us consider a few of these stone monsters together. First stop: the Lions’ Gate in the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, where we find four beautiful lion reliefs, created sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries. Second stop: Simta Plonit – “Anonymous Alley” in Tel Aviv, where for a concrete lion statue has been standing for nearly a hundred years.. Third stop: Tel Hai, home to Abraham Melnikov’s famous 1934 sculpture The Roaring Lion, designed in an Assyrian style. Fourth stop: a year later (1935), another lion appeared – this time a winged one (the symbol of the city of Venice),atop the Jerusalem building of the Generali Italian insurance company. In recent years, this trend seems to have resurfaced: a giant lion sculpture by Sam Philippe was installed in Kiryat Shmona about three years ago, and in the Gaza Envelope two additional lions have appeared: a roaring lion (between the kibbutzim Nir Oz and Magen) and a silent lion (Kerem Shalom). But Yehuda Armoni’s lion is the most monstrous of them all, for it hides by the roadside, silently stalking passersby like a band of robbers.
Reflections
Another intriguing painting in the exhibition is Winter Pool in Netanya. Like many artists before him, Armoni has spent years exploring reflections in water – lakes, streams, or puddles. We may recall, for example, the winter pools he painted in Hadera and Rehovot, The Yarkon (2008), Sheva Tahanot (2009), Pool in the Sharon (2017), Sorek Stream (2017), Reflection in Water (2017), Puddle in Ben Shemen Forest (2017), Canada Park (2017), Puddle in Sorek Stream (2019), The Lake in Ma’alot (2023), A Flock of Sheep Crossing a Path with Puddles (2025), and others. It seems his effort and research have paid off: there is no doubt that in Winter Pool in Netanya he reaches the peak of his achievements (so far) in this field.
Montfort: Between Stone and Forest
Another large painting by Armoni depicts the Montfort Fortress (from the French, “fortified mountain”), a medieval archaeological site containing the remains of a Crusader stronghold that belonged to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The fortress stands on a steep spur on the southern bank of the Kziv gorge in the Upper Galilee, near Kibbutz Eilon, about 13 kilometers northeast of Nahariya.
Professor Joshua Prawer wrote of Montfort that “nature’s share in the strength of the fortress is greater than that of man.” The fortress was built as a refuge for the knights of the Teutonic Order, intended to protect them not from the Muslim enemy, but rather from rival Christian military orders that controlled Acre. Over time, the site gained importance, and its inhabitants embellished the buildings and strengthened the surrounding fortifications.
A brief historical note: toward the end of the 12th century, the Muslim ruler Saladin began his campaigns in the Land of Israel. These culminated in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, where he destroyed most of the Crusader armies. Following this victory, Saladin conquered Jerusalem in October 1187. The Crusaders continued to fall before the Muslim armies, and Montfort Fortress was eventually captured as well. Saladin’s victories led to the Third Crusade, led by King Richard I of England (“Richard the Lionheart”), which ended with the Muslims’ defeat at the Battle of Arsuf and the reconquest of large parts of the land. In 1192 an agreement was signed between the two leaders, establishing the Crusader Kingdom for a second time, though within narrower borders.
The Teutonic Knights regained Montfort and began restoring it. Due to internal conflicts with the Hospitallers and the Templars, they were forced to leave the capital, Acre, and relocate to the fortress. With donations from Europe, they built the magnificent stronghold whose remains still stand today, transferring there the order’s headquarters, archive, and treasures. They expanded the fortifications and built a keep, which served as an inner fortress within the castle.
In 1271, after conquering most Crusader strongholds in the Galilee, the Mamluk sultan Baybars arrived at Montfort. He laid siege to the fortress for about a week, during which his sappers undermined the southern wall, enabling the Mamluk forces to break through. The defensive fighting was brief, and after negotiations between the leaders of the order and the sultan, Baybars allowed the knights to leave with their possessions and return to Acre. After the Teutonic surrender, Baybars ordered the fortress destroyed to prevent the Crusaders from resettling it. Much of the fortress was demolished, and only the heavily fortified keep remained largely intact.
I am reminded of a story about a group of schoolchildren who recently visited the fortress on a field trip. The teacher asked why they thought the Crusaders had chosen to settle in such a high place, and one child immediately replied: because the Wi-Fi reception is better there…
In his painting, Armoni skillfully depicts the bright remains of the ruined fortress. It stands there proudly yet in radiant solitude on the cliff, while at the same time being engulfed and almost entirely swallowed up by an abundant green forest. There is no trace in the painting of any human figure, past or present. After all, one could have added a grand battle scene between Muslims and Crusaders from the 12th century, as the great British painter Turner did when he inserted Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps into his painting Snow Storm. But not with Yehuda. When I ask him about this, he replies: “There’s nothing philosophical behind it. As a tribute to the French painter Corot, one day I’ll start adding figures to my landscapes as well.” We shall wait and see.
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