From art to Buddha and back again: Art director's Itamar Newman’s enlightened journey

Itamar Newman was an award-winning art director, painter, and designer when his 1997 exhibition 193945 – Homage to Primo Levi was shown at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art. 

Among the works, a bold homage to Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) stood out. It showed an emaciated, ashen, Holocaust survivor facing the relaxed French bohemians.

“During an encounter with the audience,” Newman recounted to The Jerusalem Post recently. “I was asked: Can art about the Holocaust change the world?”

“I said that the Holocaust itself didn’t change the world, so what could paintings do?” 

He was already a well-known figure at the time, having designed covers for Kaveret’s 1973 album Poogy Tales and the best-selling book Does Not Give a Damn by Dan Ben-Amotz that same year.

A well-liked figure in the 1980s Israeli artistic and musical scene, Newman went on to win the Ophir award for his work on the 1996 film Dogs Don’t Bark in Green, and for rebuilding the chariot used by Moses Montefiore in his travels after it was vandalized in 1986. The renewed chariot still stands today at Mishkenot Sha’ananim.

This realization led Newman to seek an answer to what would change the world.

Seeking a new way to live

Step by step, Newman sought a new way to live. He stopped exhibiting his works, embraced the teachings of the Buddha, moved to the northern moshava of Yavne’el, where he opened a Vipassana Meditation Center, and invited a monk to live there and teach.

His upcoming exhibition, DHAMMA, marks a return to artistic life after roughly three decades.

The large canvases reveal serene, vibrant, portraits of men and women sitting in calm meditation.

In Me and My Ego, two figures (both are Newman), one tiny, the other immense, observe each other with interest. Behind them, one can see a large traditional monument of the Buddha with Phra Ajarn Ofer (Venerable Monk) in orange robes. This painting also contains a visual reference to Western art, not Manet this time, but Francisco Goya‘s The Third of May 1808.

The brutal painting, which shows Napoleon’s army executing Spanish fighters a moment before they are felled, reveals how history usually mentally bleeds into us when we slow down to gather our thoughts. An iron sculpture, designed by Newman, is placed in the common garden of the meditation center. It shows a man sitting in meditation with a circle of axes around his head, forming a surreal halo.

Newman also appears as a small sculpted figure leaning against a car with its headlights flashing, revealing a circle of students listening to the Buddha teaching on the edge of a forest. The playfulness continues with another object, an immense fork that dips and rises with a tiny figure sitting in meditation on the edge of the eating utensil.

Dining can be thought of as one way to illustrate how suffering is woven into our human lives according to Buddhist thought.

To sustain ourselves, we must consume plants and animals – inflicting suffering – or we ourselves suffer hunger.

Westerners who embrace a Buddhist mendicant life – which includes accepting food gifts as charity offered by laypeople – often point to how the experience transformed how they experience eating.

“Monks are meant to eat once a day, before noon,” Phra Ajarn Ofer told the Post while stirring a pot of date honey. 

“The robes I have are orange for a reason. When the Buddha began teaching, he told his students to gather pieces of garments and sew them together themselves.”

Looking for fabrics, the mendicants went to cemeteries or marketplaces, gathering whatever was around.

“These were quite disgusting, dirty, soiled fabrics,” the spectacled monk continued, “so they boiled them in vats of saffron to disinfect them, which is why many monks wear orange robes today.”  

WHEN WRITING about Newman, art historian Gideon Ofrat noted his insistence on high-level figurative painting took place long before the so-called Return to Realism in Israeli art. 

In one early work from 1984 titled No Name, the young artist presented himself clutching his fists, unable to let go.

A more recent portrait reveals him with a kind look on his face, showing the viewer open palms.

“When I sold my house in Ramat Gan to move here,” he told the Post, “I put all of my paintings in a container. These were drawings and artworks I gathered since the age of 14.” 

“A while ago I wanted to go over them and opened this container,” he continued, “I was struck by a horrific stench. There was a hole on the roof of the container and, over the years, water leaked in and all the artwork was destroyed by mold and humidity.”

“You know what I did? I bowed my head and accepted it. This was reality, after all, nothing could be done about it. It was at this moment I knew all these years of spiritual work actually did something.”

In one abstract work, the neon sentence ‘Dhamma Macht Frei’ gleams.

While the idea could be expressed in English as ‘Virtue Makes Free’ or ‘The teaching of the Buddha Liberates,’ the reference to the Nazi slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei – Work Liberates,’ placed at the entrance to Auschwitz, shows how Newman, after decades of work, finally has a working answer to the question posed to him all those years ago in Ramat Gan.

‘DHAMMA,’ a solo exhibition by Itamar Newman, curated by Aryeh Berkowitz. Opening: Thursday, September 19. Shown until Saturday, October 19. Artists’ House, Tel Aviv. 9 Alharizi St. Hours: Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Free.