Eliahu Gat (; 1919–1987) was an Israeli landscape painter.
Biography
Eliahu Gulkowitz (later Gat) at was born in 1919 in the small town of Dokshitz in what is now Belarus, to a Lithuanian Jewish Zionist family. In 1926, the family resettled in Poland, where Gat attended a Polish gymnasium. In 1937, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine and studied architecture at the Technion in Haifa. From 1939 to 1942, he joined Kibbutz Nir Haim and Maoz Haim. During this period, he also worked as a dockhand and seaman in Haifa port. In 1942, he joined the British Army, serving in Palestine and North Africa until 1946. In 1945, while still a soldier, he studied for a year at Aharon Avni’s painting studio. When he was transferred to Cairo, he enrolled in the Cairo Academy of Art, taking courses sponsored by the British Army. Following his discharge, he painted at the Stematsky – Streichman studio. In 1948-1949, he served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Artistic career
Gat was among the founders of the Group of Ten, which held its first exhibition in February 1951 at Beit HaOmanim in Tel Aviv, home of the Israeli Artists Association. The group consisted of Gat, Elhanan Halperin, Shoshanah Levisohn, Ephraim Lifshits, Moshe Propes, Shimon Zabar, Dan Kedar, Claire Yaniv, Nissan Rilov and Zvi Tadmor – all graduates of the Stematsky-Streichman studio. The two participating sculptors were Shoshanah Heiman and David Polombo. The philosophy of the group was to paint the local Israeli scene realistically, as opposed to the abstract art and universalism of the New Horizons group.
Influences
In 1952, Gat traveled to France on a Government grant. He studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Souverbie together with Michael Gross and Ori Reisman. Gat’s letters from his sojourn in Paris testify to his artistic confusion and to his spiritual and physical tribulations: “… I taught I would paint a little in the evenings and bought a blue lamp, but so far I haven’t succeeded. You can understand the difficulties, after a day’s work, and especially in a room with no atmosphere, in addition to the confusion I feel about painting in general.” The artists he mentions in his letters, tough notably disparate in style and approach, represent the divergences that were to mark Gat’s own work in the future. He admired Bernard Buffet, a young artist who was then enjoying a social and artistic success in Paris. “…By the way, Buffet is head and shoulders above everyone else. His exhibition was very impressive and he already has a following.” Another artist mentioned by Gat was Chaïm Soutine. “Soutine, in terms of stature, is fit to stand side by side with the great classicists…Mourjansky has promised me to Katia Granoff so that I can view fifteen Soutines. He is one of the artists I understand the least, but who impresses me the most. By the way, Israeli art suffers from Soutinism, but not of the healthy kind.” A trip to Spain and a visit to the Prado yielded the following impressions: “You walk round and round and each painting is better than the last. I could stay here for months and study. What a lightness of touch there is in the colour handling of Titian and Tintoretto; it is practically a sketch, and yet it is so deep. Some works could even be called Titian Impressionism – brushwork and light translucent layers of paint.” Gat’s interest in Soutine and in the free impressionist approach of the venetian artists also serves as an indication of his future artistic direction.