The Past is Always With Me
Content warning: This page contains graphic depictions of suicide that include images of nooses, which may be distressing for some viewers.
Most of the work in this exhibition is drawn from Ladyzhensky’s extensive Growing Up in Odessa series. What motivated Yefim Ladyzhensky to paint so many scenes from his youth in Odessa? He says, “When I walk into my studio these days, I am overwhelmed by feelings of despair. I’m drowning in the pointlessness of my actions.” Ladyzhensky feels compelled to destroy his work, but finds “the will to resist this restless world that is so heartless towards a creator.”
His The Past is Always with Me triptych is not part of his Odessa series, but provides critical context for understanding the emotional anguish that drove its creation. These paintings are in sharp contrast to Ladyzhensky’s many lively, childlike, and light-hearted scenes. The Odessa series came not only from his deep longings and fondness for the city, but also an acute inner turmoil and outright disgust for the culture and art he encountered in Israel after he emigrated in 1978.
In a 1979 article Ladyzhensky published in Russian in the Israeli magazine 22, he laments the character of the Jewish people he met in Israel, complaining, “here in Israel, I don’t see the Jews I knew and loved.” He describes the work of Israeli artists as “influenced by the mercantile side” and by trends in Europe, and “alien to the Jewish spirit.” Two of the paintings in this triptych, like many of his late self-portraits, foretold his suicide by hanging in 1982.
Yefim Ladyzhensky
The Past is Always With Me I
1979-1981
Collection of the artist’s family
A large five-pointed red star, referencing the state flag of the USSR, sits atop a dark red-brick background. Ladyzhensky’s own head appears five times, each one hanging from a noose tied to one of the five points of the red star. Hasty blue and white marks make X’s over these faces.
Yefim Ladyzhensky
The Past is Always With Me II
1979-1981
Collection of the artist’s family
This painting refers to the iconography of the state of Israel: a six-pointed Star of David stands out against large, creamcolored stones, evocative of the stonework of Jerusalem, where Ladyzhensky settled with his daughter. Here, he paints his own head hung from a noose six times, and makes hasty red X marks over each.
Yefim Ladyzhensky
The Past is Always With Me III
1979-1981
Collection of the artist’s family
Ladyzhensky paints himself beside the Odessa Steps, which, in this flattened composition, descend upward toward the sea. He sits at the base of a bronze monument to Armand-Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, and Governor of Odessa from 1803 to 1814. Ladyzhensky’s childhood dog, Belka, lies at his feet.
