POETS’ PORTRAITS: LINES FOR MY IMAGE: Drawings and Sculpture by Zvi Lachman, Tel-Aviv
Center for Jewish History

“Poets’ Portraits,” on view at the Center for JewishHistory, consists of charcoal and pastel drawings on paper by the 55-year-old Israeli artist Zvi Lachman. They are all portraits of well-known — and not-so-well-known, at least in this country — poets and writers, including Avot Yeshurun, Taha Muhammad Ali, and Yona Wallach. Many of the drawings of poets are accompanied by the text of one of their poems. Mr. Lachman makes drawings that are constructed with agitated linear fragments, a network of short, blunt and feathery marks that vacillate between solidity and chaos. The solid form of the head becomes clearer when the drawings are viewed from afar, but close up it is easy to focus on isolated areas. Mr. Lachman’s art suggests that the human psyche is always in a state of transition.

Often the eyes of the sitters are drawn in a faint and hazy manner, or one eye is rendered much more sharply than the other. Like Cézanne, Mr. Lachman gazes again and again at the subject at hand in order to discover complex relationships that avert the naked eye. These agitated and fluid portraits represent the restless and shifting minds of the sitters and the portraitist. The interplay between dark lines and faint smudges and erasures indicate depth in space, varied skin tones, and the rhythm of the sitter’s body.

A few small figural sculptures are placed on wooden pedestals in an enclosed outdoor space that can only be seen by viewers indoors, from behind glass. The sculptures follow in the tradition of such existential humanists as Rodin, Medardo Rosso, and Giacometti, in that the textures and contours of the figures resonate with psychological meanings. The figures, some seated at sepulchre-like tables or wedges, are pockmarked and penetrated by space. We look into them as much as we look at their surfaces.

Eric Gelber

Until August 30 (15 W. 16th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-294-8301).