ARDON, MORDECAI

born July 13, 1896, Tuchow, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now in Poland] died June 18, 1992, Jerusalem, Israel Mordecai also spelled Mordekhai, original name Max Bronstein eminent Israeli painter who combined jewellike, brilliantly coloured forms with virtuoso brushwork. Ardon created modern, semiabstract paintings that are deeply moving. Ardon emigrated from his native Poland to Germany, spending the years 192125 at the Weimar Bauhaus, where he studied mainly with the painters Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. These studies were followed by work for three years with Max Doerner, an authority on materials and techniques, at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Munich. After a brief career in Berlin, Ardon fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to go to Palestine. Settling in Jerusalem, he became a teacher and later director of the country's chief art academy, the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (194052). From 1952 to 1963 he served the Israeli government as artistic adviser to the Ministry of Education and Culture. Most of Ardon's paintings, whether in his representational style of the 1930s or his later, more abstract, manner, are landscapes that transform Jerusalem's hills and valleys into vibrant tones and stirring rhythms. Numerous canvases also reflect his attachment to ancient Middle Eastern culture and his love for Kabbalistic literature, out of which he created new pictorial myths. Working on a monumental scale, Ardon painted several triptychs whose subjects are war, the Holocaust, and the earthly and divine Jerusalem.