Dani Karavan is an artist of a new breed--in fact, he's one of a kind. Widely sought after and solicited by countries all around the world, working simultaneously on large projects in Seoul, Cologne, Cergy-Pontoise (northwest of Paris), Tel Aviv, and elsewhere, Karavan in the unique situation today of being embraced both by the avant-garde (The Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, for instance, have taken him to their bosom), and by the general public in the cities where his works have been installed.
Abraham Karavan, his father, come to Israel from Lwow in Galicia at the age of eighteen, in 1920. In Israel he became an engineer and landscape gardener and in time designed and greened a good proportion of the parks of Tel Aviv. Today, walking around the city, his son can still point out not only the public gardens the elder Karavan designed and created, but even individual trees he planted years ago. One is a palm tree nestled in the hollow of an old brick wall in near-by Jaffa.
Dani Karavan's work is unique both in scale and in its very nature. It often extends over acres and even miles. What Karavan has done is to find a twentieth-century idiom for the kind of organization of space that is still apparent, say, in the great piazzas of Siena or of Pisa. Contemporary jargon calls such works "environments," which is perhaps not the most appropriate term. One can also refer to them as squares and perspectives. These words are old and unpretentious--but they apply to what Michelangelo did in front of St. Peter's in Rome, and that's not such bad company to be in.
Attentive not so much to tradition as to human sensibility and needs, Karavan has revived something that is immediately perceptive in these older sites. What they offer us, even today, is not merely geometry in stone, it is geometry plus meaning--geometry plus soul. This is the dimension so often lacking in great cities today, and this, in my opinion, is the reason why people with no particular interest in contemporary art can find an immediate satisfaction in Karavan's work.
Born in the White City
Dani Karavan was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. In those days, the city was just going up among the sand dunes on the Mediterranean sea front. In the course of the decade that followed, a great number of buildings, designed by Bauhaus architects who had fled Nazi Germany, fleshed it out. Indeed, for a while Tel Aviv came to be known as the White City.
Karavan was only thirteen when he began studying art with the Israeli painter Aharon Avni. At sixteen and seventeen he turned to several other eminent Israeli artist, including Marcel Janco, one of the founders of Dada in Zurich in 1916, who had settled in Tel Aviv. From these, and from Mordechai Ardon at the Belzalel Academy in Jerusalem, and also, about a decade later, from, academies in Florence and in Paris, he gradually acquired the professional craft that today allows him to handle several big ventures simultaneously in different parts of the globe--and to handle them with serene attention to poetic detail.
When Karavan was eighteen, Israel found itself at war and the young artist quite naturally turned to political activism. He and some other youths founded the Harel (Mountain of God) Kibbutz in the Judaean foothills,
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