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Lot Essay
A watchmaker's son from Tuchow, Poland, Ardon was the eldest of the 12 children of Alexander and Elisheva Bronstein. A devout Jew and a master craftsman, Alexander Bronstein intended for his son to follow in his footsteps. Ardon dreamed of becoming an artist and enrolled at the Weimar Bauhaus school, where he studied under Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky.
Involved with a left wing group, Ardon was forced to flee Germany as early as 1933, when he travelled to Israel.
For Ardon the subject of time was two-fold: on one hand time and clocks held an autobiographical reference to his father. On the other hand time is related to history, to his moving forward to a new life in a new county while the rest of his world remained behind and had vanished, a time past.
To be engagé was a cardinal precept for Ardon, he felt that he must find the means of recording the appalling events of his period. In an interview given to Karl Katz in 1963 Ardon said: "As a painter I have to create my dialogue with colours and forms and shapes. There are things I understand and there are things I don't understand. So I have to use colours and shapes as a key, because I am a painter. If I were a watchmaker, I would use watches as a key, to open rooms - rooms of a hidden world". (M. Ardon, The Creation Tapestries, The American Committee for the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, 1963, p. 12).
"Like Paul Klee, Ardon sometimes coins a word to title a painting, as in the wry name Timepecker, for a canvas which treats time with derisive humour. One is reminded that Goya also dealt with the theme... time destroys its own creation... Ardon's image of time is ironic - a robot, the unfeeling monster of contemporary life. Constructed of belts and pulleys, it eats away clock numerals until none remain. Pastel hues of pinks and blues, paired with vibrant golds and reds, move against a checkered background of sapphire blue". (M, Vishny, op. cit, p. 35).
In the recent Mordecai Ardon monograph, published in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition of his work at the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum, Arturo Schwarz related to the present painting: "In the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Ardon coined a portmanteau title for the Timepecker, 1963. Combining the woodpecker's name with "time", thus obtaining a meaningful neologism that perfectly fits the subject and this luminous painting. The bird, vaguely anthropomorphic - is it a bird or is it a man? - is transformed into a complicated but absurd combination of pulleys and wheels connected by belts, that, being self-contained, seem to generate no action. Over a multicoloured surface - which stands out against a vibrant blue background composed of small rectangular brush-strokes - are spread the hours, represented by the familiar Roman numerals. The latter constitute the timepecker's sole diet - when he devours the last one, will he disappear with the final morsel?" (A. Schwarz, Mordecai Ardon, The Colors of Time, Tel Aviv, 2003, p. 67).
Timepecker combines autobiographical elements of Ardon's life, his sense of history, with a masterful composition in terms of his complex colour layering technique.
Involved with a left wing group, Ardon was forced to flee Germany as early as 1933, when he travelled to Israel.
For Ardon the subject of time was two-fold: on one hand time and clocks held an autobiographical reference to his father. On the other hand time is related to history, to his moving forward to a new life in a new county while the rest of his world remained behind and had vanished, a time past.
To be engagé was a cardinal precept for Ardon, he felt that he must find the means of recording the appalling events of his period. In an interview given to Karl Katz in 1963 Ardon said: "As a painter I have to create my dialogue with colours and forms and shapes. There are things I understand and there are things I don't understand. So I have to use colours and shapes as a key, because I am a painter. If I were a watchmaker, I would use watches as a key, to open rooms - rooms of a hidden world". (M. Ardon, The Creation Tapestries, The American Committee for the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, 1963, p. 12).
"Like Paul Klee, Ardon sometimes coins a word to title a painting, as in the wry name Timepecker, for a canvas which treats time with derisive humour. One is reminded that Goya also dealt with the theme... time destroys its own creation... Ardon's image of time is ironic - a robot, the unfeeling monster of contemporary life. Constructed of belts and pulleys, it eats away clock numerals until none remain. Pastel hues of pinks and blues, paired with vibrant golds and reds, move against a checkered background of sapphire blue". (M, Vishny, op. cit, p. 35).
In the recent Mordecai Ardon monograph, published in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition of his work at the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum, Arturo Schwarz related to the present painting: "In the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Ardon coined a portmanteau title for the Timepecker, 1963. Combining the woodpecker's name with "time", thus obtaining a meaningful neologism that perfectly fits the subject and this luminous painting. The bird, vaguely anthropomorphic - is it a bird or is it a man? - is transformed into a complicated but absurd combination of pulleys and wheels connected by belts, that, being self-contained, seem to generate no action. Over a multicoloured surface - which stands out against a vibrant blue background composed of small rectangular brush-strokes - are spread the hours, represented by the familiar Roman numerals. The latter constitute the timepecker's sole diet - when he devours the last one, will he disappear with the final morsel?" (A. Schwarz, Mordecai Ardon, The Colors of Time, Tel Aviv, 2003, p. 67).
Timepecker combines autobiographical elements of Ardon's life, his sense of history, with a masterful composition in terms of his complex colour layering technique.