Some time ago, in an old café in the Old Town of Montevideo, I had the pleasure of meeting Martín Gurvich. During that interesting conversation, I had the privilege of rediscovering the figure of the prominent artist, sculptor and painter José Gurvich (Zusmanas Gurvicius 1927 - 1974) through the sensitive and insightful perspective of his son.
Immersed in the hustle and bustle of the café, our conversation led us to a different and emotionally charged space. Martín opened his heart to me, recalling moments from his childhood, his spiritual journey, and his father's legacy beyond his artwork.
I share with you this enriching encounter that connects us with life, beliefs, and the temporary time of human existence on Earth.
Martín Gurvich was born on January 25, 1963, and from an early age, he accompanied his parents on their travels around the world. Between 1964 and 1970, the family embarked on a series of journeys through Europe, Israel, and the United States, the latter being where they resided until 1974, the year José Gurvich tragically passed away.
Martin, as a school-age child, you experienced the harsh physical departure of your father. What memories do you cherish from the moments you shared together?
I remember him as someone very, very warm, good-humored, sociable, affectionate, optimistic, and always very involved with his art. When he was in his artistic mode, he changed and there was no disturbing him. It was his profession, and there he poured all his passion. He spent many hours with himself and in dialogue with his works. He wasn't someone who spent much time on my education because he had many things going on. My mother took care of the more practical and earthly aspects. We didn't have much, much exchange because I was very young...
In 1970, at the age of seven, you arrived in New York with your parents. Initially, you stayed on Long Island, at the home of a Lithuanian family who provided shelter. What memories do you recall from those years?
It was a bohemian world, of art. We went to artists' houses, to vernissages, to workshops, and people would come to visit my father as an artist to chat or buy his works. It was a very precarious world in material terms. There, I did all of my primary school at a school in Manhattan.
In 1967, before we went to New York, my father had an exhibition at the Commission of Fine Arts that was impressively successful, and the community was dazzled by his work. It was an exhibition of 200 spectacular works that included oils, temperas... My father spent two years working for that exhibition and sold many works. With that sale, we managed to live a year in Israel, in Europe, and I believe the first year in New York.
Luckily, in Uruguay, he sold something, but in New York, it was difficult to establish himself as an artist and sell. Over the years, sales in Uruguay declined, the country was in a different political situation, and I don't think too much art was sold. In New York, he wasn't known, so there came a time when he had to look for a job. He got a position in a factory where series works (paintings) were made, and he asked to be placed anywhere except for painting. He worked in the packaging department, where the finished works arrived. He worked there for a few months, and my mother had to work as a cleaner at the school where I attended in the afternoon.
In New York, a very influential gallery and business man named Joachim Aberbach. Through this person, the professional landscape began to clear up, new doors began to open, and also the realization of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. The works were sent from Uruguay, and the day they left customs was the day my father had a heart attack. The fate was very tragic, and the exhibition did not take place.
"He feared death, and his desire was to leave his fingerprint strong enough to overcome death, oblivion, nothingness. A work that testified to his love for life, family, friendship, his supreme purpose: art." Julia Helena Añorga "Totó" (Source: Gurvich Museum/website)
My mother brought everything back to Uruguay. And the struggle began anew. This was the most difficult period of my life because my mother was unwell, economically we were not well off, there was the military dictatorship, and compared to New York, it was like being in another universe.
My mother was a person with a very strong character who sacrificed her life and her profession, she was a history teacher, to accompany Gurvich. For her, he was love and the reason for her life. My mother was Catholic but not very devout. Both Gurvich and she were very liberal, my father by conviction and my mother by education. She was a great fan of history and had a great openness to the world.
After my father passed away, she continued to defend him; she was like Gurvich's number one admirer as an artist. As a human being, there were things she liked, and others she didn't, like any marriage. However, from a visual perspective, she idealized him. For her, he was "the best," "the artist," and that's why she defended him so much.
" At only 47 years of age Gurvich left an immense oeuvre in quality and extension, but no one could measure how much more he would not have created with his tireless spirit. He was an artist of the kind that characterized the Renaissance.
A cultured man, knowledgeable in literature, music and, of course, a scholar in the areas of painting that interested him.
......I cherish a precious memory of Gurvich. I remember the grand exhibition at the National Fine Arts Commission hall, 1967, at the Solís, I remember the formidable ceramics, intricate and detailed like a Bosch, without monsters. The sensation of boundless humanity in some canvases, where the multiplication of characters seemed like a hymn to men, speaks of a universalist more radical than the constructive.
There lies, in my opinion, the essential datum of the master's creative personality; during his stay in Israel or when he contemplated the bay of Montevideo from his house in Cerro, he exercised an identical worldview. His scenes of the kibbutz, so intimately woven with Jewish religiosity, are siblings of the works that had another setting, another culture…." Hugo García Robles
Source: Publication "Un canto a la Vida"
Exhibition tribute on the twentieth anniversary of his death.
He did everything he had to do in a very short time and didn't repeat himself so much because all his series are limited. The only thing he did a lot was still life. He painted them in every possible way, all with a different approach; more cubist, more naturalistic, for example, and all of them are of great plastic quality. Between 1944 and 1949 he painted them as a direct student of Torres García, and between 1950 and 1962 as a member and teacher in the Torres García Workshop. In 1967 he made a very special one that is exhibited in the Gurvich Workshop room at the Museum.
"Art does not reveal the truth, it is not committed to reality, art is a human invention, man expresses himself through it. Expression is the form of feeling and intuition is the path to feeling where reason is left out." José Gurvich
Source: Publication "Un canto a la Vida"
Exhibition tribute on the twentieth anniversary of his death.
Your journey towards Hinduism...
Martin, having been raised in a liberal household with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father; How do you come to embrace Hinduism?
After finishing high school in Uruguay, in 1981 I went to New York where I began studying Political Science and International Law at Syracuse University. Suddenly, before graduating, I had a spiritual questioning about everything and what I was going to do. I felt interest and attraction, not towards Western religions but towards Buddhism and Hinduism, and I began to read. I felt the urge to go to India and left university a few months before finishing my degree.
I wanted to travel overland because I wanted to discover the places of my ancestors. For my mother, I wanted to go to the Basque Country, to San Sebastian. For my father, to Lithuania and from there to India. I arrived in San Sebastian and then went to Paris from where I was going to continue my journey. It was December 24th and I had arranged to meet a university colleague on a street between Boulevard Saint Germain and Boulevard Saint Michel and she never showed up. Nearby, in the Plaza de Saint Michel, the devotees of Hare Krishna were singing on Christmas, giving away the French translation of the Bhagavad Gita that I was looking for. I stayed in Paris and a month later, I was integrated into the community where I became a member in 1982.Later I got involved in various activities, first in France, then a year in England and since 1988 in Belgium where I live.
The first years were a lot of study and preaching, later I took care of communication, that is to say, the contact of our organization in Belgium with certain audiences of society. For example, with governments, politicians, religious leaders, media, the Hindu community in Europe and the world, with academics studying Hinduism or sociology of religions and art. For me, art and spirituality are very close because originally art was an expression of the different spiritual traditions that existed in the world.
Within Hinduism, you have traditions that are monotheistic like mine, monists that do not think of a personal God but rather of a unique energy or absolute truth, and others that are polytheistic. Within the same religion you have like the three versions. I am of the Vaishnava tradition which is the monotheistic tradition that to differentiate it from Western monotheism we call it inclusive monotheism because it accepts that there are other forms of monotheism like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and also accepts that there are other forms of spirituality that help the individual to progress spiritually like those who have a polytheistic conception of existence.
Although it accepts that there are different spiritual practices, the theology is monotheistic, that is to say that there is a supreme, creator, and personal God. And in the case of the Vaishnava tradition, it is very detailed because the personality of God is described in the scriptures, there is a much more detailed presentation perhaps than that of Western monotheisms. For me, spirituality is fundamental but I also believe in religion, in leading a more "regulated" life, following certain principles of life and not just philosophical ones.
From your perspective as an adult and after embarking on this philosophy and religious practice; what reflections and feelings connect you to your father's spiritual journey?
I was very young when I lost my father, but from what I've heard from my mother and what I've seen from Gurvich's works, it seems to me that he was a very open person, constantly engaged in personal and spiritual exploration as an artist. There was a search for his roots, his mission in the world, the meaning of life reflected also in his art. He was an artist who didn't stick to a single way of painting or thinking. Always very open to different artistic currents, reflecting on himself and engaging with the world around him, whether it be in Israel, New York, or Montevideo. All very different worlds.
Source: Publication "Un canto a la Vida"
Exhibition tribute on the twentieth anniversary of his death.
He was an inquisitive person, always searching. We are all 'seeking,' some do it in a methodical way with a particular religion, and others in a more spontaneous, less directed manner. I think my father was open to different forms of spirituality, but he never practiced a specific religion or tradition. He wasn't a practicing Jew. He didn't grow up as a religious person in the sense of following certain principles, but God was present in his paintings. My father never attempted to depict God; the only thing he did was the hand and the eye of God. He was someone who understood that there was something greater, but I couldn't tell you what his conception of God was.
His mother was the one who maintained the tradition. He captured Judaism in his art as a tribute to his mother and the connection he had with her and his Jewish roots. In the 1970s, my father traveled to Israel; at that time, his mother was very ill, and he began to create a series of works on Jewish, religious, and biblical themes using all his plastic and artistic flexibility. The Dream of Jacob, the biblical temperas, are religious works not imposed, but authentic expressions of religious themes with a joyful, very original, and unique plastic presentation. It's very interesting because for an artist who wasn't religious, he left behind a large body of religious work. He is one of the artists who has left more religious works in all of Judaism in the 20th century after Chagall.
"The feeling of being Jewish permeated his being. José Gurvich had a heterogeneous and multiple Jewish identity, built through stages, enriched in various settings, and through diverse experiences in his native Lithuania, Montevideo, Israel, and finally New York. It manifested in his art from his three stays in Israel and in the Kibbutz, the Israeli collective farm Ramot Menashé (in the heights of Menashé)."
Source: Book Gurvich: "Viajes por el tiempo judío" de Alicia Haber
Despite having heard extensively about all the tragedies of Europe, he was an artist with an optimistic view of the world, even while being aware of all the horrors of the Holocaust and everything that happened to his family.
In the light of your spiritual journey and the teachings you have incorporated from Hinduism, were you able to understand your father's physical departure from a different perspective?
For me, it was very difficult. My initial internal reaction was like a rebellion against God. Why lose my father when I was so young? It's destiny, and destiny cannot be changed. It's relentless. The day it's your turn, it's your turn. There's no age to feel orphaned, but the younger you are, the harder it is.
We believe in reincarnation in a very explicit way. In Hinduism, the soul continues to reincarnate until it reaches spiritual liberation. This is when the soul no longer incarnates in this world and returns to the spiritual world, where it serves God eternally. As long as it has material desires and attachments, it continues to come back to learn.
My spiritual interpretation is that the soul is a tiny piece of God and in a limited way, we have many of His qualities, but not His essence. I hope that my devotion to God helps my father in his spiritual journey.
I believe that my father already came with a passion for art from past lives. At the age of 13, he was already making beautiful drawings. The great artists of this world are surely people who painted for many lifetimes...
In 2001, Martín Gurvich and his mother established the José Gurvich Foundation as a tribute to the life and work of the artist, with the aim of preserving his legacy. One of its main objectives was the creation, in 2005, of the José Gurvich Museum on Ituzaingó Street.
Later, after a two-year closure (2013-2015), the museum reopened its doors in a new building on Peatonal Sarandí. In 2019, it became a public museum when the Uruguayan State acquired the building and the permanent collection of works, with the foundation managing the museum through an agreement between the Ministry of Education and Culture and the José Gurvich Foundation.
For twenty-two years, Martín Gurvich served as president of the foundation, a position that will be taken over by Cr. Joaquín Ragni starting in 2024, with Prof. Tatiana Oroño and Dr. Diego Gamarra sharing the vice presidency.
"For me, it has been a great honor, satisfaction, and challenge to lead the José Gurvich Foundation for its 22 years, carrying out a large number of projects in Uruguay and abroad. That Uruguayans and foreigners alike can enjoy the life and work of my father in a dynamic, educational, interactive, and open-to-society museum fills me with pride, and I am sure that my father and mother would also be very proud. I wish the Gurvich Museum and the José Gurvich Foundation great success in the projects and tasks they have set out to continue providing a high-level cultural service to our country..."
Source: Statement published by the Gurvich Foundation on December 13, 2023.
Comments