I never liked the painting. The crudely drawn figures, the bright colors, the ugly woman with short red hair clutching a flowering frond, the indecipherable Hebrew scribble along the bottom. It looked to my 12-year-old eyes as if an untalented toddler made the picture.
“He’s the Grandma Moses of Israel,” my mother told me, referring to Shalom of Safed, the painter of the canvas that hung on our apartment wall.
I didn’t know who Grandma Moses was, nor could I find Safed on a map. I only knew this painting, “The Wedding of Isaac and Rebecca,” was a gift to my mother from a beau, someone my brother and I never met (after my father left three years earlier, my mother kept her dating life a secret).
I also knew I didn’t like the idea of strange men dating my mother and giving her gifts. What if this painting tipped the scales and she were to marry the guy?
The guy turned out to be composer Galt MacDermot, who wrote the score to “Hair,” then playing off-Broadway. Piecing the story together 44 years later, I guess MacDermot and my mother went on a few dates, and to impress the Jewish lady he squired about town, he picked up a painting at an American-Israeli gallery in Manhattan.
I know that’s where he bought it, because it says so on the back of the frame.
The term used in the art world is “provenance.” It traces the history of an artwork as it travels from owner to owner, gallery-to-gallery, down through the years.
This, then, is the provenance of Shalom of Safed’s “Wedding of Isaac and Rebecca.”
Shalom Moscovitz was born in Israel, in the city of Tsfat (Safed), in 1887. He worked as a watchmaker, but late in life turned to painting biblical scenes. His works are distinctive for their childlike figures and horizontal strata on which he painted the stories. Shalom died in 1980 at age 93, a year after my mother, Helen Pine, z”l, passed away at 58.
From the artist’s studio, the canvas made its way to the New York gallery, to MacDermot, to my mother and then me. As I mentioned, I never liked it because, as I now see, it reminded me of my parents’ divorce and my mother’s lonely life afterward.
After my mom died, the estate lawyer instructed us to appraise the painting. Total value: $5,000. At first, my brother and I considered selling, but we figured it could only go up in value. So I held on.
Years later, I learned to read Hebrew. Finally I could translate the Hebrew calligraphy at the bottom. It recapped the story from Bereshit, of Isaac and Rebecca’s wedding. I could now pick out Eliezar and a bent, white-haired Avraham in the procession.
Last summer, I visited Safed for the first time. I climbed the steep stone steps that Shalom himself must have walked. I popped into galleries that sold his work, and instantly recognized his canvases. They looked like my painting back home.
Today, I realize the provenance of that painting is also my provenance.
I, too, made my journey, from place to place, from person to person. And where Isaac and Rebecca went, I went. This picture I never liked as a child has grown impossibly beautiful to me.
About 10 years ago, just before moving to the Bay Area, I had the painting reappraised. With Shalom of Safed long dead, I figured I must have a $50,000 treasure on my hands.
Wrong. It had actually gone down in value, to less than $3,000. Somehow, the art market had decided that the Grandma Moses of Israel wasn’t such a hot commodity after all.
I felt a little sorry for the painting, but ultimately it didn’t matter what the appraiser decreed. My picture is not for sale.
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].