Goat Sculpture

Gabi BEN-HAIM The eye of memory From earliest childhood, Israeli artist Gabi Ben-Haim was a people watcher. Born in 1940, he grew up in Morocco, where his grandfather- a Jewish sheikh.-- was the main communication; link between the Arab munici.pality and the Jewish quarter. Young Ben-Haim's affection for all sorts of people was cultivated in part by living in a three¬generation household with his grandparents and their eleven children and thirty-two grand¬children. The youngster also roved the entire city on his own, attentively observing its panoply of humanity. Many of his sculptures are drawn from indelible memories of his childhood. But today he con¬tinues to find inspiration in the everyday life of Haifa. After his family moved to Israel in 1955, Ben-Haim trained as an artist and for some years was a jewelry maker. In time he opened a small antique shop at one end of the Haifa flea market. But in a cor¬ner of the dim little shop, sur¬rounded by antique furniture and works by past artists, he set about following his true love, making sculptures. At first they were made in terra-cotta, but about ten years ago he graduated to bronze. To this day Ben-Haim main tains his shop, and keeps sculpt¬ing in it. Not for him the preten¬sions of the artist in splendid iso¬lation. He deliberately puts himself in the middle ofthe world that gives him inspiration. "All sorts of people come into the shop, from the lowest to the highest in society, from all walks oflife-it's beautiful," he says. They, and people of the neighborhood who drop in regularly to catch up on their homegrown artist, become the seeds of his wonderful human menagerie. When sculpting a human fig¬ure, he says, "I want each move¬ment to capture the personality in all its nuances, what this character means. When you look at this small figure, you have to be able to read the whole book of his life. You have to know who he is." Unlike what is usually found on the art scene, the works of Ben-Haim do not represent any particular school, movement, or artistic "ism"; they do not aspire to intellectual, artsy sophistica¬tion. What distinguishes them, in fact, is their folklike simplicity and directness, their warmth and humanity. His works render the essence of a character in econom¬icallines of musical fluidity. Many figures have the charm of folktale stereotypes, while in others he develops more subtlety.