Studio Visit: Uri Lifshitz

"It's not a world outlook. You don't understand what the a-ideal or the a-personal is. You don't understand. I tell you I'm comprised of the same human cripplednesses as you are. But I call them cripplednesses. I wish I could get rid of mine. But if you're in the process you have to get rid of them. They simply drop away from you, gradually.
All kind of things. The education I recieved, for example. My father bought art books. He raised me on the art books of Phaidon and Skira. Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Cezanne. I have those books to this day. In those days, in the kibbutz, everyone bought an electric kattle, and this and that. My father bought art books. My father never did any painting in his whole life, but he knew that this was important. He didn't know who his children would become. He didn't know that his 8.5 year old son was retarded. And he bought him the whole shebang. He bought the books, he was a book person. He raised me on the great painters. At my place you can open the books and see them. he bought the books in the 'Micra Studio' shop that was in Allenby Streen once, it belonged to Samuel, the first art book shop in Tel Aviv in those days. My father didn't belive that it was happening to him, that his son was becoming a painter. He didn't believe it was happening to him. He rejected it. He said: 'That's not for you, that's for the great. Leave it, you're my son, you're disturbed, I've known you since age zero, you stutter, you can't pronounce a word from the sixth grade.' But he didn't throw me away.
At 20 or 23 when I started painting, he didn't believe it was happening to him. When he read about it in the newspaper, he didn't believe. My first exhibition, he said 'Don't do it.' My trip abroad - 'Don't do it. You'll leave your wife, you'll stop painting.' And everything that happened was just the opposite. Because he lived in the enchanted world of literature and philosophy, of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. A man, an ordinary human, terribly intelligent, he knew all of Russian and French literature by heart, all of them. He knew on what page, in which year, everything. He knew, and that's what made him miss out on life."

Published in Uri Lifshitz Etchings & Lithographs 1963-1985 in Conversation with Yeshayahu Yariv, Gordon Gallery, Tel aviv, 1986, p. 18