The Brooklyn Rail

Michael Brenson
Questions for Eyal

When did you begin visiting the Met’s galleries of nineteenth century French landscape painting? How often did you go; alone or with whom; how long did you stay? What did you see?

Can we talk about Cézanne?

And about Morandi? And Kara Walker? And Richter?

And about what it means for an artist to be “image haunted”?

“I’ve been overcome by these stripes,” you said of your stripe paintings. They opened up “new venues of inquiry” for you “within an idiom of abstraction.” The stripes “served as surrogates”—a word that I think you used for all the motifs that became sources of inquiry. You said you were “in dialogue with” other stripe painters. What do you mean by “in dialogue with”?

In his soon-to-be-published book Beckett’s Children, Michael Coffey quotes from a famous 1937 letter in which Beckett wrote: “More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get at those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it…. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” Your stripes can seem like veils and often there seems to be something forming or occurring behind them but I can’t imagine tearing them away or pulling them apart. I’m not sure if in your stripe paintings you are rejecting the possibility of representation or yearning to subsume in the stripes all that can be represented. What it was like to paint them day after day, week after week, as day became night? Did they liberate as much as consume?

Your father dropped dead from a heart attack when you were twelve, mine from a heart attack when I was sixteen. You were much closer to your father than I was to mine. Would it be helpful for us to talk about their sudden deaths, and about father loss, or is it better not to go there?

Talk to me about antisemitism in America.

The Holocaust is a crucial part of your family history, but you were disturbed by how Israel made the Holocaust overwhelmingly, even overbearingly, present for its citizens. You spoke about how the Israeli State used it, in your view even abusively, as an ideological instrument. I, too, grew up with the Holocaust. My parents fled Hitler and Stalin for the United States. But for as long as they were alive—both were gone by 1967—nobody in my family and nobody else around me spoke with me about the Holocaust. I don’t remember anyone mentioning it during my thirteen years (2006–19) as a Visiting Senior Critic in the University of Pennsylvania’s MFA program. In the even more hyper-progressive Bard MFA program, in which I felt honored to be a faculty member from 1999 to 2018, the Holocaust seemed to me essentially taboo. I occasionally brought up my family history but was never encouraged to talk about it. In the fall of 2022, I asked if you would be open to recording a conversation about the different ways in which the Holocaust entered and shaped our lives. “Sure,” you said. Then I thought, the last thing the world needs is another Holocaust conversation. I’m ready for it now. When can we begin?

Your series “Holy Smoke” was inspired by alarm about Israel’s bombings of Gaza. How are you imagining your next “Holy Smoke” paintings now that Israel has bombed Gaza to rubble?

When I interviewed you about our mutual friend, the sculptor Jonathan Silver, you had much to say about his teaching, work and person. “He was a character in the movies for me,” you said. The two of you argued constantly. “We were out there. There wasn’t any to-ing and fro-ing. We’d be at each others’ throats in a matter of seconds.” Your politics were not his. Your feelings about Israel were not his. Insults flew and you laughed a lot and he was important to you and you to him. Your disagreements were bruising but your friendship seems to have been stronger because of them. In the United States in 2024, ideological collision between friends is nearly inconceivable. What was it about the two of you that made such candor possible? What are the two of you arguing about now?

I want to ask you about light, and about the stain.

You’ve had a year to observe humans from a distance. Do we seem funnier? Stranger? More absurd? More admirable? More obscene? What do we do with Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, al-Assad, Hamas, the Republican Party? You’ve had time to come up with new jokes. We’re waiting for them. Can we hear your laughter now?

Paul Baumann

There were homeless people around fires burning in oil drums, warming their hands, and many artists on both sides of 14th street, many of whom had been renting from the Meilman’s, a family in the meat business, evolving rapidly into the real estate business. Mike Meilman was a Jackie-Gleason type, but with a put-on mob ethos, vague threats about how we could end up on a meat hook, and amid the cigar smoke in his grimy office with the dropped ceiling, he’d reach around behind his chair to produce his walking stick, a taxidermied bull’s penis.

Eyal and Amanda found themselves with us on 14th street, renting studios from the same landlord. We would see one another in the wee hours, with our parcels of refuse, looking for places to dump the endless debris.

This was 1989 or so, an Atlantis from where we are now.

Eyal held his convictions with a primal grip, his heart all outwardly, and his thoughts among others.

When we first met, I saw the best mentor I’d ever have with the clearest vision I can muster. I was correct.

Eyal was life itself. We are left here shifting around in a depleted realm (I owe this word to Cora Cohen, who upon hearing Eyal had died, said “the world is depleted”), we flattened, having lost dimensions, dimensions of dynamism, as Eyal drew us out of our flatness, drew us out into fuller being.

Not for nothing, Eyal was also the most scholarly of us. His capacity to retain information that compelled him was astounding.

Nothing truly Eyal was in any sense disembodied. We are left with the body he crafted in his works.

Eyal had something imposed on him, I think from birth: the gift of having something to say—something that would require much of him, while he turned it out as a gift for all.

There is no more generous personal presence than the one that draws out one’s own dynamism, one’s own fuller presence, and Eyal did that even in the slightest of encounters, making such deep impressions on even casual acquaintances.

Eyal always had so much to say in conversation, but what was imposed on him was another matter: from something in his experience of the world; from growing up in Israel, feeling the acute pressures of the conflict; from having a father who had hung up a poster of Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921) above the couch in the living room, who was also an artist in his own right, and a mentor as such, but who died suddenly of a heart attack when Eyal was twelve (there is a beautiful drawing of a pair of workboots by Eyal’s father in Eyal and Amanda’s home); something in his experience as an Israeli soldier when Eyal was still a kid; something about this world that only Eyal Danieli could say; which was imposed on him, and he was driven to say it, to make it, to pursue it at pretty much any cost, and it cost him (and those around him in some ways) plenty; not that it was really one monolithic thing exactly, for it contained a range of some latitude, but nothing stopped his drive—his spiritual practice, as he referred to it, was painting.

Eyal was an anarchist in a capitalist world. What does this mean? He wouldn’t vote—voting was to participate in oppression—and trying to argue the point, you may as well argue with a grizzly bear. He told me a story about his father, how his father, should his bank account come into the black at any moment, would take the family out to dinner, using credit, to push his account back into the red—the stubborn principle of a man who helped create Israel. These things have many meanings and can be portrayed in a number of ways, but most certainly, we can see a form of protest in the attitude, which Eyal certainly shared.

His principles cost him plenty, and he never budged.

To you who may never have met Eyal Danieli, I can only say, look for his paintings: here is the most potent expression of his attitude, observations, and principles—as well as of the beautiful, and fully embodied dynamism of his living.

Idith Meshulam Korman
Our Yali

These paintings by Yali—Najaf and The Parachute—are hanging next to my piano, and are an outcome of many hours of phone conversations between Yali and myself, conversations we had after the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003. I knew Yali since we were teenagers in Israel. We shared so much together: anger over capitalism, frustrations from the art world, traumas, and an immense love for talking over the phone. On average, we spoke about four hours a day for almost thirty years, to the point that it became part of the DNA of both of our kids, Bella and Ittai. We shared hours laughing, talking, and inspiring each other. My affinity for visual art I attribute to Yali; his love and deep understanding of classical music was partially attributed to me, I hope.

“Najaf,” composed by Elias Tanenbaum—an American anti-war composer born in Brooklyn, NY in 1924—I have performed as an accompaniment to Yali’s painting Najaf. “Najaf” by Tanenbaum and Najaf by Yali are both responses to the grief caused by the damage to the Shiite holy temple in the city of Najaf, Iraq, which was hit during an attack by American forces in May of 2004. The musical score “Toccata,” also by Elias Tanenbaum, is a crazy piece about the madness of the world, and here I perform it as an accompaniment to Yali’s painting The Parachute.

Ezra Kohn
A Tribute to Eyal

I met Eyal Danieli in the fall of 1985 at the New York Studio School in Manhattan. I had taken the year off from my studies at Vassar College, having just completed a summer program at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. I was eighteen years old at the time and Eyal was in his early twenties. He had just moved to the United States, after serving in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War and graduating from Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem.

The New York Studio School seemed to be a magnet for Israeli artists in the mid 1980s. The first time I locked eyes with Eyal was in the New York Studio School’s second floor office. I immediately had a sneaking suspicion that we would become close friends. Eyal’s eyes revealed to me that he was hyper-critical, distrustful, angry, and highly intelligent. He had the expression of someone who had seen war and been deeply traumatized by the experience. This look reminded me of the gaze of my father, who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1930 and fled the Nazis with his sister and parents at the age of nine. Ultimately, my father would serve in the IDF himself during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and then again, as a surgeon, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

These salient parts of our personalities elicited countless conversations over the years, conversations about Judaism, Israel, and God or the lack thereof. We also discussed art history, the role of the artist, the materials of the artist, and the struggles we go through as artists. We often questioned the meaning of the artistic process and the visceral compulsion to create artworks in the face of the emptiness of it all. Eyal and I shared these sensibilities and concerns. They were the glue which bound us together as friends and artists.

At the end of the 1985–86 school year, I returned to my studies at Vassar College and Eyal stayed on at the New York Studio School, working as the school custodian and then later creating a small high-end picture frame shop—Sullivan Street Frames. In 1987 I returned to New York City and lived there almost continuously until 2007, when I moved to southern California with my wife and daughter. Eyal also got married and had a daughter during this time period, but he stayed in the city, running Sullivan Street Frames and making his art.

Eyal’s drawings and paintings evolved over the decades and at a certain point, a couple of decades ago, he began to depict monochromatic images which addressed issues such as Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and the Israeli military machine. These works were usually done in series, and utilized ephemeral materials such as palette paper and paint sticks. In order to understand these works it helps to understand that Eyal was never at peace with having been a soldier in the IDF. He was never at peace even saying that he was Israeli, although he most definitely did identify with the Israeli people, if not their government. Ultimately, Eyal’s quest while developing these later paintings was to understand what it meant for him to be a Jew. In this quest Eyal and I were indeed on similar journeys. Eyal constantly wrestled with these internal questions about personal and group identification. His works over the past decades were attempts to exorcise these demons.

With the advent of the pandemic a few years ago, FaceTime became a vehicle for Eyal and I to share our painting process more frequently. I would often call him when I had lost all hope in the art-making process, which was, over the past few years, on a weekly basis. We agreed that the art making process was unavoidable for both of us, like a bodily function such as breathing. Eyal encouraged me to continue the work in the studio and I reciprocated with encouraging his artistic process. There was no pretense in this dialogue, only the genuine bond of two artists who had remained friends for more than three decades.

Somehow, no matter where we lived or what burdens we had, we managed to see each other at least twice a year, usually at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MoMA. We saw so many shows together over the years, the most recent of which was at the Met in late December 2022. We had come to the museum to see the exhibition entitled Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. While viewing the works we discussed the beauty of the ceramics on view and the underlying historical context of slavery in which these works were created. We discussed the fact that many of the pieces were anonymous because slaves were officially prohibited from learning to read or write. This discussion ultimately led us to discuss the oppression of Jews and other minority groups and the effect of this oppression on the artistic impulse within these disparate groups.

After viewing this show we sauntered around the rotunda gallery, adjacent to the ceramics exhibit, and silently enjoyed the selection of Renaissance paintings on view. We had seen these works together dozens of times over the years, but with Eyal the process was always somehow new, never boring, or redundant. As the holiday crowds at the Met grew unbearably dense and we had had our share of art viewing, we left the museum at dusk and walked slowly west across Central Park. As we walked, we talked about the various artists we had met during our time at the New York Studio School. We also discussed Israeli politics and our mutual Israeli friends and their current circumstances. And, of course, as always, we discussed the existential challenges and joys of being husbands and fathers, as well as the trials and tribulations of being artists. After crossing Central Park, Eyal and I found a bench on Central Park West and 75th Street. We sat down in the twilight and continued exchanging ideas and memories, enjoying just being together.

As the twilight turned to night and our conversation tapered off, we decided it was time we said our goodbyes under the streetlamps along Central Park West. I had an odd sensation, after we hugged one another and said our goodbyes, that I would never see my friend Eyal Danieli again. Little did I know at the time, that this would be a prescient sensation. Eyal passed away a little more than a month after this meeting. It is with profound sadness that I must accept the fact that he is no longer with us.

Glenn Goldberg

I sit here in the quiet at 3:30 in the morning, in New York, thinking about a special friend who is gone.

I first met Eyal somewhere around 1986, when he was a student at the New York Studio School. I was teaching there at the time. My memory of him is as a very passionate student, thoughtful and always engaged in conversation. I specifically recall impromptu, animated sessions between him, myself, and Rob Storr (who shared the Deanship with Jackie Brookner for roughly a year) that took place in the magical, skylit drawing studio. Drawing and the drawing studio were central to the school’s idea and energy. I remember standing at the drawing tables by the stairs, discussing various artists and our ideas about them. The conversations were rigorous, impassioned, and often void of agreement.

While teaching at the school I would visit Amanda Guest’s studio, who had already begun her quiet, intimate, and articulate works that continued and currently thrive in their mature form. It is at the school that Eyal and Amanda first met and fell deeply in love. They later got married and had their daughter named Bella. I remember how Eyal would glow and swell every time he spoke of Bella to me. He would smile broadly and beam with a bit of a blush. He always marveled at how special she was. He seemed well aware of his fortune in both Amanda and Bella.

Eyal and I did not spend a lot of time together over the years, but I always felt close to him. We would see each other infrequently and when we could (somewhat typical in New York City). Our friendship was based around art, music, politics, family, a meal, and robust, passionate conversation.

Eyal and I spent a bit of time playing music. He loved to sing Beatles songs and we played a few over the years together. Our musical styles were different. We tried. We made mistakes. We had fun. We’d look at each other and laugh after each song was finished.

I remember fondly driving in his car a few times. It was an old, large, tank-like Mercedes. I believe it was shoe polish brown, and if it wasn’t I still remember it that way. I was surprised that Eyal had a Mercedes. It seemed like a load to park, maneuver, and take care of in the busy city. His car had great character, much like him. It was formidable. It was the kind of car that you’d worry about if you were taking it on a long trip… loveable, but perhaps not reliable. Its youth was already gone. It was not lost on me, though never discussed, the inherent pun that the powerful Mercedes Matter had started the Studio School and there was Eyal behind the wheel of a car with the same name. The school was very important to us both and I always enjoyed that thought.

Years ago Eyal had a frame shop on Sullivan Street in SoHo. It was a welcoming, neighborhood place. The bakery was a few doors down so it always smelled great on that block. I’d stop by randomly to say hello. He always had a nice exhibition of someone’s framed drawings in the front. We’d go in the back, sit around for a bit, talk, pick up a guitar, look at some frame moldings, hug, and then I’d leave. Big hugs upon greeting and leaving were always part of the equation.

Eyal was a powerful person. He was intelligent and thoughtful. He had a big personality. He had love and thunder. He was analytical. He said what he felt. He had a huge and sensitive heart. He was direct. He was soulful. He was not afraid. He stood up for what he believed in. His painting and drawing changed when it needed to. He addressed deep, difficult, personal content in his work and life. He liked particular hats. Eyal and I had a period of time when we reached an impasse in our friendship after a disagreement. It was difficult for me, but I guess we both needed time to get over it. We ran into each other at a friend’s show and finally made amends. That was a great relief to me because Eyal mattered.

The last time I saw Eyal was at an exhibition of his. Afterwards, I sat with him, Amanda, and two mutual friends at a secret cheeseburger spot in midtown. I was heading home for dinner and exercised great restraint nursing a lonely diet coke and lemon. I wanted a cheeseburger. Eyal had one. They looked sloppy and tasty. We were all happy and having fun, celebrating Eyal and his work.

Eyal’s passing was early, sudden, and abrupt. It is still hard to reconcile. I love him and miss him. He affected me.