Echos of a Kiss

Myriam Bat-Yosef

This colorful Surrealist lithograph by Myriam Bat-Yosef was done in 1973 at Editions Press in San Francisco. It has the Editions Press blindstamp in the lower left corner. This impression is inscribed 'To Jack Tjeerdsma', one of the founding partners in Editions Press.

Painter and printmaker Myriam Bat-Yosef was born Marion Hellerman in Berlin, Germany on January 31, 1931 to Lithuanian Jewish parents. When Bat-Yosef was two years old, her family fled the rising tide of Nazism, emigrating to Jaffa in 1933. In 1936 her father died of an untreated infection when he was called into action as a Zionist soldier, still recovering from appendicitis before the invention of penicillin. Myriam and her mother relocated to Paris for a few years before the invasion of France forced them to relocate yet again, this time in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Bat-Yosef began classes at Tel Aviv Academy of Fine Arts in 1940, and in 1946 she had received her diploma and taken the artist surname Bat-Yosef, meaning "Joseph's daughter" in Hebrew, as an homage to her father. After completing compulsory military Israeli service and attaining her teaching diploma, in 1952, she left to study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her first group exhibition took place in 1955 at the Israeli Club at Avenue de Wagram, with artists Yehuda Neiman, Avigdor Arikha, Raffi Kaiser, Dani Karavan, and others. In 1956 Bat-Yosef moved to Italy to attend the School of Fine Arts, Florence. She met the painter Erro, with whom she lived and shared a studio. They held several exhibitions in Milan, Rome, and Florence, and with the onset of the Suez Canal war, the two married so as to keep Bat-Yosef from being called to duty. Thereafter, they lived in Iceland, Israel, and Paris until 1964, exhibiting throughout Europe. When they divorced in 1964, Myrian Bat-Yosef exhibited more frequently and expanded her exhibitions to the United States and Japan. She exhibited as recently as 2009.

Reverting to her Israeli identity, she began to feature Hebrew characters in her drawings, of which she had an exhibition at the Sydow Gallery, Frankfurt, in 1964, the first exhibition by an Israeli artist in Germany since the war, according to Bat-Yosef. In 1965, extending her practice to performance and the painting of bodies and objects, such as with Érixymaque, which was staged for the fourth Paris biennale, Bat-Yosef held two exhibitions with the gallerist and collector of surrealist art Arturo Schwarz, in Milan.

In 1967, for a solo show at the Gallery of Israeli Art, New York, she created an environment of painted sculptures and drawings in response to Israel's six-day war, which had begun on 5 June that year. She set out for Jerusalem the following year, staying there for 10 years before becoming disillusioned with Israeli politics and returning to Paris in 1980 for the third and final time. Her colored ink drawings and paintings of this period, such as Antiracism (1980), of fiery peripheral tongues, explicit imagery and lightning zig-zags around a central blank void, are arguably among her finest works.

Myriam Bat-Josef died in Paris on 8 October, 2023.