Ticho House is a popular tourist attraction and art gallery in downtown Jerusalem.
By MORDECHAI BECKTicho House(photo credit: Courtesy)By the time she left Vienna for Palestine in 1912, 18-year-old Anno Ticho had already absorbed much of mid-European art during a creative period of innovation and modernity. Artists such as Gustave Klimt, Egon Schiele, Joseph Hoffman and Oskar Kokoschka were exhibiting their new works, and the young Anna was taken to their exhibitions by her enthusiastic mother, Bertha.Her artistic education was given over to Prof. Ernst Novak at his Studio Schule. His somewhat pedantic method gave her the grounding in academic drawing, and an almost scientific approach to portraiture and natural forms. This two-year period of training was the only formal art education Anna Ticho ever received. It was long enough to learn the basic skills needed to be an artist, and yet short enough to avoid falling into a particular style, the bane of many art schools.Born in 1894 in Moravia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Anna Ticho’s move to Palestine – then part of the Ottoman Empire – was partly motivated by Zionist ideology and partly by the prospect of marriage to her cousin Albert, who was pursuing his medical studies away from the antisemitic restrictions he experienced in Vienna. In November of that year they were married by Rabbi Yosef Sonnenfeld, one of Jerusalem’s leading rabbis.Anna Ticho, 1935 (Credit: Beit Ticho)Ticho’s early days in Palestine were spent looking rather than drawing. She notes in her memoirs:“The mountains were bare, not as they are now. There wasn’t a tree on them. I swallowed the view with my eyes – the pure lines of the mountains, lines that return onto themselves as if they continue forever and came from the distance...I felt the loneliness of the landscape, but I couldn’t draw..I never missed the landscapes I saw abroad that I had once loved so much.”Anyone familiar with her later work will see in these observations an early hint of what was to come.Olive Tree, 1935 (Credit: Anna Ticho)Landscape, 1979-80 (Credit: Anna Ticho)
Jerusalemites will probably also be familiar with Ticho House, an Ottoman-style villa in the middle of the city built in 1864. Architecturally known as a Liwan, its original main element was a large central room that functioned as a living room and guest-reception area, flanked by various smaller rooms. The Tichos bought it in 1924 at a public auction, and added various structures to it which allowed them to split the building into a ground floor office and ward for Dr. Ticho’s eye hospital and an upper floor for Anna Ticho’s studio.Anna Ticho divided her time between working at her art and assisting her husband in his clinic. Many of the portraits that she did in this period indeed are of patients who came for treatment. Her husband’s specialty also saw them travel around the Middle East, and brought Anna in contact with the varied landscapes of the area. In 1930, back in Jerusalem, she prepared her first exhibition. Interestingly, she showed her move into water-color paintings, an oeuvre which she taught herself and at which she became extremely proficient.Now a large book called Anna Ticho: Lifescape has been produced by the Israel Museum – of which Ticho House is a part – as a celebration of one of the city’s most respected artists.Timna Seligman, who edited the book, explained to The Jerusalem Report why her work was, and has remained, so popular.“There’s a difference between what the ‘Art World’ dictates and what is popular with the public at large. Ticho brought the two together. Her figurative work, even when she was at her most abstract, was still based on observation and exact drawing technique. She was admired by other professional artists as well as by the popular vote – by people who wanted something on their wall. I think that her masterly technique comes through in terms of observation, whether she is using pencil, charcoal, or water color. It is not only the complete control of her technique which marks out her style, it is also how she transcends her subjects. They are never just dry recording. She shows an empathy with her subject matter, whether portraits, trees, flowers or landscapes. You can see and feel the love of her subjects in the work. This is why she was able to become a consensus in terms of what was going on around her. In contrast to what was fashionable in the art world at the time – minimalism, abstraction, conceptual art and so forth – she painted real people, living flora and romantic landscapes of the Jerusalem hills.”And she sold.“She sold many works,” reports Seligman, “as can be seen in the works acquired by major collections across the world. But she also kept back a lot, drawings and pictures that she most loved. The fact that she bequeathed to the museum over 2,000 works shows what she had in her own studio. Even when she exhibited a lot of works she would then bring them back. She didn’t look for sales.”Not that the Tichos cut themselves off from their surroundings. In fact, the villa became a meeting place for the German-speaking residents of the city. The book shows photographs of the Tichos with guests such as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem.Similarly, although she was never part of the teaching staff of the Bezalel School of Art and Crafts that was founded in 1906, Anna Ticho was very close to many of the artists there. Even though she was separate from them stylistically, she became good friends with Leopold Krakauer, Jacob Steinhardt and Joseph Budko, the head of Bezalel.Ticho did study some printing techniques under Hermann Struck, but never really followed through, even though the engravings she did were in her unique style. The head of the Jerusalem Print Workshop, Arik Kilemnik, spoke at the opening of the book launch of his disappointment in Ticho for not pursuing her etchings or other print techniques. “The few works that she did shows that she could have developed into a serious print artist,” he insisted.Hilly Landscape, 1960 (Credit: Anna Ticho)Bougainvillea, 1970 (Credit: Anna Ticho)This resistance to branch out into different media is an issue that Seligman relates to as well.“A lot of these earliest works were done while she was traveling around – to Damascus and elsewhere. These are small works in pencil or charcoal that were easier to carry around. She realized that this is what she was good at. She did work in oils early on, but the immediacy of her drawings was what excited her. She sensed that this was her strength and she developed it. Her being with nature was much better expressed in the spontaneity of her drawing.”Some of her drawings and water colors of the flora of Jerusalem’s hinterland have become iconic. The extreme detail of her observations are reminiscent of Durer, Rembrandt’s etchings, and even some of the works of Van Gogh. Lifescape shows a good selection of her drawings and painting throughout her career, from her early days in Vienna to her mature works that she executed in her studio in Jerusalem, plus many sketches which she made as she was traveling around the Middle East. These works show a deep concern for the people of the area as well as the wild beauty of the local nature.“Despite her tremendous output,” observes Seligman, “her influence has been minimal. That is because she never taught, neither at a school like Bezalel nor privately. She may have had people approach her, but knowing her, she probably pushed them off very gently.”In exhibitions in the US, she showed her landscapes next to other Israeli artists such as Yehezkel Streichman, Moshe Gershuni, Nahum Gutman and Joseph Zaritsky. They were all abstract artists and all men. Yet Ticho was able to exhibit with them as an equal – she was very much considered, even though she was different from the overriding trends of her time.It was perhaps no surprise when she was told she would receive the Israel Prize for her work, which she was awarded posthumously as she died just before the official ceremony. In many ways the prize was superfluous – she had already won the hearts of her fellow Israelis. She wouldn’t have wished for more.Today, Ticho House is a tourist attraction open to the public. The downtown location, which includes a well-known kosher restaurant, also plays host to live music. ■
