When Nathanaëlle Herbelin studied painting two decades ago, Israel's plastic arts world was thick with conceptual art, and painting was considered a fringe pursuit. Those were the days when Israel's Hamidrasha art school was riding high, and the Israeli style Want of Matter ruled the day. Figurative painters were virtually turned away.
Herbelin was born in Israel to a French father and an Israeli mother, and grew up in the town of Tzoran northeast of Tel Aviv. After the army, she left Israel to study in Paris.
"I remember painting on my bed when I was a girl. Painting has always been a therapeutic tool for me, and I was drawn to realistic painting. I painted Scouts' shirts and was my class' painter, " she says.
Herbelin wasn't accepted to the
Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts near Tel Aviv, "which turned out for the best: I think they were looking for teenagers who were more in tune with conceptual art. I found myself painting with former Soviet artists who gave me technical tools that I use to this day. I decided that this was what I wanted to pursue, and I felt that it would be hard to express in Israel."
Herbelin dreamed of attending
Paris' École des Beaux-Arts. "Paris is a city of radical conservatism, and that suited me fine," she says. "It was very hard to get accepted to the Beaux-Arts. I lost 10 kilos [22 pounds] studying for the exams. And it worked. I studied there for six years. I went to a prep school and then did five years of studies – and also won a scholarship and studio space."
After graduating, she exhibited her work in galleries in Paris and New York, and in group exhibits in other cities. She was hardly shown in Israel save for a solo exhibit at the
Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery and one at
the Institut Français in Tel Aviv.
Nathanaëlle Herbelin, 2022. 'Paris is a city of radical conservatism, and that suited me fine.'Credit: HV-studio / Nathanaëlle herbeli
In recent years, she has
been spending most of her time in Paris. Her parents, sister – painter Emmanuelle Herbelin – and brother Yehonatan live in Israel. Yehonatan is author of the novel "I Was There," which takes place in the Gaza Strip.
Two years ago she married her French partner, Jérémie Werner, and the two have a daughter together. About a year ago her Paris studio was visited by Musée d'Orsay curators Christophe Leribault and Nicolas Gausserand, who had stumbled across her paintings at a solo exhibit in an unusual Paris exhibition space in 2022. That exhibit was curated by Philippe Ségalot, who was international head of contemporary art at Christie's
"I saw an abandoned space with a unique atmosphere," Herbelin says. "We decided not to make it a sales exhibit – in this way we broke the commercial aspect. It was like a pop-up exhibit for a few days, presented at the same time
as Art Basel. People actually stood in line to see it."
'Paris' power is that I know painters and friends from all over – Italian, Chinese, Georgians, Iranians, Jews and Muslims – and it's all very enriching.'
Herbelin was nine months pregnant when Leribault and Gausserand visited her studio; they offered her a solo exhibit. She was surprised and flattered. The Musée d'Orsay is one of the city's three leading museums, after the Louvre and the Pompidou Center. The d'Orsay, a bastion of Impressionism, shows very little contemporary art.
Her work is being shown there until June 30.
"I told them, 'Well done: You're either very progressive guys or you have no idea how busy with the baby I'm going to be,'" Herbelin says.
She kept working on the exhibit even after October 7. "The people at the d'Orsay were very respecting and sensitive; I felt a lot of support with the difficulties I went through," she says. "They didn't see a connection with my exhibition, which was in the works a long time before that as
a dialogue between 19th-century painters and the current reality in the Middle East.
Painter Nathanaëlle Herbelin at her atelier in Paris.Credit: Anas Boileau
"I think my name doesn't automatically brand me as Israeli or Jewish. I mean, I don't hide it; people know I'm Israeli. It's mentioned in the exhibit's text, but my paintings are universal and inviting. So far, nobody has asked me about Israel. It doesn't come up as a subject in conversations. But it may happen."
Grandma's ghost
"It comes in waves, and I think it will pass this time too," she says. "Criticism of Israel and Jews has a flip side. French people also think that Jews are smart and good, and Jews are very involved in cultural affairs. The Jewish community here is large and powerful."
Either way, Herbelin's private life is filled with people from different cultures. "Paris' power is that I know painters and friends from all over – Italian, Chinese, Georgians, Iranians, Jews and Muslims – and it's all very enriching. I've become friends with several Muslims," she says.
"One of them, Ahmed, lives in the 18th arrondissement and earns a living as a sawyer. I came over to have a few things fixed, and he always struck me as melancholy. He emigrated from Egypt and couldn't leave Paris for his father's funeral because he has no residency permit. I donated a painting for him to sell and also painted him once. I mostly paint universal and personal themes, but sometimes I touch on political or social themes."
From the exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay.Credit: Objets Pointus
At the opening of her exhibit, Herbelin said that during her first decade in Paris, before she met Werner, her only family in France was her grandmother, who died two months before she and her future husband met. Once a week she would ride to the suburbs to visit her grandmother and wash her clothes.
"Now, three years after she passed away, I'm a young mother and, God knows, I devote 20 percent of my time to doing the laundry. And when I shrink almost all of my love Jérémie's pants, I think of her."
Herbelin adds that her grandmother kept all of her "worst paintings."
'I was painting a bar manager named Augustin, a good friend of mine who fell asleep while I was painting. He was a pretty bad model.'
"When she died, I had to take back a hundred paintings to the studio, and now I'm improving them, adding layers," she says. "It's like living with ghosts. Painting on the paintings I brought over from her place keeps reminding me of her."
When she was young, Herbelin wandered among the works of Degas, Monet, Manet,
Courbet and Camille Corot at the Musée d'Orsay. In her current exhibition, the curators have placed her work among paintings by the artists of the Nabis movement, a revolutionary Postimpressionist group founded in 1888 and 1889 at the Académie Julian in Paris. The artists of that stream whose work appears with Herbelin's include Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton. (The name Nabis derives from the Hebrew word for "prophet.")
La chambre sacrée des érythréens, 2020, Nathanaëlle Herbelin.Credit: Nicolas Lafon / Nathanaëlle Herbelin
In the accompanying text, the curators write that Herbelin's art provides a sense of continuity to the history of painting. As they put it, the paintings present a new dynamic of relationships, a preoccupation with women's body hair, female pleasure and a contemporary female gaze that responds directly to the male gaze of the 19th century. The palette, motifs and delicate touch are reminiscent of Bonnard, Vuillard and Vallotton.
The exhibit's catalog is a modest affair; Herbelin wrote part of it, with the rest by the curators and sometimes even the models. Some of the work on display is pretty big, and some tiny. The smallest pieces are sketches that the artist did for herself, though many of them are of very high quality. She examined subjects before switching to a large format.
What things interest you most in painting?
"Personal subjects that everybody can identify with, both domestic scenes and interpersonal relations. It's hard for me to paint about political or social subjects that I haven't experienced myself.
"For example, I was painting a bar manager named Augustin, a good friend of mine who fell asleep while I was painting. He was a pretty bad model, but in the end a painting emerged that depicted a French guy who could be any other young man around the world, dozing on a green couch with his spotted shirt and an ashtray."
From the exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.Credit: Objets Pointus
Jérémie au bain, 2023, by Nathanaëlle Herbelin.Credit: Thomas Merle
Exposed and natural
Regarding the juxtaposition with the Nabis, there's Herbelin's painting of a woman who seems to be examining the hairs of her bikini line with her chest exposed. Alongside it is a 1918 painting by Bonnard of a young woman washing her body in a basin. The use of color is somewhat similar, but the time and story are different. In this pairing, Herbelin and the curators illustrate the change in painting over 100 years.
There are also paintings in which Herbelin is the model; sometimes even in the nude. For her 2022 work "Être ici est une splendeur," she couldn't find a suitable model, so she gave it a go herself. She started with one of those small sketches and switched to the large format as seen in the exhibition.
In the catalog she explains that while working on the painting she read a book by German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who in 1906 was the first woman to do a nude self-portrait. Herbelin writes: The fact that Becker portrayed herself in the nude while pregnant piqued Herbelin's curiosity; Becker wasn't actually pregnant at the time.
About a year and a half later, Becker really did become pregnant – and continued to portray herself. When she gave birth in November 1907, she planned to retire and focus on her family, but she died suddenly about three weeks later – apparently a complication from the birth.
"I decided to portray myself as if I were pregnant, as a kind of tribute to Paula, a tribute that also expressed my desire to have a child," Herbelin says. "And then two months after the painting was created, I became pregnant too."
She's particularly interested in partnerships and family. The exhibition includes a painting of a couple, Madeleine and Clément, embracing on a bed and barely dressed. "To me they looked like an inspiring couple," Herbelin says. "When I painted them I also wanted to be in such a relationship; it was before I met Jérémie."
Michel, Emmanuel, Berhe and Zina, Levanda 1, 2020, by Nathanaëlle Herbelin.Credit: Nicolas Degrave / Tajan / Nathanaëlle Herbelin
In one painting Werner is seen in a bathtub totally nude. "He's exposed and natural, just as for hundreds of years it seemed natural to us to see nude women in paintings," Herbelin says. "People who look at the painting are surprised that he agreed to be a nude model, but if he were a woman nobody would consider it unusual."
In another painting, her daughter Elisha is lying on her and nursing. Herbelin writes that when Elisha was born she knew things that her mother apparently has forgotten. She took her mother's breast in her tiny mouth and seemed to glue herself to her. Weaning is difficult and she's still nursing. Nursing is a primitive, crude phenomenon, so Herbelin is so happy to be able to do something so archaic.
To what extent is your Israeliness reflected in the paintings?
"Now I'm painting things related to the war. I'm also painting Israeli scenes; for example, I'm drawn to fruit-and-vegetable stands. I always have pictures of rabbis there in the background, behind the fruits and vegetables. It's a very Israeli landscape.
Cecilia, 2021, Nathanaëlle Herbelin.Credit: Objets pointus / Nathanaëlle Herbelin / Galerie Jousse Entreprise
"During the coronavirus I was living in Tel Aviv's Neveh Sha'anan neighborhood and I painted a group of Eritreans [asylum seekers] on Levanda Street. They lived four to a small room. This painting is considered exotic in Europe, but I didn't want to show it in Paris. I donated it to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art."
Why not show Israeli things in Paris?
"I fight identity politics in the art world. I don't want to give the Europeans the gift they want so much. They expect political art from me, but I feel that that's a discussion that has to take place in Israel. When I painted children after October 7 – children from Israel and children from Gaza – I didn't want to show them here in Paris."
Herbelin says that in Israel too she sometimes feels like a prisoner when she's expected to touch on subjects she's not always keen to tackle. "There's a lot of death and suffering and complexity in Israel, and that sometimes enters the painting even if I'm not living in Israel. But I want people to let me breathe," she says.
Did you think about trying something from contemporary art such as installations, presentations or video art?
"It's good that there's contemporary art and new techniques. That means that the world is progressing. Painting is something much more ancient. It's from the era of caves. The art that you're referring to has no connection to painting. It's fine that there's contemporary art, and I like to go to art exhibitions like that, but it's the way I like to go to the movies."
From the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay. Left: Pierre Bonnard, Nu accroupi au tub, 1918. Right: Nathanaëlle Herbelin, 2023 ,Pince a'e'piler, version 2.Credit: Sophie Crepy
Do you feel that you're living in the wrong era?
"On the contrary, I feel as if I'm an emissary of painting in the current era. That's why I'm also so interested in the history of painting. And like every painter today, I'm carrying the torch of painting and feel that I'm contributing something to it."
There's the notion that when people wander around a museum somewhere around the world, they often feel that what's interesting is the artist's biographical background rather than the work itself. Are you familiar with that?
"Totally – the feeling that the story is more important than the work of art. It's good that they're including more unknown artists, but sometimes I wander around museums and feel that the audience has to tolerate inferior art only because the museum's directors have embraced affirmative action."
Do you feel that you have a defined style?
"I prefer to change. In general I prefer to paint from observation rather than from photos; the painting emerges much more alive that way. That's why I invite people to the studio and replace objects. The human and physical changes in the studio are always exciting.
"In a painting from a photo there's less adrenalin, it's less exciting and more technical. There were subjects I was forced to paint from a photo because that was the only way possible, but today in such cases I manage to distance myself enough from the photo to enter an imaginary world and play around so that it becomes interesting."
This question might be a bit annoying, but if people have been painting for thousands of years, what does your painting contribute to the world? In what way are you different from thousands of artists who showed people in situations quite similar to yours?
"It's like with poetry, for example. There have been many great poets, but people still write poems. I make art because I have a need to do so, because I can't do anything else.
"Look how many people go to painting classes at every age – the way people go to writing workshops. It's important to me to convey emotion in my paintings. At the exhibition I see people crying.
"It's important to me to create art that isn't condescending. It's important to bring people back to museums, to give them faith in a museum. Let them have a moment of beauty. The world is tough, after all."
