French-Israeli-Ukrainian artist Samuel Ackerman pays tribute to his friend Mikhail Grobman (September 21, 1939 – November 23, 2025), an Israeli painter and poet of Russian origin. In 1965, Grobman dared to exhibit innovative works on Jewish themes at the Moscow House of Artists, an almost unbelievable event at the time. In 1971, he was among the first Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. Ackerman, who co-founded the Leviathan art group with Grobman and Israeli painter Avraham Ofek, shares personal memories and explains Grobman’s art, focusing on the decade between 1973 and 1984 when their exchanges were most intense. An important chapter in the history of Soviet emigration.
It is difficult to speak in the past tense about Mikhail Grobman, a close friend and a great artist, whose entire creative drive was aimed at transforming Jewish-Israeli art. I met Grobman in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War, in Jerusalem, in the Bakka neighborhood where he lived in a new building.
During that memorable evening, in a living room filled with recently arrived Russian-speaking intellectuals and artists, I was deeply impressed by the paintings hanging on the walls and by the artist himself, who, armed with a long pointer, confidently commented on the images he had created. I immediately felt close to his two-dimensional language, in harmony with the words written on the paintings, which together generate allegories of biblical images. That evening, Misha embodied for me the image of a poet-singer from Jerusalem’s Woodstock. Around midnight, at the request of people who wanted to see the works of the nonconformist artists in his collection, Misha took out a large folder, without letting anyone touch the sacred sheets, containing gouaches by Yakovlev, Kropivnitsky, Yankilevsky, Steinberg, and others. This was my first encounter with independent Russian art, and Misha’s works hanging on the wall left a striking impression on me, like Matisse’s The Red Studio. Late at night, as I was leaving, Misha said to me,“Come whenever you like and bring your works.”
Three weeks later, I was back at Grobman’s with a portfolio containing my works on paper. Misha looked at everything carefully and said, ”The works must be signed. And you must quickly move beyond abstract lyricism and understand the new Israeli reality.” At that time, all the artists in Jerusalem knew Grobman. Two years after his arrival in Israel, thanks to his charisma and inexhaustible energy, he had become an integral part of Israel’s artistic life. The home of Misha and his wife Ira was the center of intense encounters between newly arrived artists and local creators. Misha was the organizer of numerous exhibitions and the author of reviews in newspapers and magazines. Long before the publication of Two Centuries Together: 1795-1995, he wrote an article on Solzhenitsyn and the Jews in the Jerusalem Post.
I considered Grobman to be an Israeli Zarathustra, preaching against illusionist forms of art and advocating the creation of a new and free art based on the existential experience of Jewish tradition. In 1975, Grobman began publishing Leviathan, written in Russian calligraphy, with reproductions of avant-garde artists, notes on artistic life in Israel, and his early theoretical projects, precursors to the avant-garde Leviathan group.
Misha helped many artists, including myself, to organize their first exhibitions. Thanks to him, I received a commission to create a large mosaic in a new school in Jerusalem. Misha was a tireless collector, not only of prominent personalities, but also of rare books, paintings, and documents.
His home in Jerusalem was always open to hundreds of people interested in free Russian art, conversation, and discussion, who appreciated Misha’s lively humor and his wife’s always warm welcome.
But my memory returns once again to Grobman’s artistic images. From his earliest works in the Moscow period, the central theme has been creatures endowed with particular rhythms, commenting on the biblical cosmos and faith in the return to the land of the Covenant. An extraordinary, bold choice in a country plunged into a period of dark anti-Semitism after the Six Day War (1967).
Grobman was one of the first, in his article on Malevich, to define Suprematism as a tendency toward permanent reevaluation before the twilight of art. Malevich as a biblical prophet announcing a new emergence from the deluge of materiality.
Misha was fascinated by real creative space: the desert, the sea, Mount Hermon, where innovative actions would be carried out. In 1976, the first manifesto of the Leviathan group, written by Grobman, then discussed and signed by myself and the famous Israeli artist of Bulgarian origin Avraham Ofek, was published. The manifesto provoked many reactions.
The creation of the Leviathan group marked the beginning of an artistic movement similar to that of the artists of La Ruche de l’École de Paris. It was an attempt to revive the La Ruche paradigm in Jerusalem, based on Jewish folklore and mysticism rooted in the soil of Israel.
Grobman’s artistic vocabulary is characterized by sharp forms surrounding cosmic bodies, pregnant bulls, and the seeing eyes of flowers from the reborn earth. The author himself was a new wild rose that pierced through the covers of new fashions imported into Israel by skilled officials living in their museum bubbles.
The Leviathan group chose the Judean desert as the site for new plastic prophecies. On the sandy rock, Grobman depicted angels with wings of dew. Avraham Ofek projected rays of sunlight onto the sand using mirrors in a work entitled The Actions of Jacob, in reference to the famous biblical character. As for me, during this first Leviathan action, I unfurled a 40-meter-long blue scroll like a stream irrigating celestial seeds.
From 1973 to 1984, we had many meetings and discussions about the fate of the artist and the perennial question of what constitutes true innovation in the contemporary world.
Today, we can say with certainty that Grobman was an innovator, a brilliant and original artist. The Leviathan exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, scheduled for August 2026, is proof of the vitality and importance of Grobman’s ideas and work, as well as our collective contribution to Israeli art. I am forever grateful for the time we spent together in Jerusalem.
Samuel Ackerman is a French-Israeli-Ukrainian painter, born in Mukachevo (Transcarpathia, Ukraine) in 1951. He studied at the Uzhhorod Academy of Fine Arts, emigrated to Israel in 1973, and settled in Paris in 1984.