The Standard Times · New Bedford, Massachusetts · 18 March 1945

CP-1945-010

Palestinian Artist’s Work Will Be Shown at Library

Transcribed from the clipping

“Oded Bourla of 415 County Street, a young Palestinian artist, has made his home in New Bedford for four years, and examples of his work will be introduced formally to New Bedford at a public reception from 8 to 9 Tuesday night in the upper foyer of the Free Public Library… Joint sponsors are New Bedford section of the National Jewish Welfare Board, headed by Special Justice Samuel Barnet, which includes among its aims the fostering of Jewish cultural works… Mr. Bourla’s family on his father’s side has lived in Palestine for four centuries. He was born there and feels a loving and intense sense of kinship with the scenes he painted. ‘My grandfather was caretaker there,’ he observed, pointing to one of his smaller paintings, depicting the tomb of Rachel at Bethlehem, a low-domed building nestled against a background of olive greenery and gray hills, with a foreground of rough, colorful earth. ‘I went there many times and painted the scene over and over. This one was done in New Bedford, from memory.’… ‘It is so hot in Summer,’ said Mr. Bourla, ‘that no outlines are really visible. Shadows scarcely show, for the intense light strikes into the shadows. Buildings are the color of the dust which covers them. Skies are sometimes white with heat, like the white heat of iron after it passes the red-hot stage.’… One of his most appealing oils is ‘Valley of Jezreel, Summer,’ paved with the golden stubble of a grain field. He identified the hills in the background as the place where Saul and Jonathan were killed, described in the Bible as accursed and doomed to be desert forever. Irrigation by the Jewish pioneers has lifted the curse.… The painter learned to love the Jezreel valley in boyhood, when he was a member of the Children’s Colony at Beth Alpha… He subsequently was graduated from the New Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem… The most imposing of his oils is ‘Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.’ The opalescent blue of the sea is a pleasant foil for richly colorful buildings of the old Arab quarter at the foot of the mountain.”

Context added by this archive

In March 1945 “a young Palestinian artist” in an American paper means a Jewish painter from Palestine, shown under the auspices of the National Jewish Welfare Board and trained at the Bezalel academy. The Arabs of the country appear once, as a quarter of Tiberias seen from across the water. This is the noun before it moved.

Cite this item

"Palestinian Artist’s Work Will Be Shown at Library," The Standard Times, 18 March 1945. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1945-010. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1945-010

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