My contemporary the painter Jan

Mikhail Gendelev

Jerusalem July 2004

In the Spring of 2004, several rooms of the Israel Museum, the country's main artistic platform, were used by an exhibition - a retrospective, selective, fundamental and simply tremendous exhibition of works by Jan Rauchwerger.

To say that I was overwhelmed is to say nothing.

Of course, I knew Jan, I had known him for more than a decade, I had seen his paintings, I had known for certain that Jan Rauchwerger was a brilliant artist, inventive, technically and technologically perfect, civilized, very much in demand...

That is to say, he had received enough laudatory epithets for a comfortable existence as an artist in life, for his persona - in the art world, and for his name - in critical reviews; assets for a clever modern artist to live on during his lifetime and with some to spere for his heirs.

All these words-epithets both mean something in general, direct, literal sense and, sometimes, even correspond to the object of enthusiasm in a figurative, approximate sense.

In a word, a strong master, contemporary to me, to us, to the culture of our state, to the phase in the history of art. A contemporary artist. Which means modern, but not in the sense given the word "modern" in soviet and postsoviet times, when read more