Preface
The world of wall paintings opened up to me in July 1999, when I randomly discovered a rare stencil painting on the wall of a ruined house in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood in Tel Aviv. This discovery surprised me greatly, but none of the experts I consulted could tell me about its origin. In the survey I did at the time in the Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek, Neve Shalom and Achuzat Bayit neighborhoods, in private homes and in synagogues, I discovered and photographed dozens of wall paintings, ceiling paintings and decorative painted surfaces. The survey and its interesting findings led me to research and documentation that has been going on for 16 years all over the country, from Metula to Eilat.
In this article, I will describe and present a variety of wall paintings at Arab residents’ homes in the city of Lod, which are dated to the Mandate period and which I uncovered with a team of artists from Techelet Studio. In contrast to painted tiles and other architectural items made of wood, stone, clay or iron, it is difficult to find the remains of wall paintings, which, have been erased and about which no research has been carried out except for the important work of Dr. Sharif Sharif-Safadi of Nazareth who researched ceiling paintings in the homes of the wealthy in Palestine during the Ottoman period. His findings as well as those of my research show that at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, wall paintings were part of the design culture in the homes of Jews, Arabs and Templer settlers in Palestine.
The Star of Lod – a Rare Wall Painting
In 1990, together with my father, Haim Farkash, I moved our family’s Pe’er brush production workshop from Tel Aviv to a building in the northern industrial zone in Lod. On a tour of the Old City of Lod, I saw remnants of paintings on the walls of a small, half-ruined, abandoned house at the corner of Elbaz and Borochov Streets. The remnants in the central room, which were covered with many layers of paint, intrigued me, and I decided to uncover them. Standing on a ladder, I used a scalpel to remove the several layers of paint that covered the paintings. On the upper part of the wall of the room, on the first layer of paint, I exposed a stripe of decorative painting of birds in a shade of brown, and in the corners of the room, eight decorative star-like paintings in two shades were revealed, of a type that I had not seen so far. A total of six layers of paint were found on the wall of the room, and all of them bore remains of paintings from various periods. I named the rare corner painting the Star of Lod (Fig. 1).
Following this discovery, I decided to conduct an in-depth survey to locate wall paintings in abandoned houses in the city of Lod. For several days, over a period of about three months, I checked about 10 abandoned houses in Lod and discovered on their walls about 30 wall paintings and decorative painted areas on the first layers of paint, one of them a blue wall on Halutz Street (Fig 2).
In a grand, half-ruined one-story house on IDF Boulevard on the corner of Borochov Street, I uncovered walls in five rooms and on the balcony (Figs 3, 4). I searched for a Lod resident from the Mandate period who could tell me about the house. I found Faik Abu Mena, a barbershop owner born in 1928, who told me that a doctor named Judah from Lebanon had lived in the house and that there had been a luxurious restaurant on the north frontage.
We uncovered and removed a geometric wall painting in two shades from the wall of a ruined house on Herzog Street before the wall was demolished.
Wall Paintings in Hassuna Family Buildings
The building materials and paint store of the Hassuna family is located in the center of the Old City of Lod. During a renovation carried out in the store in 1993, I saw remnants of wall paintings on the upper part of its walls (Fig 5). At the request of the owners, I exposed a two-tone geometric plant wall painting in the central room. The owner of the store, Muhammad Hassuna, invited me to visit his brother’s house on Egoz Street, where I saw round ceiling paintings in two rooms (Fig 6), which according to the owner of the house were executed by an Egyptian painter in the 1930s.
Wall Paintings in a Store at 81 Herzl Street
In 2014, several shops on Herzl Street were demolished. On the remaining south wall at 81 Herzl Street, paintings were discovered, among them two landscapes, and a vase with flowers in five shades (Fig 7). The landscape paintings were partially erased and difficult to identify. We carefully uncovered the painting of the vase with the flowers. Using the strappo technique, we detached it from the wall in order to save it. The wall was painted during the construction in 1930 of the single-story structure and was probably used a restaurant, café or hair salon. We found no information about the owners of the building.
Mural Charachteristics in Lod
Four Types of Lod Wall Paintings
1. Stencil Paintings
All the paintings found on the walls and ceiling of the Hassuna house were executed using the stencil technique. The artist placed a paper stencil on the wall and used a brush to paint a pattern through the openings in the stencil.
The first stencil paintings in Israel and in Lod were in shades of brown, blue and green, and were
painted as a decorative stripe around the walls of the room, about 40 cm below the ceiling line. Sometimes a pattern was painted on the entire wall depicting a rug or wallpaper. Such examples were found in houses in Neve Tzedek and other areas in Tel Aviv, as well as in Mazkeret Batya, Lod, Jerusalem and in the Templer settlements.
Examples of wall and ceiling paintings, complex and multi-layered, deceptively three-dimensional in appearance, were painted in Israel in the homes of the wealthy, both Arab and Jewish, as well as in public buildings and synagogues. Human figures were only painted in Christian homes. Pictures of European landscapes and holy places such as the Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb were painted in Jewish homes.
Mainly geometric and floral decorative examples were found in Templer homes. Stencil paintings were drawn for the most part in guest rooms and bedrooms, on large balconies and stairwells. Sometimes, doors were also covered with paintings.Four Types of Lod Wall Paintings
2. Line and Stripe Drawings
In many rooms in Lod, paintings, demarcated by colored lines and stripes, were found that separated the upper and lower paint surfaces on the walls (Fig 8). The common colors of the lines were red, blue and black. Sometimes diagonal lines were found that created colored triangles.
near Falafel Susan
3. Decorative Paint Surfaces
Decorative paint surfaces were found in lower parts of walls in some rooms; these featured marble-like and wood-like paintings and dotted painted surfaces.
4. Rubber Roller Wall Paintings with Patterns
These walls, painted with a synthetic rubber roller invented in Germany in 1937, appeared in Palestine after 1945 and were common in Lod in the 1950s and 1960s, in both Jewish and Arab homes.
Paint Materials and Shades of Color
In the city of Lod, like most Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century and until 1948, the interior and exterior walls were painted with lime and chalk paints (distemper) that were colored with natural earth pigments, such as ocher (yellow-brown), sienna (brown) and ombre (brown-green). However, the most common shade in this country was blue, which was used in many cases as a background for ceilings and interior walls, sometimes also for exterior walls and window and door frames. The blue shade is a synthetic ultramarine pigment (which was invented and developed in France in 1826) that was also used to make a laundry bleach known locally as “washing blue.” The blue powder was added to a mixture of water, cow’s milk and lime or chalk. The result – a wide range of shades, from light blue to dark blue.
The walls of Arab-Ottoman and Mandatory houses were covered with rectangular colors demarcated by lines. The corners of the rectangular surfaces were rounded or decorated with a graphic corner ornament painted with a stencil. The surfaces were often painted with glossy, glazed or marble-like paint. I documented the remnants of such decorated walls in the Saraya House (the Turkish governor’s house) in Jaffa, the Pink House (built by Abdul Rahman El-Taji Bey near Nes Ziona), in many well houses in the Jaffa and Ramla area, in the Nabulsi House in Kfar Yona and in the Ramla Municipality building.
Who Were the Artist-Painters in Lod?
An earthquake that struck the country in July 1927 and the construction of the nearby airport in the early 1930s brought a building boom and prosperity in the city of Lod. With the help of the British Mandatory government, limestone houses were built, reinforced with concrete and featuring flat roofs. Jewish and Arab building contractors built public buildings and residences for middle- and upper-class families.
The homeowners recruited Jewish painters from Tel Aviv to paint and decorate their houses according to the European style common in Tel Aviv and other towns. At the same time, Arab painters, who gained their experience in Jaffa and Ramla and probably also in Egypt, worked in Lod. I am familiar with the biography of Ephraim Kam, an artisan painter who came to Israel in 1921 from Poland and worked in Lod after 1927. Some wall paintings discovered in Lod were also found in houses in Tel Aviv, which indicates the work of Jewish painters in Lod (Fig 9). As in many other communities in Israel, there is a connection between wall paintings and floors decorated in a variety of patterns and shades.
c) 25 Nachmani Street, Tel Aviv
Summary
Wall paintings that were uncovered on the walls of approximately 10 houses in Lod testify to the cultural wealth and impressive interior design that graced many houses, which were built during the British Mandate in Lod, and to the connection between Arab residents of Lod and Jewish professionals before 1948.
According to the characteristics of the paintings, it is possible to differentiate between wall paintings executed by Jewish artists and those by Arab artists.
After 1948, due to demographic changes in the city of Lod, layers of decorative paint and walls were erased. Several houses, in which I documented walls in Lod about 15 years ago, including the house where the “Star of Lod” painting was found, have been destroyed over the years. Dozens of hidden wall paintings still exist on walls of houses from the Mandate period in Lod.
So far, we have preserved and restored only one wall in Lod (Figs 10,11). I hope that this article will lead to the documentation, preservation and restoration of additional walls in the city.
