The program to "Collective Voice" offers a peculiar anecdote: Two summers ago, Karen Chernick '06 stumbled upon an anonymous painting while working in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Like in a Duccio or Giotto, its idyllic landscape flatly layered hills over turrets over rolling hills, invoking the primitive biblical portraits of the early Renaissance. Someone told Chernick that a student had painted the work, but she knew better. It was by Reuven Ruben, the famous Israeli artist who sought in the first half of the 20th century to blend European schools of painting with a distinctly Israeli flavor. Here he was, buried in Heller's basement, uncredited and unappreciated.She discovered it was one of a number of Israeli paintings from before and after the state's founding scattered around campus, and two years later, the result of her interest became the thesis exhibit "Collective Voice: The works of Reuven Rubin and other Israeli artists from the Brandeis Collection." The show, which ran in the Shapiro Art Gallery this month, collected many of these paintings in a meditation on serenity and chaos in the Jewish state.

Facing the gallery's entrance is Moshe Castel's painting "Poesie de Canaan" (1962), in which oil and sand intermingle on canvas to form a blocky yet skeletal structure, which emerges like a daguerreotype from a sea of sorrowful blues. Hebrew letters compose its mortar like weather-worn runes. It appears like a relic whose vibrancy has fossilized, miraculously preserving its entire luster.

Ivan Schwebel's etching "Below Augusta Victoria" (1976) contrasts parochial calm with urban entropy. It depicts a Jerusalem hospital which mostly services Palestinian refugees. A murmuring chaos bubbles beneath its humdrum veneer; almost faceless pedestrians concerned with the day-to-day give way to a puddles of graffiti painted not on city walls, but across the scene itself. Conflict is unnoticed here, but ever-present.

Naftali Bezem's "Blessing the Candles" (date unknown) breathes maternal warmth. It concocts colors as Henri Matisse might--they meditate instead of yielding to form. To its left is Bezazel Schatz's "Into the Night with Henry Miller" (1946), in which a monstrous and tortured creature--like an alligator, deformed by stray paint strokes and splatters--lurches violently. It is an unyielding cacophony, silent here yet as loud as the world. Its neighbor is ritual, constant and equally persisting. Their placement betrays curatorial expertise; together, they are more than the works of Israeli artists--they are a state, with all its dichotomies and tensions.

"Jewish History" (date unknown) is a harrowing Holocaust remembrance by Samuel Bak. It is an ashy scene in which two candles--burning brightly but weeping more than wax--flank a decrepit model of a synagogue. Bak, who survived a concentration camp in occupied Poland and whose work has been displayed by the Rose Art Museum, molds the horrors of his childhood into an memorial of their enduringness.

Although "Jewish History" is perhaps the most poignant painting here, it eclipses none. "Collective Voice" collects Israeli painters but makes no attempt at defining them as a school. Likewise, it does not hope to define Israel through art; at best, their eclecticism contradicts the homogeneity viewers might accept. But mostly, the paintings here just breathe.



Editor's note: The original version of this story was worded such that it implied that the concentration camp Samuel Bak survived was Polish-run. The camp was actually run by the Nazi German occupiers. The Justice regrets the error.