Since 1968, Victor Majzner has held over fifty solo exhibitions and participated in numerous major group exhibitions in Australia, Italy, the US, England, and New Zealand. His publications include The Australian Haggadah, Painting the Torah, and a collaboration with Debbie Masel, Painting the Song. Earth to Sky: The Art of Victor Majzner 1967–2001 by Leigh Astbury was published by Macmillan in 2002.
Image: Could you talk about where you grew up and spent your early years, and how that influenced your sense of Jewish identity?
VM: I grew up in a secular Jewish family in Poland. My first language was Yiddish, and I went to a secular Yiddish school until the age of thirteen. We left Poland in 1958 for a year in Paris and arrived in Australia in 1959. Until 1977, my Judaism was purely cultural. Once I discovered that Jews made art, I started to delve into deeper
Victor Majzner. Lag B’Omer, 2020. Watercolor on paper. 42 x 28¾ inches.
levels of Judaism, including studying Torah and kabbalah.
Image: Your deep engagement with Jewish texts is a defining aspect of your work. How did those projects evolve?
Victor Majzner. What Makes a Man, 2022. Watercolor on paper. 43¾x 28¾ inches.
VM: I strongly believe that for a Jew to make art, one has to be steeped in Jewish culture, as well as the contemporaneous culture of the West. I found my way into Judaism through the biblical story of the Exodus, especially the idea that each Jew identifies with this story as if they were present at Mount Sinai, because, as the Talmud explains, all Jewish souls, present and future, were at Mount Sinai to witness the divine.
This story, the Haggadah, has been illustrated in every country inhabited by Jews. Australia only had one Haggadah, consisting of only a few pages of text produced during World War I for Australian Jewish soldiers celebrating Passover. I’m a painter, so I had to paint my own Australian Haggadah. Luckily, I found a willing collaborator in my son Andrew, who did some amazing micrographic illustrations of Australian wildflowers—we had to locate this Haggadah in the Australian context.
Later, I was commissioned by my synagogue to illustrate the first parashah of each of the five books of Moses. Having completed these, I asked myself whether I could do the next parashah. And so, after long study and discussions with numerous rabbis, six years later, I had completed all fifty-four parashot of the Torah.
Victor Majzner. Jewish Crucifixion, 2023. Watercolor on paper. 42½ x 27½ inches.
Image: Did your Song of Songs project flow organically out of your Torah series?
VM: As I was working on my Torah project, a friend of mine, Debbie Masel z’l, was working on her own interpretation of the Torah. She contributed short poetic statements to each of my parashot, which I included in the publication. As our collaboration was so fruitful, we decided to undertake a contemporary interpretation of the Song of Songs.
Debbie was battling breast cancer throughout our project, so I did some initial black and white drawings that I photocopied and delivered to her. She in turn wrote some poetry based on the original text as well as my drawings. I then included her text in the final paintings. She succumbed to her illness before the public launch of Painting the Song. However, a few months before she died, she presented me with her Torah musings, which were published in a book, In the Cleft of the Rock. Her inscription to me reads “to Victor, who sees what I hear”—the most beautiful compliment!
Image: The events of October 7 and the ensuing war and protests have left many people reeling, seeking a vocabulary to express their anguish. What kinds of images have spoken to you as you have processed these events?
VM: The events of October 7, 2023, have been the most transformative in my life. They didn’t just affect me but the whole Jewish world, in Israel and the diaspora. Israel, the state that was supposed to safeguard our present and future, was found to be disorganized, unprepared, and in moral, military, and intelligence disarray. Not only was the country tearing itself apart politically, it took its eyes off the threat that was always imminent. As Jews, we felt vulnerable again for the first time since the 1950s.
As the world descended into a moral quagmire, my initial response was emotional and intellectual outrage. My voice is in my brush, and immediately images of Goya’s Disasters of War and Bosch’s surrealistic imaginings of hell filled my imagination. I had a visceral need to respond to the distorted representation of Israel that quickly became a euphemism for Jews. As it happened, since June 2023 I’ve been grappling with the idea of a Jewish crucifixion. The crucifixion is the most powerful symbol of sacrifice on behalf of humanity—a visual scream! Judaism just doesn’t have such a potent image, so I tried to adopt the crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice of a Jew. In retrospect, I was responding to the rise in antisemitism, especially from people whom I considered my comrades. It took me through a number of painting ideas, but eventually I painted the triptych October 7, 2023: It Is a Silence Only God Can Bear.
This painting represents the idea that any Jewish body contains the long history of dispossessions, persecutions, torture, and extermination we thought finally ended 
with the establishment of the state of Israel. Unfortunately, the events of October 7 were just the latest loss of Jewish innocence and naïveté. I would like to think that this triptych also represents the resilience of the Jewish people and the belief that we will overcome these dark times and reemerge bruised but optimistic about our future.
Image: The Australian landscape features prominently in many of your paintings. What role have aboriginal understandings of the land played in your work?
VM: Australia has a long landscape-painting tradition primarily based on European precedents, but in the 1940s a uniquely Australian tradition began to emerge. I felt part of this tradition, but I found it impossible to see the Australian landscape apart from the uniquely Indigenous tradition of representing this land. Including that is my way of acknowledging that this land has a longer tradition of habitation and imaging than the European one, spanning over sixty thousand years.
Image: I’m struck by the way images of the Australian outback in your work meld with biblical landscapes both real and imagined. Have you found yourself understanding the land of Israel and biblical texts differently through this lens?
VM: I’m a Jew. I see everything through my Jewish lens. Everything I’ve painted since 1977 is to some extent informed by my Judaism. I often anchor or locate my work in landscape, be it Australian or Israeli. (I painted two series of Israeli landscapes: The Negev in 1999 and Galil/Golan in 2006.) As I often also engage with religious and mystical ideas, I naturally include them in the land. The land is part of me, and I am part of the land—this is an Indigenous idea that has become part of my reality.
