The film Two Women and a Man tells the story of the professional life of the surrealist artist ”Justine Frank”, as told by researcher Ann Kastroff. The name of the artist is a double-edged sward of clues, the Marquis de Sade on the one hand, and Jacob Frank on the other. Frank was the exciting, enigmatic, intimidating and terrible figure of 18th century Eastern European Jewry, a late and traumatic phase in the life of the Sabbateanistic movement, an absolute radicalization of its wild, transgressive, and alternative reality-generating nature, rooted in the figure of Sabbatai Zevi. The sexual revelation is packaged as biographical research, investigating the history of the rejected artist who found herself in the country in the 1930s. She had received the recognition she deserved as a member of the Surrealist movement. She was the focus of public attention only once, a year before her death, in an exhibition by Marcel Janco, the Dadaist artist that immigrated to Israel in 1940. Justin Frank was arrested by the police for indecent exposure in public and for trying to attack Janco. After her release she moved in with her only friend, the widow Fania Hisin, and died in 1943. With the renewed interest in this forgotten artist, the motives behind her fusion of transgression and Judaism were understood in different interpretational contexts: through her affinity to Georges Bataille and in relation to the Surreal circle in whose margins she worked as a radical, feminist positioned in relation to the patriarchal tradition of the erotic representation, and even as an all-defying anti-Zionist act.
Also found on the compilation Judaism – Israelism – Messianism curated by Galit Eilat.
Catalogue no. 509
File: R
Catalogue no. 1473
File: Chosen
Catalogue no. 669
File: The Archive
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
