Articles about art

August 29, 2026 Who Painted Akiva’s Pictures? Alex Tubis and the Art of Shtisel Akiva Shtisel feels like a real artist because his fictional biography was built with real paint. This is how Alex Tubis created the character’s pictures — and why his own story unexpectedly echoes the drama. In Shtisel, painting is not attractive background decoration. Akiva’s portraits carry love, family memory, guilt and the difficulty of releasing the past. For that story to work, the paintings had to be credible not only on screen but as objects in their own right. Much of Akiva’s mature work was made by the Israeli painter Alex Tubis. This feature draws on Mira Fox’s interview in The Forward, its Russian adaptation published on LiveJournal, the artist’s official biography, exhibition records and later interviews. Tubis’s biography, exhibitions and independent practice are documented separately in the ArtOnline encyclopedia entry on Alex Tubis. A real painter behind a fictional artist Israeli illustrator Menahem Halberstadt made Akiva’s drawings for the first season. As the character developed from drawing toward oil painting, the writers needed a different visual language. Tubis was noticed after an exhibition and invited to meet the series’ art team. The beginning was almost comic. Tubis had not watched Shtisel and assumed the invitation came from a low-budget student production. Even after he learned the scale of the project, he doubted that his manner would fit. He considered his own figurative painting too classical for contemporary television. He arrived with examples of Peter Doig’s work, suggesting a more visibly fashionable direction. The team answered that they did not want an imitation of somebody else. They wanted Tubis’s paintings. What he regarded as a lack of modernity became the essential quality: his quiet, attentive realism could plausibly belong to Akiva. Turning a dramatic instruction into a painting Tubis did not receive a finished visual formula. The writers described what was happening emotionally, explained what the picture needed to carry, and sometimes offered an art-historical reference. He then developed studies before making the final canvas. For the celebrated Boy with a Goldfish, Édouard Manet’s The Fifer was one point of departure. The relationship was not meant to be literal. What mattered was the frontal clarity of the young figure combined with psychological mystery. Tubis’s boy is present before us and enclosed in a world of his own. Television imposed a pace unlike ordinary studio practice. He had roughly a month to complete three large oil paintings central to the third season. Yet the camera cannot conceal a purely decorative imitation, particularly when a canvas returns in close view. Tubis therefore made complete paintings under production pressure, not stage props designed to survive a single shot. Why he avoided the scripts Paradoxically, Tubis did not want to read the full scripts. He became a fan of the series and preferred not to know the characters’ futures. A focused explanation of the emotional task was enough for him to work, and the limited information prevented the painting from becoming a literal caption to the plot. Sometimes the full significance of a portrait became clear to him only when he watched the completed episode. Painting retained its own duration and ambiguity; editing then placed it within the family drama. The collaboration was unusual because Tubis did not control the final meaning, yet created an object capable of absorbing meanings beyond the original commission. Akiva’s hands Michael Aloni, who plays Akiva, visited Tubis’s studio to learn basic painting technique. He needed to do more than imitate an artist’s gestures: he had to hold a brush, mix paint, judge distance and stand before a canvas without theatrical exaggeration. Some close shots show Tubis’s hands. This is more than ordinary doubling. The hand performing the action carries the professional memory of the person who made the picture. Painting enters the performance as labor, and Akiva becomes convincing because another artist’s embodied knowledge is present in the frame. Tubis and Akiva: different worlds, familiar pressure The painter and the character seem far apart. Akiva grew up in a Haredi family in Jerusalem. Tubis was born in Moscow, moved to Israel as a child, studied at Bezalel and developed in a secular art environment. Yet both experienced pressure to choose something more practical. Tubis has recalled that many Russian-speaking peers entered technology and other stable professions, while painting could be dismissed as unreliable or unserious. The pressure was social and economic rather than religious, but it resembled Shulem’s recurring doubt about his son: when would the artist move on to a proper occupation? This parallel helps explain why the paintings fit Akiva so closely. Tubis did not need to reproduce the character’s religious life in order to understand the experience of defending slow work whose result cannot be guaranteed in advance. Bezalel and a Haredi classroom The connection later became more direct when Tubis taught drawing and painting to students in a Haredi program at Bezalel. Classes observed restrictions concerning nude models and some religious imagery, while the professional fundamentals — composition, proportion, light, color and observation — remained unchanged. The experience revealed diversity inside a community that outsiders often imagine as uniform. That insight parallels one of Shtisel’s achievements: it does not explain Haredi characters as an exotic group but allows each to appear as an individual. After the series When Shtisel reached an international audience, viewers began searching for the artist behind the paintings. The attention brought Tubis new recognition and commissions, but it also narrowed public curiosity: many people wanted only the works associated with Akiva. Success therefore carried both opportunity and the risk of standing in the shadow of one’s own fictional alter ego. His independent portraits, interiors, landscapes and empty sports grounds show that the television collaboration did not represent a borrowed style. The series drew upon an already developed ability to speak about time, intimacy and solitude through restrained figurative painting. For a broader discussion of art, faith and family in the drama, see ArtOnline’s related feature Shtisel: An Artist Between Calling, Family and Faith. Sources Mira Fox’s interview in The Forward Russian adaptation of the interview on LiveJournal Shtisel gallery on Alex Tubis’s official website Official biography and exhibitions