Harold Rubin

Harold Rubin
Harold Rubin at Levontin 7, Tel Aviv, 2013. Photo by Mark Segal.
Background information
Born	(1932-05-13) 13 May 1932 (age 85)

Harold Rubin (born 13 May 1932) is a South African-born Israeli visual artist and free jazz clarinettist.

Harold Rubin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 13 May 1932. He attended the Jeppe High School for Boys and received private instruction in the fine arts. Instructed in the classical clarinet as a teenager, he developed a fascination with jazz and began playing at the Skyline Night Club at eighteen. Enrolled as an architecture student at the University of the Witwatersrand, he completed his professional studies after further education in London.

Rubin's creative endeavours in South African society during the 1950s and 1960s dissented against the apartheid-era Afrikaner establishment by defying the country's racist social norms. Rubin organised his own jazz group in the 1950s, snuck into black townships, and played alongside black musicians. Rubin's visual artwork was first exhibited in 1956. Among Rubin's contributions to the South African fine arts in this spirit was the 1961 Sharpeville, a series of drawings devoted to the brutality of the Apartheid-era authorities during the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

Rubin's most controversial project on the South African art scene of the 1960s was My Jesus, a provocative rendering of the crucifixion in which Jesus Christ appeared as a nude black figure with the head of a monster. The work contained the inscription "I forgive you O Lord, for you know not what you do" – a sardonically reversed "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do" – and depicted the naked figure with a slight hint of an erection. The controversial image was put on display alongside other anti-establishment works at a Johannesburg gallery in 1962. The exhibition caused such furore that the government sent the police to shut down the exhibition and referred its artwork for an examination by its censorship board. Rubin became the second South African to be charged with blasphemy.