Bracha L. Ettinger - Life and Work

Life and Work

Bracha Ettinger, Israeli and British who lives mainly in France, was born in Tel Aviv (March 23, 1948). She received her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1975. She then moved to London and studied, trained and worked between 1976 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, the Tavistock Clinic and the Philadelphia Association with R. D. Laing. Her daughter the actress Lana Ettinger was born in London. She returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. Ettinger, who painted and drew since early childhood, then decided to dedicate herself fully to painting and art and moved to Paris, where she lived and worked from 1981 to 2003. Her son Itai was born in 1988. Alongside painting she began writing, and received a D.E.A. in Psychoanalysis from the University Paris VII Diderot in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Aesthetics of Art from the University of Paris VIII in 1996.

Her paintings eventually aroused the interest of different curators in French museums, and she had One-person exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in 1987 and at the Museum of Calais in 1988. In 1995 she had a One-person exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1996 she participated in the Contemporary art section of "Face à l'Histoire. 1933-1996" exhibition in the Pompidou Centre. In 2000 she had a Retrospective at the Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, and in 2001 a Solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. In parallel to working as artist Bracha Ettinger continued to train as psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida and Jacques-Alain Miller, and has become one of the most influential contemporary French feminists. Around 1988 Ettinger began her Conversation and Photography project. Her personal art notebooks have become source for theoretical articulations, and her art has inspired art historians (among them the distinguished art historian Griselda Pollock) and philosophers (like Jean-François Lyotard and Christine Buci-Glucksmann) who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.

Even though she was still based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was Visiting Professor (1997–1998) and then Research Professor (1999–2004) in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Since 2001 she has also been Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (now CentreCATH). Ettinger has partly returned to Israel in 2003, keeping studios in both Paris and Tel Aviv ever since, and became a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem until 2006. Ettinger is activist against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Ettinger is considered now to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Ettinger's art was recently analysed at length in the book Women Artists at the Millennium and in Griselda Pollock's Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum.

Some of her specific academic fields of endeavor are feminist psychoanalysis, art, aesthetics, ethics, the gaze, sexual difference and gender studies, Jacques Lacan, the feminine, early (including pre-birth) psychic impressions, pre-maternal and maternal subjectivity.