A blinding spark flashed
within the concealed of the concealed,
from the mystery of the Infinite,
a cluster of vapor in formlessness …
Under the impact of breaking through,
one high and hidden point shone.
Beyond that point nothing is known.
So it is called the Beginning.
— Zohar, The Book of Radiance
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
Ari Munzner was one of the most delightful people I have met over my 30 years at the Jewish World. A person who pondered the cosmic mysteries, he was far out, in the jargon of hippie days.
The esteemed artist and educator allowed the AJW to use his artwork on the cover of three editions of our Community Guide, the annual comprehensive directory of Jewish resources in Minnesota published over 17 years.
Remembrance
I would call Ari to request his help and ask if he was still painting. “I’m still shmearing paint,” he would reply with a laugh.
And as we go to press with our Rosh Hashana special edition, I recall that a painting by Ari graced the cover of the Sept. 6, 2019, High Holidays issue. The beautiful painting composed of thousands of tiny brush strokes was titled “Genesis, 7-1-2019.”
Munzner’s “Genesis” series began in 1956 and grew to more than 500 paintings. The series of artworks “investigates the relationship of art, science and mythology through the mystery of the microcosm and the macrocosm,” in the artist’s words.
The newspaper explained in 2019, in a note below Munzner’s artwork on Page 1: “Since Rosh Hashana is referred to as the Birthday of the World (God created the world on the first day of Tishrei, according to Jewish tradition), it seems appropriate to feature an artwork that inspires contemplation on the origin of the universe.”
Aribert (Ari) Paul Munzner died Aug. 1, in St. Louis Park. He was 95.
He was born Jan. 9, 1930, in Mannheim, Germany. “His father Ralph Munzner was a medical doctor who had done cancer research at Heidelberg in the 1920s, his mother Bertha Munzner was an accomplished pianist,” according to an obituary read by his daughters, Naomi and Tamara, at an Aug. 9 celebration of his life at the California Building in northeast Minneapolis. The well-attended gathering took place in his art studio.
The obituary continued: “Ari and his family escaped Nazi Germany in 1937, with the help of Bertha’s industrialist foster brother who worked for the steelmaker Otto Wolff at the time. They spent two years in Baghdad, Iraq, where their identity as Jewish refugees was a secret. Ari went from speaking only German and Hebrew to learning Arabic and French from a Jesuit tutor. They entered the United States in 1939 and lived in New York City for two years while Ralph studied to pass the medical exams in English; Ari learned English from reading comic books. The family moved to the small town of Alton in upstate N.Y., where Ralph was the doctor and coroner. Ari lived there until graduating from high school in 1948.”
From that unconventional early life, Munzner went on to attend Syracuse University, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1953. During this time, Ari was “studying fine art by day and hanging out in jazz clubs with the abstract expressionists in Greenwich Village by night,” as per the obituary. “Abstract art was considered so radical that he was asked to leave the MFA program at Syracuse, but the very paintings that got him thrown out of Syracuse got him admitted to the Cranbrook Academy of Art,” where he was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1955.
In an ironic turn, his three-page master’s thesis, titled “Art Cannot Be Taught,” landed him a job teaching art at the Minnesota School of Art, which later became the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Ari taught at MCAD from 1955 to 1993, when he commenced painting full time. He continued to mentor MFA students for many more years before re-retiring in 2005.
Among the eulogies offered at the Aug. 9 celebration of life was one by Minneapolis artist Lynn (Leah) Golberstein. She was not present, but her remembrance was read to the gathering.
She said of Munzner, “As a teacher and mentor, you were truly ‘Maestro’ to so many of us.”
“You were always totally present and genuinely saw who each of us was,” Golberstein wrote. “Whenever the world seemed filled with pain, your go-to antidote was to go into the studio and to create something positive to balance out the negative. You chose to see the potential in a situation, even when it was hard to find. Your intellectual breadth and depth combined with your sharp memory and genuine curiosity about people allowed you to meaningfully engage with anyone and everyone.”
Tom DeBiaso, professor emeritus at MCAD, recalled Ari as “a guiding force at Minneapolis College of Art and Design‚ always on the right side of every issue, with unrelenting energy, fierce dedication and an incredible warmth of character that uplifted everyone around him.”
“There was never a time when Ari wasn’t an integral part of the fabric of MCAD,” DeBiaso continued. “Through his lived example as an artist and educator, he helped shape generations of students, his colleagues and the academic direction of the college. Whether he was serving as faculty, mentor, administrator or friend, Ari touched us deeply with his knowledge, vision and unwavering belief in the power of the creative process.”
Ellen Meyer, who was Munzner’s MCAD colleague from 1979 to1989 “and overall, dear friends with him for 46 years,” recalled Ari’s creative process, which “began with a sung meditation and then his paint brush was lifted, not just with his arm, but his entire body, which danced through the work’s creation. His was a quest for the unknowable through the poetry of painting.”
On a visit with Ari in his studio in the Ivy Arts Building in Minneapolis many years ago, he showed me some of the jazz albums that he listened to while painting. There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between Jewish mysticism and jazz, which inspired Ari’s creativity. He also played the harmonica.
Meyer added, “His painting, teaching and administrative work were separate endeavors, but entirely intertwined. As a mentor to me and also the dearest of friends, I think of adjectives that describe him, which you, no doubt, also share: inspiring, playful, brilliant, inventive, serious, mission-driven, spiritual, thoughtful, wise.”
Getting back to the obituary written by his daughters, they mentioned that “Ari’s artwork investigates the relationship of art, science and mythology through the mystery of the microcosm and the macrocosm. He was awarded grants to study with photomicroscopist Roman Vishniac, to experiment with 3M’s Scanamural system, and to use the 3M BFA Paint System to paint with a light pen long before computer paint systems were widely available.”
Some readers will recall that Vishniac was the famed photographic chronicler of Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe — the world that was destroyed by Hitler and his henchmen.
“Ari met his wife-to-be Joan through the University of Minnesota fencing club shortly after moving to Minneapolis,” his daughters recalled. “Joan was a champion fencer and graduate student in French, who became a teacher of French and German. After a long courtship, they married in 1960. They moved almost every year, often renting houses from professors away on sabbatical, until buying a house of their own in Uptown Minneapolis in 1974 — after Joan put her foot down to stop doing constant moves with two small children.”
Tamara and Naomi also mentioned that their parents spent a one-year sabbatical, in 1967, in Florence, Italy, and Tunis, Tunisia. “In 2002, they traveled to Europe together again by boat, on the QE2. Ari cared for Joan during her long illness through Parkinson’s disease; they were in love until the day she died in 2016.”
During the 2020 uprising in Minneapolis after the police killing of George Floyd, the roof of the Ivy Arts Building caught fire and was doused with water by firefighters. Unfortunately, Ari’s studio was flooded, and numerous artworks stored there were destroyed or damaged. Despite the loss of his work, Munzner, then 90 years old, moved to a studio across town in the California Building and began anew.
The Jewish World also used Ari’s artworks for our Rosh Hashana edition covers in 2001 and 2008. For the 2008 High Holidays issue, we discussed his artwork, a bright intricate painting that evokes a burst of energy — perhaps, the Big Bang.
Munzner was fascinated by the concept of tzimtzum (concealment and contraction) — as articulated by Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Kabbalist from Tsfat, Israel — which informed his painting.
“The universe contracted itself in order to create itself,” he explained about the mystical view of the world’s origins. “It’s a marvelous concept of what at first appears to be a contradiction; but it’s not,” he said, and commented that Luria’s idea resonates in Einsteinian theories and quantum mechanics.
Regarding the Bible’s first word, B’reishit, Munzner said it’s not “in the beginning, but in a beginning; and each moment is a new beginning of cosmic consciousness that we might contribute to.”
May Ari’s memory always be a blessing.
(American Jewish World, Sept. 2025)
