Visual arts in Israel or Israeli art refers to visual or plastic arts created by Israeli artists or Jewish painters in the Yishuv. Visual art in Israel encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques, styles and themes reflecting a dialogue with Jewish art throughout the ages and attempts to formulate a national identity.
In 19th century Palestine, much of the art was decorative and sold to religious pilgrims and travelers. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Jewish painters fleeing pogroms in Europe settled in Tel Aviv. In 1925 Yitzhak Frenkel, also known as Alexandre Frenel, considered the father of Israeli modern art, brought to modern Palestine the influence of the École de Paris; by teaching and mentoring many of the nascent state's upcoming great artists. Furthermore, he along with other artists led the movement of Israeli artists to the Artist's Quarter of Tzfat leading to a golden age of art in the city during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
After the destruction of Jewish communities in Europe during the Holocaust, Israel emerged as the center of Jewish art.
19th century – early 1900s
Early art in 19th-century Palestine was mainly decorative art of a religious nature (primarily Jewish or Arab Christian), produced for religious pilgrims, but also for export and local consumption. These objects included decorated tablets, embossed soaps, rubber stamps, etc., most of which were decorated with motifs from graphic arts.Yona Fischer, Art and Artisan in the Land of Israel in the 19th Century (1979, Israel Museum) (in Hebrew). In the Jewish settlements artists worked at gold smithing, silver smithing, and embroidery, producing their works in small crafts workshops. A portion of these works were intended to be amulets. One of the best known of these Jewish artists, Moshe Ben Yitzhak Mizrachi of Jerusalem made Shiviti (or Shivisi, in the Ashkenazic pronunciation, meditative plaques used in some Jewish communities for contemplation over God's name) on glass and amulets on parchments, with motifs such as the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Book of Esther, and views of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.Haviva Peled, "Seven Artists", in Fischer (1979). Objects of applied art were produced also at the "Torah ve-Melakhah" ("Torah and Work") school founded in 1882 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle.Gideon Ofrat, "First Starts: Torah and Work", in Zmanim, 103, Summer 2008 (in Hebrew) This school opened departments for the production of art objects in Neo-Classical and Baroque styles, produced by combining manual labor with modern machines.
A large body of artistic work was produced by European artists, primarily Christian painters, who came to document the sites and landscapes of the "Holy Land". The motive behind these works was orientalist and religious and focused on documentation – first of the painting and later of the photography – of the holy sites and the way of life in the Orient, and on the presentation of exotic people.Yehoshua Ben Arie, Artists and art of the Land of Israel in the 19th Century (1992, Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi) Photographs of the Holy Land, which also served as the basis for paintings, focused on documenting structures and people in full daylight, due to the limitations of photography at that time.P.A. Parry, Jerusalem 1861: Impressions (1978, Ariel) Therefore, an ethnographic approach is in evidence in the photographs, which present a static and stereotypical image of the figures they depict. In the photographs of the French photographer Felix Bonfils, for instance in his prominent photographs of the Holy Land in the last decades of the 19th century, we even see an artificial desert background, in front of which his figures are posed. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, local photographers began to appear, the most important of whom is Khalil Raad, who focused on an ethnographic description of the reality of the Holy Land, in large part colonial. Russia-born Shlomo Narinsky arrived in the Holy Land in 1906 and photographed it in a romantic, pictorial, aesthetising style, with a focus on its oriental and biblical aspects. Narinsky made portraits of personalities like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as well as of traditional-looking Bedouin, Yemenite and Ashkenazi Jews, and of female beauties. Pictures taken by him between 1910 and 1921 were published as postcards by the Jamal Brothers, complete with captions in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Art of "The Land of Israel", 1906–1932 Bezalel
Until the beginning of the 20th century no tradition of fine arts existed in Palestine although European artists came as visitors and painted the "Holy Land". Artists and craftsmen of Judaica objects and other applied arts made up the majority of artists working in the Land of Israel. Although the "Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts," known as "Bezalel", was not the first art school established in the Jewish settlement, its importance in setting the boundaries of the tradition of modern art in Palestine was very great indeed, and it is customary to view its establishment as the beginning of Israeli art. The school was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz with the support of heads of Jewish and Zionist institutions. At Bezalel emphasis was placed on objects of applied art with a metaphysical dimension.
At the art school the influence of European Art Nouveau was in evidence, in addition to other social movements such as the British "Arts and Crafts" movement. In the logo of the quarterly magazine "Yalkut Bezalel", designed by Ze'ev Raban, we see within the ornate frame cherubs with a painter and a sculptor on each side and a lamp maker and a rug weaver next to them. Under the illustration is the caption "Work is the fruit; art is the bud; art without a soul is like prayer without conviction".Yael Granot, "Bezalel and the Ben Shemen Jewelers' Community" in Nurit Canaan-Kedar, Art and Artisans, Roots and Boundaries (2003, Tel Aviv Faculty of the Arts)
Alongside the art school, within its different tracks, studios opened for the production of jewelry, tapestries, paintings and Jewish ceremonial objects that were sold in Jerusalem shops. Schatz's vision included the idea of cross pollination between the various parts of the institution. "There is a practical side to the study of art", Schatz wrote, "The school always needs new drawings for the rugs and silver artifacts. Thus we need a series of artists who have absorbed the prevailing spirit of the school within their art, having studied with the expert teacher who embodies this spirit".Granot in Canaan-Kedar (2003), p.129
In the art created in Bezalel during this period Jewish and religious motifs dominate, for example, descriptions of the holy places, scenes from the Diaspora, etc. The works are decorative and heavily engraved in the "Eastern" style. The descriptions sought a connection between the Biblical period, the Return to Zion [from the Babylonian exile] and the Hasmonean Kingdom of Israel [140–37 BC], and the Zionist aspirations for the development of a Jewish settlement, driven by ideological and Zionist sentiments. The artists did this by borrowing historical motifs they perceived as "Jewish" motifs and designs they perceived as "Eastern". Typography occupied a central place in their designs. Sometimes the text even became the main element in their compositions.Chaya Benjamin, Bezalel of Jerusalem: From the Allen B. Slipka Collection of the Israel Museum (2008, Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
The work of Schatz himself consisted mostly of small-scale sculptures of Jewish subjects, as well as reliefs and memorial plaques in honor of various Zionist leaders. His most famous sculpture is Mattathias (1894), which was influenced by Renaissance sculpture and in particular by the sculpture of Donatello. A different spirit entirely brought Samuel Hirszenberg, to the institution to join the Bezalel teaching staff. Hirszenberg brought European academic painting to Bezalel, and painted Jewish subjects within this framework. The artist Ze'ev Raban created many graphic works in the spirit of Art Nouveau, also known as "Jugendstil" ["Youth Style" in German]. The subjects of these works were "Orientalist" landscapes of the Holy Land and figures from the Bible drawn in the Neoclassical style. Among other well-known artists who taught at Bezalel were Ephraim Moses Lilien, Arnold (Aaron) Lachovsky, Adolf Behrman, Shmuel Levi (Ophel), and others.
Due to financial difficulties and political infighting the school closed in 1929. The museum, which housed many works of art, remained in the Bezalel building. This collection eventually served as the basis for the Art Wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Land of Israel modernism movement At the beginning of the 20th century some of the Bezalel students began to rebel against the rigid artistic tradition that was followed in the institution and turned to more "subjective" art. This period is often called the "Tower of David Period." One of the most prominent of these artists was the sculptor Avraham Melnikov.Of stone and schizophrenia, Haaretz Melnikov suggested a different formal approach, culled from within the art of the Ancient East. This approach was offered as a replacement for the European art forms that dominated Bezalel during the reign of Schatz and Lilien.
The monument "The Roaring Lion" which Melnikov erected at Tel Hai, in memory of the battle of Tel Hai designed in the "Assyrian-Mesopotamian" style, reflected Melnikov's aesthetic ideal. "For many generations", Melnikov asserted, "the Jews were cut off from the figurative tradition in art; there are many ways to express artistic taste, but the taste that was in fashion was European art based on Greek and Roman culture, and as long as Athens was the inspiration for art in Europe, the Jew was instinctively excluded from it".Haaretz, 18 December 1925
Other young artists offered alternative artistic approaches, turning to modern art, of which Schatz and Melnikov strongly disapproved. This showed up also in the exhibitions they organized. In 1920, for example, the "Hebrew Artists Association" was formed; it organized the annual exhibition, and during the years 1923 to 1928 held an "Exhibition of Land of Israel Artists" in the Tower of David in Jerusalem's Old City, organized by Joseph Zaritsky, Shmuel (Ophel) Levy, Melnikov, and others. In these exhibitions art in the "Bezalel Art" style were exhibited next to art influenced by the European Post-Impressionist and Expressionist styles. Other exhibitions of Modern Art were held in the hut attached to the Ohel theater in Tel Aviv between 1926 and 1929.
Another organization of Israel artists was called "Egged" (Amalgamation) and included artists such as Arieh (Leo) Lubin, Pinchas Litvinovsky, Sionah Tagger, Chana Orloff, Yossef Zaritsky, Chaim Gliksberg, Reuven Rubin, Arieh Allweil, and Nachum Gutman. Some of its members, like Orloff and Tagger, displayed influences from French Cubism in their works. The group held an exhibition in 1929 in an apartment on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, opposite the Mograbi Cinema. Another exhibition of modern art was held in 1930 in the Tel Aviv Museum and was called "The Beginnings of Modernism in Israeli Painting, 1920–1930".To a significant extent the modern painters began to create a "Hebrew" version of Post-Impressionist painting using a palette of light colors, an attraction to expressive brushstrokes, and a tendency toward naïve, flat painting. In addition to traditional subjects such as portraits, many artists depicted the Land of Israel in landscapes that added a romantic perspective to their subjects. This style of these works is sometimes called the "Land of Israel School".