Israeli ceramics are ceramics designed either in Mandatory Palestine or Israel from the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to traditional pottery, in Israel there are artists whose works were created in an industrial environment. Until the late 1970s there existed in Israel a local tradition that emphasized the local values of nature as an expression of Zionist identity. From the 1980s artistic expressions that sought to undercut this tradition began to appear in the works of Israeli artists, who combined ceramics with other artistic media and with personal, critical agendas.
Beginning of ceramics in the Land of Israel, 1900–1930
Palestinian ceramics At the beginning of the 20th century the Palestinian tradition of designing pottery from local materials dominated in Israel.See: Gideon Ofrat, The Beginnings of Israeli Ceramics, 1932-1962, Ceramic Artists Association of Israel. [in Hebrew] The pottery was primary functional, intended primarily for the use of the local population in the Land of Israel. Other vessels were imported from neighboring areas.
Pots were thrown on potter's wheels mostly in urban areas or in pottery villages. It was a craft traditionally worked by men. In the census carried out on the streets of the land of Israel in 1928 during the British Mandate, 77 pottery villages (of individuals or groups) were listed, while in the 1931 census, 211 different pottery villages were listed.See: Ziffer, Irit, "Water Vessels in Traditional Arab Pottery," in To the Fountain: The Maiden and the Jar: A Local and Multi-Cultural Image, Kenaan-Kedar, Nurith (Curator) (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2013), 60. [in Hebrew] Many of the pottery villages were centralized, based on geographical proximity of the potters' families. Examples of this can be found in the pottery workshops held in the pottery villages in Rashia al Fakhar (Tel Faher) at the foot of Mount Hermon.See: Feldman, Nir, Material From the Wind: Chava Samuel, a Pioneer of Ceramic Art in Israel (Rishon LeZion: Rishon LeZion Museum, 2011), 11. [in Hebrew] Or in Hebron, at the various workshops of the Alfahori family. These pots were fired at a low temperature in traditional kilns that burned wood, charcoal, or animal droppings. Different workshops were held in Gaza as well, where they produced unique black pottery (فخار اسود), produced by adding organic materials, such as barley husks, to the kiln or by reduction firing. The smoke from the process of the burning of these materials within the kiln lent the pottery its characteristic black color.See: Ziffer, Irit, "Water Vessels in Traditional Arab Pottery," in To the Fountain: The Maiden and the Jar: A Local and Multi-Cultural Image, Kenaan-Kedar, Nurith(Curator) (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2013), 47-48 [in Hebrew], and: Ziffer, Irit ,"A Healthy Foundation for the Creations of the Younger Generation – A Note on Israeli Pottery Tradition," in The Third Biennale of Israeli Ceramics (Exhibition catalogue, Mark Tsatsula, ed.), Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2005), 110. [in Hebrew]
In addition, a tradition existed of producing pots made of clay mixed with straw or gravel for cooking and other utilitarian uses by the local population. This work was carried out by hand by women, and the pots were fired in improvised kilns, in kitchen ovens, or sometimes not fired at all. Pottery of this type, which was produced in the Samaria area and in Ramallah, for example, was typically decorated with color made from rusted iron that originated in the Jordan Valley.See: Irit Ziffer, "A Healthy Foundation for the Creations of the Younger Generation – A Note on Israeli Pottery Tradition," in The Third Biennale of Israeli Ceramics (Exhibition catalogue, Mark Tsatsula, ed.), Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2005), 110. [in Hebrew]
As the century progressed, this tradition began dying out as a result of industrialization, and in addition, from the 1980s competing pottery from other countries began to be imported.See: Shlomit Bauman, "Detachment and Continuity as an Influence on Creative Processes in Israeli Ceramic Design," History and Theory, Bezalel II/16 – Creation Modes: Jewelry and Fashion, April 2010. [in Hebrew] Until 1989, for example, 11 different workshops were active in Hebron. However, by 2007 there remained only 8 potters there.Irit Ziffer, "Water Vessels in Traditional Arab Pottery," in To the Fountain: The Maiden and the Jar: A Local and Multi-Cultural Image, Nurith Kenaan-Kedar (Curator) (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2013), 60. [in Hebrew] In 1983 The Eretz Israel Museum mounted an exhibition displaying the pottery of the Lebanese village of Rashia al Fakhar."Exhibitions," Davar (30 December 1983). [in Hebrew]
Armenian ceramic art
At the end of 1918, members of the British Military Administration and the Pro-Jerusalem Society invited David Ohannessian, a master Armenian ceramicist from Ottoman Kütahya and a survivor of the Armenian Genocide who was living as a refugee in Aleppo, to travel to Jerusalem to renovate the ceramic tiles of the Dome of the Rock. In the late summer of 1919, Ohannessian returned to Kütahya, under the protection of the British Military Administration, to obtain the necessary raw materials and recruit remaining Armenian ceramicists to return to Jerusalem with him and participate in his workshop. This first Armenian atelier was supported, in part, by the British interest in traditional arts in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement. Armenian ceramic art can be traced back to the 15th century, to the Ottoman Anatolian cities of İznik and Kütahya, but the combination of the ancient art of the Land of Israel and Christian motifs created a unique artistic synthesis.
David Ohannessian opened a workshop that also produced utilitarian and decorative pottery. He created tiles for the American Colony Hotel (1923), the fountain house in St. John's Hospital, the tiled dome in the Rockefeller Museum garden, etc. Motifs in his work are Cypresses trees, tulips and grapevines typical of traditional Seljuk and Ottoman decorative art.See: Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, The Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2002), 29-52. [in Hebrew] He also used figures derived from Armenian medieval illuminations, designs from European renaissance majolica, and bird motifs based on an Armenian 5th-6th century mosaic floor, discovered during an archeological dig in Jerusalem during the 1890s.
The workshop that Ohannessian founded in Jerusalem followed the tradition of ceramic making as he had practiced and overseen it in his atelier in Kütahya, in Ottoman Anatolia, which had flourished prior to World War I and his deportation to the Syria. According to traditional methods, the processes of clay and glaze mixing, wheel throwing, design, painting, and firing were performed by a variety of artisans, all supervised by Ohannessian, some of whom specialized in design and others who were experts at the potter's wheel. Ohannessian was skilled himself in all facets of the art and trained a variety of apprentices, as he had done in Anatolia. He maintained particular expertise in painting ceramics and design. Upon the founding of his workshop on the Via Dolorosa, he cooperated with Near East Relief, to train a number of Armenian orphans of the genocide, giving them the skills to engage in the art on a professional basis. Some of his workshop's output, especially the monumental architectural tile works, were signed by the chief artist. Numerous other vases and plates identified their respective makers through small glazed initials on the bottom, usually painted in ochre. Ohannessian's workshop used a stone wood-burning kiln, built to his specifications in 1919. The model implemented in this workshop was used for other Armenian workshops founded subsequently in Jerusalem.
The artists Megardish Karakashian and Nishan Balian, who left Ohannessian's workshop in 1922, founded a workshop together called "Palestine Pottery," where they developed a line of design with figurative images that were alien to traditional Turkish ceramic art (with the exception of Kütahya's own figurative tradition, as practiced by its Armenian ceramicists).. For example, the two of them combined designs from ancient mosaics discovered in the Land of Israel, such as the "Birds Mosaic" (Jerusalem) or the mosaic from Hisham's Palace in Jericho. Often these images were imbued with Christian theological interpretations.See: Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, The Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2002), 53-91. [in Hebrew] The joint workshop functioned continually until 1964, when Stefan KarakashianGabriel Stern, "Beit Hayotzer at Netiv Hayisurim," Al Hamishmar, (18 August 1967). [in Hebrew] and Marie Balian, heirs of the founders, founded two separate workshops that made use of images from the past as well as new images that they created.
The ceramics of Bezalel
Within the framework of the "Bezalel School of Art and Craft", a ceramics studio was founded in 1924, with Jacob Eisenberg at its head.Nurit Shilo-Cohen, Schatz's "Bezalel," 1906-1929 (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1980), 364. [in Hebrew] These were the last years (1920-1929) of the institution that saw itself during this period less and less as an academy of art, and more and more as a series of partially independent art workshops. By 1917 Boris Schatz was considering opening a department for the design of cast decorative items, as well as a department of painting on "porcelain." This craft was already being taught at Bezalel using ready-made porcelain brought in from outside Palestine for use at Bezalel.See: Boris Schatz, "How to Encourage and Promote Home Crafts in Jerusalem and in Eretz Israel in General," printed in: Bezalel: 1906-1929, ed. Nurit Shilo-Cohen (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1980), 149-186, especially 173-175, and also: Bezalel 100, Book 1, ed. David Tartakover and Gideon Ofrat (Jerusalem: Hapais Council for the Culture and Arts, 2006), 174. [in Hebrew] Schatz saw in the activity of the factory for bricks and roofing tiles that operated on the grounds of the "Schneller Orphanage" in Jerusalem from approximately 1895, proof of the practicality of such a local industry, which would make use of local materials brought from Motza.
Eisenberg, who was a student at Bezalel from 1913 to 1919, after his graduation went to study in Vienna, at the School for Arts and Crafts, where he took a continuing education course in ceramic design and production.Many of Bezalel's pupils, such as Nachum Gutman, Israel Hirschfeld, and others, went to Vienna for training. The department separated the design of the ceramics, mostly taught by Bezalel instructors and particularly by Ze'ev Raban, from the practical production of the pieces. Of the objects produced in this department, the best known are the wall tiles and decorations from the 1920s and 1930s. These works include the tiles on the walls of the Ahad HaAm School, the Bialik House, and the Lederberg House in Tel Aviv, and in the synagogue of Moshav Zekanim.
The style of tile design was influenced by Art Art Nouveau and by the "Jugendstil style. This style is expressed in the flatness of the area described and in the richly decorated borders. With regard to ideas, "Bezalel tiles" expressed a tendency toward transcendentalism, seen in their borders cast with images taken from Jewish tradition and Zionist content.See: Alec Mishory, ""Zionist Resurrection on the Facade of 'The Municipal School' in Tel-Aviv," in Lo and Behold (Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2000), 94-116. [In Hebrew]
Beginning of Hebrew ceramics, 1932–1950