Painting
At the outset, Bezalel's artistic orientation, which aimed at creating an 'original Jewish
art' by fusing European techniques with Middle Eastern influences,
resulted in paintings of biblical scenes depicting romanticized
perceptions of the past linked to utopian visions of the future, with
images drawn from the ancient Jewish Eastern communities as well as
from the local Bedouin. Artists of this period include Shmuel
Hirszenberg (1865-1908), Ephraim Lilien (1874-1925) and Abel Pann
(1883-1963).
The first major art exhibition (1921), held at David's
Citadel in Jerusalem's Old
City, was dominated by painters from Bezalel.
Soon afterwards, however, Bezalel's anachronistic, national-oriental
narrative style was challenged both by young rebels within the
Bezalel establishment and newly-arrived artists, who began searching
for an idiom appropriate to what they termed 'Hebrew' as opposed to
'Jewish' art. In an attempt to define their new cultural identity and
express their view of the country as a source of national renewal,
they depicted the daily reality of the Near Eastern environment, with
emphasis on the bright light and glowing colors of the landscape, and
stressed exotic subject matter such as the simple Arab lifestyle
through a predominantly primitive technique, as seen in the works of
painters including Israel Paldi, Tziona Tagger, Pinhas Litvinovsky,
Nahum Gutman and Reuven Rubin. By the middle of the decade, most of
the leading artists were established in the new, dynamic city of Tel
Aviv (est. 1909), which has remained the center of the country's
artistic activity.
The art of the 1930s was strongly influenced by
early 20th century Western innovations, the most powerful of which
was the expressionism emanating from the ateliers of Paris. Works of
painters such as Moshe Castel, Menachem Shemi and Arie Aroch tended
to portray an emotionally charged, often mystical reality through
their use of distortion and, although themes still dealt with local
landscapes and images, the narrative components of ten years earlier
gradually disappeared and the oriental-Moslem world vanished
entirely. German expressionism was introduced in the middle of the
decade with the arrival of immigrant artists fleeing the terror of
rising Nazism. Joining German-born artists Anna Ticho and Leopold
Krakauer who had come to Jerusalem some 20 years earlier, this group,
which included Hermann Struck, Mordechai Ardon and Jakob Steinhardt,
devoted itself largely to subjective interpretations of the landscape
of Jerusalem and the surrounding hills. These artists made a
significant contribution to the development of local art, notably
through the leadership given to the Bezalel Academy of Art by its
directors, Ardon and Steinhardt, under whose guidance a new
generation of artists grew to maturity.
The break with Paris during World War II and the
trauma of the Holocaust caused
several artists, including Moshe Castel, Yitzhak Danziger and Aharon
Kahana, to adopt the emerging 'Canaanite' ideology which sought to
identify with the original inhabitants of the land and create a 'new
Hebrew people' by reviving ancient myths and pagan motifs. The 1948
War of Independence led other artists, including Naftali Bezem
and Avraham Ofek, to adopt a militant style with a clear social
message. But the most significant group formed in this period was
'New Horizons,' which aimed to free Israeli painting from its local
character and literary associations and bring it into the sphere of
contemporary European art. Two major trends developed: Yosef Zaritzky,
the group's dominant figure, tended towards an atmospheric lyricism,
characterized by the presence of identifiable fragments of local
landscape and cool color tones. His style was adopted by others,
notably Avigdor Stematsky and Yehezkel Streichman. The second trend,
a stylized abstractionism ranging from geometricism to a formalism
frequently based on symbols, was strongly evident in the works of the
Romanian-born artist Marcel Janco, who studied in Paris and was one
of the founders of Dadaism. The New Horizons group not only
legitimized abstract art in Israel but was also its dominant force up
to the early 1960s.
Artists of the 1960s provided the connecting link
between the activities of the New Horizons group and the search for
individuality in the next decade. Streichman and Stematsky, both
teachers at the Avni Institute in Tel
Aviv, strongly influenced a second generation of artists,
including Raffi Lavi, Aviva Uri, Uri Lifschitz and Lea Nikel who, in
their search for a personal imagery, challenged the refined brushwork
of lyrical abstractionism with pluralistic works, encompassing
various expressive and figurative abstract styles derived from
sources abroad. At Bezalel, Ardon's influence, especially with regard
to themes and techniques, evidenced itself in the works of Avigdor
Arikha, who developed a world of forms filled with intense spiritual
meaning, and in the return to figurative themes evocative of the Holocaust and traditional Jewish subjects, as seen in the surrealistic
paintings of Yossl Bergner and Samuel Bak. Jacob Agam is a pioneer in
optic and kinetic art, and his work is exhibited in many countries.
While the minimalism characteristic of art in the
1970s almost always included amorphic, transparent forms reminiscent
of local abstract painting, the exposition of ideas rather than
aesthetics dominated the works of artists such as Larry Abramson and
Moshe Gershuni. The artists of the 1980s and 1990s, working in an
atmosphere of individual experimentation, appear to be searching for
content and a sense of Israel's spirit by integrating a wide range of
materials and techniques, as well as images based on local and
universal elements as diverse as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
and the human emotions of stress and fear. Current trends, as in the
work of Pinhas Cohen-Gan, Deganit Beresht, Gabi Klasmer, Tsibi Geva,
Tzvi Goldstein, David Reeb and others, continue to strive towards
broadening the definition of Israeli art beyond its traditional
concepts and materials, both as the unique expression of an
indigenous culture and as a dynamic component of contemporary Western
art.
Sources: Israeli
Foreign Ministry |