Art in Zion: The Genesis of National Art in Jewish Palestine (Routledgecurzon Jewish Studies Series)

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Art in Zion Art in Zion examines the complex relationship between art and national ideology, through the specific case of the artistic activity in Jewish Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century and set against the backdrop of the Zionist settlement and the process of nation-building. Dalia Manor focuses on two phases of this early development: on works made by the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, and paintings by a group in the 1920s known as the Modernists, in particular by Reuven Rubin. Beyond the differences between these two groups, the book examines their shared aspiration to create a genuine national art that would reflect the renewed contact of the Jews with the Land of Israel by drawing on the country itself—its landscapes and population. This book considers to what extent this search for an authentic local, artistic expression relies on ideas, themes and styles borrowed from European culture; and the seeming discrepancy between the artists’ personal commitment to the Zionist ideology and the absence of expected imagery relating to this ideology in their art. Whether turning to traditional Jewish symbols and biblical themes, or adopting a certain contemporary French ‘look’, both groups created an imagined and idealised view of the country and its people—Jews and Arabs—as an oriental Arcadia of the pre-Zionist, pre-modern era. This book analyses the ideological and social climate, and the critical response to this art, elucidating the meaning and function of such an idealised picture. Art in Zion offers a new perspective on the scholarship of Zionism and the Jewish settlement in Palestine, in pre-state Israel. As one of the few academic studies on Israel’s visual arts, and a unique study of the link between art and national ideology, it is a significant addition to any study of modern Jewish art and culture. The book also sheds light on a little-explored aspect of cultural nationalism. Dr Dalia Manor is an art historian and critic with a special interest in modern art and national identity. She has published numerous articles, catalogues and reviews on art in Israel. She is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Near and Middle East at SOAS, University of London, where she has lectured for many years.

RoutledgeCurzon Jewish Studies Series

Series Editor: Oliver Leaman University of Kentucky Studies which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology and religion as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals. Medieval Jewish Philosophy An Introduction Dan Cohn-Sherbok Facing the Other The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Edited by Seán Hand Moses Maimonides Oliver Leaman A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption Norbert M.Samuelson On Liberty Jewish Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Daniel H.Frank Referring to God Jewish and Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives Edited by Paul Helm

Judaism, Philosophy, Culture Selected Studies by E.I.J.Rosenthal Erwin Rosenthal Philosophy of the Talmud Hyam Maccoby From Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design Its Beginning, its Definition, its End John Wilkinson Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt Margaret Betz Hull Deconstructing the Bible Abraham ibn Ezra’s Introduction to the Torah Irene Lancaster Image of the Black in Jewish Culture A History of the Other Abraham Melamed From Falashas to Ethiopian Jews Daniel Summerfield Philosophy in a Time of Crisis Don Isaac Abravanel: Defender of the Faith Seymour Feldman Jews, Muslims and Mass Media Mediating the ‘Other’ Edited by Tudor Parfitt with Yulia Egorova Jews of Ethiopia The Birth of an Elite Edited by Emanuela Trevisan Semi and Tudor Parfitt Art in Zion The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine Dalia Manor Hebrew Language and Jewish Thought David Patterson

Art in Zion The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine

Dalia Manor

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN in association with The European Jewish Publication Society, PO Box 19948, London N3 3ZJ Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Dalia Manor All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The European Jewish publication Society is a registered charity which gives grants to assist in the publication and distribution of books relevant to Jewish literature, history, religion, philosophy, politics and culture. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-61142-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34666-1 (Adobe e-reader Format) ISBN 0-415-31836-X (Print Edition)

To Ram

Contents

List of illustrations

x

Note on terms, translation and transliteration

xvii

List of abbreviations

xviii

Acknowledgements Introduction PART I Bezalel Institute and the myth of origin of Israeli art

xix 1 8

1 Ideological background

10

2 Boris Schatz, founder of Bezalel

18

3 The Bezalel Institute

26

4 The iconography of Bezalel art

40

5 A ‘Hebrew style’: the early quest for local Jewish art

69

PART II Art for the nation: the work of Reuven Rubin

73

6 Beginnings in Romania

75

7 Rubin in Palestine

89

PART III The Modernists of the 1920s

107

8 A view from afar: landscapes of the homeland

109

9 Orientalism, Primitivism and folklore: looking at the country’s ‘types’

128

10 Art and ideas: artists, critics and the role of art

166

Conclusion

183

Appendix A

188

Appendix B

190

Notes

191

Bibliography

236

Index

250

List of illustrations Figures Paintings are oil on canvas unless indicated otherwise.

2.1

Boris Schatz, Mattathias, the Hasmonean, 1894; photograph (original lost). Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

22

3.1

Bezalel letterhead and stamp, 1914; Emblem design by E.M.Lilien

26

3.2

A Bezalel carpet depicting Rachel’s Tomb, prior to 1914; 36×42 28 cm. Anton Felton

3.3

A Bezalel mirror depicting Jacob and Rachel; silver filigree and 30 semi-precious stones, 21.5×13.5 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem, gift of Sarah Laport, Florida, 1974

3.4

Bezalel artists, Holy Ark (with scenes from the life of Moses, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, symbols of the twelve tribes, the Zodiac and Biblical verses), 1916–23; brass, semi-precious stones, enamel, silver, filigree, ivory and shell, 175.26×88.9×70 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago. (Designed by Z.Raban with Y.Zucker and D.Rivkind; ivory carvings: M.Gur Arieh)

4.1

Bezalel (Sharar group), Hanukkah lamp depicting a Menorah and 41 winged lions, 1920s; brass repoussé, 20.1×26.7×5.1 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago

4.2

A Bezalel carpet depicting the Menorah, prior to 1914; 146×98 cm. Anton Felton

36

43

4.3

Marvadia workshop, Bezalel, carpet depicting Rachel’s Tomb, 45 1920s; 55.9×116.2 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago

4.4

A Bezalel stencil, Souvenir from eretz yisrael, with depictions of 45 Rachel’s Tomb, the Western Wall, Tower of David, the Temple Site, Tiberias; sheet metal, cut-out, 16×20 cm. Collection: Davara Family, Herzliya, Israel. Photograph: Timna Rosenheimer

4.5

Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, Views from Jerusalem, 1836–37; lithograph, drawn in Jerusalem, printed in Hurben, Germany, 30×43 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

47

4.6

A Bezalel carpet depicting the Bezalel building, 1920s; 45×147 cm. Anton Felton

48

4.7

Bezalel cameos, shell carving: Left: Judith, 5×4 cm; Right: Ruth, 49 d. 4 cm. Collection: Davara Family, Herzliya, Israel. Photograph: Timna Rosenheimer

4.8

A Bezalel Passover plate with depictions of the Exodus from Egypt; wood inlaid and shell, d. 31.2 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

4.9

Erich Goldberg, Drawing for the Spies; 1911–14; ink, pencil and 51 watercolour on paper, 11.5×11.2 cm. Collection: Mishkan LeOmanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod

4.10 Erich Goldberg, Drawing for Samson and the Lion, 1911–14; pen on paper, d. 4.7 cm. Collection: Mishkan Le-Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod

50

57

4.11 A.Rabin, Bezalel student, plate with depiction of Samson and the 58 Lion, late 1920s; copper repoussé, d. 48 cm. Collection: Alec Mishory, Tel Aviv

4.12 Wall rug with depiction of Theodor Herzl and the Tower of David, early 20th century; 102×61 cm. Anton Felton

61

4.13 Ahraon Shaul Schur, A Yemenite rabbi in Jerusalem, 1917; charcoal on paper, 44×28.5 cm. Collection: Schur family

63

4.14 Ahraon Shaul Schur, A Bucharan girl from Jerusalem, 1930; watercolour on paper, 31×23 cm. Collection: Schur family

64

4.15 Bezalel artists, binding for the second Golden Book of the Jewish 67 National Fund, 1913; repoussé, ivory, silver, filigree, precious stones, gilt, leather, 67.5×54. Photo archive: Keren Kayemeth Lelsrael/Jewish National Fund. (The ploughmen after E.Goldberg; ivory carving: M.Gur-Arieh) 6.1

Reuven Rubin, title page, ha-tikva Publicatie Zionista Bilunara, Romania, 1915

78

6.2

Ephraim Moses Lilien, souvenir postcard for the 5th Zionist Congress, 1901

79

6.3

Reuven Rubin, poster of keren ha-yesod, 1921; 84×59.3. Judah L.Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

80

6.4

Reuven Rubin, The Temptation in the Desert, 1920–21; 98.5×132.5 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

82

6.5

Ferdinand Hodler, Night, 1890; 116×299 cm. Kunstmuseum Bern, Staat Bern

83

6.6

Ferdinand Hodler, Truth (II), 1903; 208×295 cm. © 2003 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved

85

6.7

Reuven Rubin, False Prophets, 1922; 110×96.5 cm. Private collection, New York. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

86

6.8

Reuven Rubin, Madonna of the Homeless, 1922; 130×180 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

88

7.1

Reuven Rubin, Fruit of the Land, 1923, central panel of First Fruits; 188×202 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

92

7.2

Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria, 1891; 114×89 cm. Metropolitan 93 Museum of Art, New York

7.3

Reuven Rubin, The Prophet in the Desert, 1923; woodcut, 95 33×28 cm, from the series The God Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

7.4

Reuven Rubin, The Dancers of Meron, 1923; woodcut, 33×28 cm, from the series The God Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

96

7.5

Reuven Rubin, Family in Exile, 1923; woodcut, 28×33 cm, from the series The God Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

97

8.1

Yosef Zaritsky, Safed, Jews Street, 1924; watercolour and pencil on paper, 51×57.5 cm. Private collection, Israel

111

8.2

Reuven Rubin, The Road to Nazareth, 1925; 80.5×60 cm. Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

113

8.3

Reuven Rubin, Rothschild Boulevard, 1924; 50×65 cm. Touro College collection, New York. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

116

9.1

Pinhas Litvinovsky, Yemenite Ecstasy, early 1920s; watercolour 133 on paper, 52×28.5 cm. Private collection, Israel

9.2

Pinhas Litvinovsky, Agadati performing a Hassidic Dance, early 1920s; charcoal on paper. Private collection, Israel

134

9.3

Nahum Gutman, The Goatherd, 1926; 72×54 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photograph: David Harris

148

9.4

Nahum Gutman, Bearer of Sheaves, 1926; 72×53.5 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photograph: David Harris

149

9.5

Reuven Rubin, Agadati Dancing (Hasidic Ecstasy), 1924; 78.5×73 cm. Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

153

9.6

Reuven Rubin, Succoth in Jerusalem, 1926; 162×114 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

158

9.7

Nahum Gutman, Woman in a Pool, 1920s; ink on paper, 34×21 160 cm. Gutman Family collection, Tel Aviv

9.8

Reuven Rubin, Family of Safed, 1923; 81×65 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

162

10.1 Menahem Shemi, Fishermen, 1928, 85×65 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Gift of Ayala and Sam Zacks, TorontoTel Aviv, 1957

178

10.2 André Derain, Cadaqués, 1910; 60.5×73 cm. © ADAGP, Paris

179

10.3 Yisrael Paldi, Landscape, c. 1923; 39×50 cm. Private collection, Tel Aviv

180

Plates

Pl. A

A Bezalel carpet depicting the Menorah on a background of the Jerusalem skyline with the Temple Mount and the Tower of David, c. 1908; 84×230 cm. Anton Felton

Pl. B

Ze’ev Raban, a page from The Song of Solomon (shir ha-shirim), Jerusalem: Shulammite, 1930; image size 13.5×19.6 cm

Pl. C

Reuven Rubin, Jesus and the Jew (The Encounter), 1919–21; 70× 95 cm. Israel Phoenix Collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. D

Reuven Rubin, First Fruits, triptych, 1923; 188×406 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. E

Reuven Rubin, Houses in Tel Aviv, c. 1923; 55×75.5 cm. Ayala ZacksAbramov collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. F

Reuven Rubin, Jerusalem, 1925; 80×99 cm, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. G

Yisrael Paldi, Pastoral (Landscape at Ein Karem), c. 1928; 66×81 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art; aquisition through Bank Discount Fund, 1979

Pl. H

Arieh Lubin, View of the Hills of Ramat Gan, 1924; 61×79 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Pl. I

Nahum Gutman, A House in an Orange Grove, 1927; 36×58 cm. Israel Phoenix Collection, Tel Aviv

Pl. J

Sionah Tagger, At Jaffa Port, c. 1926; 52×56 cm. Israel Phoenix Collection, Tel Aviv

Pl. K

Reuven Rubin, Sabbath in Safed, 1923–24; 73.5×91.5 cm. Private collection, New York. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. L

Nahum Gutman, Siesta, 1926; 93.5×107.5 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Pl. M

Reuven Rubin, Dancers of Meron, 1926; 160×128 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. N

Reuven Rubin, Girl with Pomegranates, 1923–24; 84×75 cm. Private collection, France. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Pl. O

Nahum Gutman, Woman in a Pool, 1930; 67×54.5 cm. Gutman Family collection, Tel Aviv.

Pl. P

Reuven Rubin, Family of Safed, 1928–29; 90×72 cm. Private collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Note on terms and transliteration

The name Palestine, the official name of the country during the British Mandate period since the early 1920s, is used in this book also for the earlier period under the Ottoman rule when the area was not a single geographical or political entity. The name eretz yisrael (the Land of Israel) has been long used by Jews and remained the preferred term during the period of Zionist settlement. Thus Palestine and eretz yisrael are used interchangeably, the former in a more neutral sense and the latter mainly in a Jewish sense. The Hebrew term yishuv (lit.: settlement) was used by Jews in referring to the Jewish community in Palestine up until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Subsequently the term has continued to be used by scholars in the same sense. The history of Israeli art is commonly described as beginning in the yishuv period and developing into the statehood period as a continuation, hence the term ‘Israeli art’ may refer to the pre-state period. For the transliteration of Hebrew the minimum number of letters to convey the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew was preferred. For convenience of reading the definite and prepositions are separated by a hyphen (e.g., ha-yishuv, be-eretz yisrael). article When a letter appears twice consecutively, as a vowel and as a consonant, they are separated by an apostrophe (e.g., ta’arucha). Hebrew consonants that do not exist in English are transliterated as follows: Some English consonants may stand for two Hebrew ones: The vowels are used as follows: a=arm; e=bed; i=it; o=hot; u=put. The attempt to keep a consistent method of transliteration has occasionally given way to a need for flexibility for names or words with an accepted form of transliteration e.g., Sephardi or Bezalel (pronounced Betzalel). Translations from the Hebrew quoted in the book are by the author except where an English version exists.

List of abbreviations

Abbreviations used in the text: CZA

Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem

GSIC

Gabriel Sherover Information Center for Israeli art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

JNF

Jewish National Fund

RMA

Rubin Museum Archive, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv

Acknowledgements

My first attempt to outline the story of Israeli art in view of the ideological influences on its development goes back to 1991 in a catalogue essay that accompanied an exhibition I organised at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Some years later, in London, I continued to develop my thoughts around this aspect of Israeli visual culture, much encouraged by invitations from Monica Bohm-Duchen to present papers in academic symposia. This independent work led me eventually to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where I wrote a PhD dissertation on which this book is based. I am deeply indebted to Professor Tudor Parfitt who helped make this process a stimulating intellectual experience. His continuous support and good advice made a significant contribution to this work. I am grateful also to Professor Christopher Green and Dr Michael Berkowitz for their valuable comments on the manuscript. Of all the individuals and institutions that helped me during my research I am particularly indebted to Carmela Rubin, the director of the Rubin Museum in Tel Aviv, for her generosity and welcoming treatment. My gratitude is extended to the Department of Israeli art and to the library at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and to curators and staff at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem especially in the Department of Prints and Drawings and in the Gabriel Sherover Information Center for Israeli art. Friends and family have played an important role throughout this work and I thank especially Michael Sternberg and Miriam Pedatzur for help with translations. Alec Mishory and Irit Miller shared with me ideas and material, and Shoshy Frankel was always ready to supply information. I am especially grateful to Orly Derzie who kindly helped in preparing the index. All efforts were made to obtain permission to reproduce works of art in this book. I extend my gratitude to all the individuals and institutions who generously gave their permission: Galia Bar-Or of the Ein Harod Museum, Miri Ben-Moshe of the Israel Phoenix, Cécile Brunner of Kunsthaus Zürich, Yoav Dagon of the Nahum Gutman Museum, Gabriel Davara, Ruth Doron, Etia Elyov, Anton Felton, Yaffa Goldfinger of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Menahem Gutman, Avraham Katz-Oz, Amalyah Keshet of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Dafna Litvinovsky, Penina Livni of the JNF, Alec Mishory, Eva Neumannova of the National Gallery Prague, Rachel Paldi, Linda Poe of The Judah L.Magnes Museum, Carmela Rubin of the Rubin Museum, Yoni Schur, Nitza Shemi, Mickey Tiroche, Arielle Weininger of the Spertus Museum, Regula Zbinden of the Kunstmuseum Bern. My sister Nomi Morag was particularly helpful in obtaining pictures

and providing valuable advice. Special thanks are due to Colin Shindler who helped secure the grant that enabled us to embellish this volume with colour reproductions. Finally, my greatest thanks are to my husband Ram Ahronov for his genuine interest in the subject of this work, for his important suggestions and, above all, for his constant encouragement and support. Some sections of the book were previously published in different versions: ‘Biblical Zionism in Bezalel Art’, Israel Studies, 6 (1), 2001 The Dancing Jew and Other Characters: Art in the Jewish Settlement of Palestine during the 1920s’, Modern Jewish Studies, 1 (1), 2002 ‘Imagined Homeland: Landscape Painting in Palestine in the 1920s’, Nations and Nationalism, 9 (4), 2003

Introduction At the turn of the twentieth century ‘Jewish art’ was a fairly novel concept. The relation of Jews to visual art had started to be discussed during the nineteenth century in various intellectual quarters, and the common belief, among Jews and non-Jews alike, was that due to the biblical prohibition on graven images (Exodus 20:4) Jews had neither interest in art nor the talent to produce it. The beginning of the study and display of Jewish ceremonial objects and illuminated manuscripts during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the rise of Jewish artists in the contemporary scene made the topic a subject of interest. But it was also a topic much in dispute—over the definition of Jewish art or whether, indeed, it existed at all.1 At the turn of the twenty-first century, the numerous researches on a growing number of art objects in different media and from different periods, from antiquity to the present, have helped little to remove the question mark from the term ‘Jewish art’. Now, however, it is the question itself—that concerning the identity of Jewish art—which is contested. The problem is rooted, historians argue, in a nineteenth-century conception of art in terms of style, and more specifically in the structure of art history as a discipline which from the outset was intertwined with nationalism.2 It is generally agreed though that the emergence of the concept of ‘Jewish art’ had to do with issues of Jewish identity, be it as part of the ‘European impulse…to preserve and develop historic consciousness’3 or as ‘ethnic Jewish self-consciousness’.4 The concept of ‘national genius’ which developed in European thought since the eighteenth century, and particularly the idea of the German philosopher J.G.Herder that the national spirit is expressed in the nation’s creative forces, its language, literature and art, were instrumental for many national movements.5 Defining the history of art in nationalist terms was therefore a natural development.6 Whereas these ideas were applied to deny the existence of Jewish art or to describe it in derogatory terms they also stimulated Jewish cultural and national revival. The promotion of a visual art that would have particular Jewish traits was an important part of this movement especially as it emerged in Russia and Germany during the first quarter of the twentieth century.7 The idea of developing Jewish art in Palestine can be understood as part of this trend.8 Indeed, the first time that works by contemporary Jewish artists were shown in a Jewish national context was during the Fifth Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1901, and this was regarded as the ‘beginning of national art’.9 Among the exhibiting artists there were some who did not support the idea of Jewish national art. For example, the German Max Liebermann showed no interest in anything Jewish and the Dutch Jozef Israëls rejected altogether the notion of ‘Jewish artists’. Only a handful of the participants identified fully with the Zionist cause, most notably the influential illustrator E.M.Lilien. In his speech on Jewish art at this Congress the Jewish thinker and writer Martin Buber (1878–1969) advocated the important contribution of art to the Jewish national revival. Of special significance was his claim that ‘a full-fledged Jewish art is possible only on Jewish

Art in Zion

2

soil’.10 This link between the future development of Jewish national art and a specific territory—the Land of Israel—was also the view of Boris Schatz (1866–1932) who in 1906 founded the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.11 The multifaceted relationships between national ideology, Zionism in particular, and the art that emerged in Jewish Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century is the subject of this book. In the vast scholarly literature on issues of nationalism and national identity, the role of the visual art in shaping, expressing or promoting national identity has been relatively little explored. A notable exception is the study of landscape in art, which is often interpreted along the lines of national ideology. The majority of these studies are dedicated to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, mainly in Britain and North America.12 The analysis of modern art in the twentieth century in the light of nationalism is still in its infancy.13 There are perhaps some ‘objective’ explanations typical of any attempt to bridge the gap between academic disciplines: nationalism is usually studied and discussed within the framework of the social sciences whereas modern art belongs to the domain of history of art. When theories of nationalism embrace the arts they are often confined to works that have wider popular appeal such as literature or cinema. When art historians employ social theories in their investigations they usually refer to class, gender or the socioeconomic conditions of the production of art. There might be other reasons for this gap, reasons perhaps more intrinsic to each of these fields. The idea of the modern in art has been related since the nineteenth century to the experience of modernity—that which concerns the present, the transitory and the ever-changing as was clearly felt in the metropolitan centre of the city.14 Thus the discourse of twentiethcentury art in the West concentrated on the idea of ‘the new’ in both form and subject matter. In contrast, the idea of the nation and nationalism has at its core a deep respect for the traditions of the past—whether existing, modified or invented—for the nation’s historical memory, its ancient monuments and its countryside.15 Some of the most potent values that underline the idea of modern art have been those of the Self and individuality, leading to the perception of the art object predominantly as an expression of the artist’s self. The flip side of this coin is the ideology of the Universal and the notion of art as autonomous from society and as a trans-historical and transcultural form.16 Such tenets, almost by definition, go against any notion of group identity, particularly of the nation that defines itself as unique and as different from other groups. These views had wide followings among theorists and art historians as the preface to H.H.Arnason’s large volume on history of modern art typically demonstrates: ‘in the study of art the only primary evidence is the work of art itself. Everything that has been said about it…everything that we can learn about the environment that produced it…is only secondary or tertiary evidence’. Subsequently the approach he offers for discussing art is that of a ‘close examination of the works as aesthetic objects’.17 Many of these conventions in the study of art have been challenged in recent decades by applying various theoretical frameworks to the analysis of art, its status or ideology in what has become known as ‘the new art history’.18 National ideology however is usually not one of these fields. The reluctance of art historians to consider aspects of nationalism in the analysis of modern art may be ascribed in part to the interpretation of nationalism as conservative, as a reactionary and destructive force that is hostile to the progressive free spirit of modern art. There is an undeniable truth in this argument since the fiercest attack

Introduction

3

on modern art and artists occurred under the most appalling variant of nationalism, in Nazi Germany. Other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, whether Communist or Fascist, had a similar oppressive attitude towards modern art, which became identified more and more, especially during the Cold War, with abstraction, freedom of selfexpression and Western democracy. Recent reconsideration of the relationship between art and political power suggests that there is much more ambiguity behind the convenient poles of ‘good’ and ‘bad’; totalitarian culture embraced some aspects of the Modernist movement while modernism in its turn has demonstrated authoritarian tendencies.19 Outside the Western world the spread of modern art was often linked directly to colonial powers. In post-colonial nations modern art as defined in Western terms has generated an opposition and the urge to search for authentic national art. On the other hand, the idea of internationalism in art has presented to artists from Asia and Africa a channel, or at least a hope, of being accepted on equal terms with Western artists.20 The emergence of modern art in Middle Eastern countries, and Jewish Palestine among them, does share some features with other non-Western modern art movements. Particularly relevant is the tension between the urge to locate a unique national voice and the desire to be, at the same time, part of an international modern movement. Beyond these general traits the development of Jewish art in Palestine, which was linked to the Jewish national movement that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, share little with post-colonial cultures in Asia and Africa.21 In this book the analogies will be limited to conspicuous influences originating mainly in Russia and France while focusing on direct and indirect expressions of Zionist ideology in the artistic activity of the Jewish community in Palestine, known as yishuv (lit.: settlement). It is perhaps worth noting that in the abundant literature that exists on Zionism there is hardly any mention of the visual arts. Similarly, the written history of the yishuv and its culture pays little attention to art and artists who were active there.22 The study of the visual arts in the context of the Zionist settlement in Palestine is to a great extent a journey into terra incognita. This is not to claim that nothing has been written on this art so far. A strong sense of ‘history in the making’ encouraged writers as early as the 1930s to outline the history of the artistic activity in the yishuv, beginning, as it would be commonly accepted, with the foundation of Bezalel.23 Oddly enough this moment of birth does not coincide with other beginnings in the history of the yishuv, first and foremost with the first wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine (aliya) in the early 1880s. Certain acknowledgement of folk art among the religious Jewish community of Palestine (commonly known as the Old yishuv) before the foundation of Bezalel has been offered of late.24 But otherwise there is no mention in the existing literature of any possible artistic activity among members of the First aliya or among members of the Second aliya (1904–14) apart from Bezalel. Yet the early accounts of Bezalel unmistakably echo Zionist rhetoric: Schatz is described as a pioneer who came to plant the first saplings of art in a country which was barren, desolate and primitive.25 Over the years the language and metaphors changed slightly but the myth of the birth of Bezalel has prevailed. Israeli art historians describe it as the project of one man and as the realisation of a dream or a utopia.26 This strong identification between Bezalel and Zionist ideology is not surprising, not least because it was founded and funded by the Zionist Organisation. But also because many of these ideas first appeared in texts written by Schatz and his supporters and subsequently entered the canonical

Art in Zion

4

historical writing about the period. Therefore it is often difficult to distinguish between the ideological point of view of the writers and that of the subject of their writing. The next episode of Jewish art in Palestine as it has been told grants the status of ‘Firsts’ and pioneers to another group of artists, some of them former Bezalel students, who settled in Palestine in the 1920s. Now the scene was set as a battlefield between the conservative Bezalel and the young rebellious artists, who were called Modernists. A series of group exhibitions in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, the arena in which this conflict was most visible, was later accredited as the ‘true’ beginning of art in pre-state Israel.27 If writers have adhered easily to this classic narrative of the ‘new’ vs ‘old’, which has been widely accepted in the history of modern art, it is also because it suited the Zionist narrative of rejecting the old Jewish way of life in the diaspora in favour of building a new society in the Land of Israel. Consequently, Israeli art historians liked to describe this period as the clash between the old values of Jewish tradition—epitomised by Bezalel in Jerusalem—and the new secular creative energy—embodied in the new cultural centre of the yishuv, the city of Tel Aviv (founded in 1909).28 In addition to their modernism the artists of the 1920s are often said to have achieved a distinctive local tone in their art, the nature of which is usually not fully explained.29 This achievement however was short lived and by the end of the 1920s, writers agree, there was a change of direction. Explanations given for this development are diverse. Some see a decline caused by economic and ideological crisis, or simply a natural process of fading enthusiasm.30 Another suggests the trauma following the violent riots of Palestinian Arabs against Jews in 1929.31 Obviously, no single event can explain a change of artistic trend. The art of the 1930s should be examined in light of various factors; the first would be the expansion of and greater diversity in the artistic community in the yishuv. Stylistic transitions in the work of individual artists of the 1920s are another factor. The developments of the 1930s helped to demarcate and elevate the status granted to the art of it marked a certain authentic, if naïve, local ‘eretz yisrael school’. This status the 1920s: not only was it the ‘real’ beginning of modern Israeli art but also has continued to grow over the years along with a popular success. Numerous exhibitions were organised to show the work of these artists, both individually and as a group, and some were held in museums dedicated to single artists. Paintings from this period are widely reproduced and they achieve the highest prices in the art market. In this book I shall re-examine the art of the period and review the existing assumptions and statements made about it. Special emphasis will be put on studying contemporary texts, published and unpublished. These will allow an understanding of the background, purposes and meaning of the artistic activity as seen at the time by both the artists and their public. Stylistic analogy to major trends or artists in world art has been a common practice in writing on Israeli art.32 This approach will be applied only when direct influences are relevant, and when the borrowing of style also entails the adoption of meanings or themes associated with this style. Priority will be given to iconographic analysis, a much neglected practice in the study of Israeli art. Analysis of the most recurrent themes in the art of the period may reveal those ideas and intentions that were not expressed verbally. A close look at individual works, their subjects and style will shed light on some of the practices and meanings in the canonical art of the yishuv. As will become apparent, the accepted periodisation of art in Jewish Palestine, beginning with the Bezalel Institute and moving to the Modernists of the 1920s, will be

Introduction

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maintained in this book. The two phases will be discussed separately, not because of their mythical rivalry, and despite their shared ideological orientation, but mainly because of the disparity in structure of the two groups and the different nature of their artistic products. Part I, which is dedicated to Bezalel, will focus initially on the ideological background to its foundation as well as the artistic and ideological development of its founder, Boris Schatz. An analysis of the themes of Bezalel objects, which occupies the major chapter in this section, will reveal the degrees of traditionalism as well as the role of Zionism in influencing the subject matter in Bezalel art. The ideology that motivated the Modernists of the 1920s in their attempt to create a national local art is construed in the final section of the book, Part III, primarily from the major themes in their paintings: landscapes and the country’s ‘types’. The intellectual climate in the yishuv and the debates among the intelligentsia regarding the purpose and meaning of art in the national context will solidify, in the final chapter, the ideological framework behind the study of the art of this period. Between these two parts is a separate section dedicated to a single artist, Reuven Rubin (1893–1974), the most prolific, successful and famous of his generation of the 1920s both in Palestine and abroad. Over the years a number of monographs, articles and exhibitions, and since 1983 a museum of his work in his former home in Tel Aviv, have upheld Rubin’s status. This wealth of literature, however, is often shrouded by myths of the artist and the period and is accompanied by unfounded suggestions and factual errors. This section will highlight Rubin’s pivotal role not only for his artistic influence on his fellow artists but also for his ambition to create a national art. The reader will notice that the book says hardly anything about the Arab population of Palestine or the tension between Arabs and Jews that has led to a long and violent conflict. This is due above all to the way in which the Jewish yishuv separated itself socially, culturally and to a large extent economically from Arab Palestine. As a study of a specific cultural activity within the Jewish community the book focuses on the views and beliefs that were expressed by its members at that time and thus reflects this separateness rather than reviewing a wide range of historical processes. When the Palestinian Arabs do appear in the picture, as will become apparent in Part III, they do so as a group with a ‘role’ to play, which functioned less as a reference to reality and more as a symbol in the realm of ideality. The relationship between art and ideology, which is the subject of this book, is by no means a simple one. Not least because despite modern artists’ claim for autonomy and self-expression, the capacity to perceive meaning in pictures, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, is ‘a product of collective experience’. And artists, he continues, work with the audience’s capacity to see with understanding, so that both ‘art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop’.33 In other words, the deciphering and appreciation of the meaning of art are possible, according to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, ‘where the culture that the originator puts into the work is identical with the culture or, more accurately, the artistic competence which the beholder brings to the deciphering of the work’.34 These principles are particularly effective when studying works of art not as a separate aesthetic object but rather in the wider context of their making and reception, which is one way of understanding their ideological character. On a similar line of thought, and refuting the idea of the autonomy and universal quality of works of art, art historian Janet Wolff claims that artists have never worked in isolation from social and

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political constraints. Art achieves success due to various social structures and processes, ‘and not simply because it is, in some sense, just “good” art’.35 The conceptual framework to the current study, then, is of art as a collective product. Since this was a time when the yishuv in Palestine was highly mobilised to the national project it is almost inevitable that ideology will be the major perspective for the study of its art. Indeed, this is the period in the history of Israeli art in which writers have frequently emphasised the Zionist idea when describing the art, unlike all other periods when the formalist autonomous approach prevails. The question to be asked though is how this ideology is manifest in art. While it is fully accepted that ‘the artist is in some sense the agent of ideology, through whom the views and beliefs of a group find expression’, one should not assume, as Wolff points out, that ‘political, social and other ideas are simply transposed into an aesthetic medium’.36 In other words, we still need to work out how an ideology is translated into visual images, into composition, line and colour. And conversely, how (and by whom) a set of ideas or beliefs can be seen in a particular visual image, a process often taken for granted. The question probably cannot be fully resolved but as a partial solution Wolff proposes that ‘the work of art itself reworks that ideology in aesthetic form, in accordance with the rules and conventions of contemporary artistic production’.37 Following this proposition I shall review in this book historical interpretations of the art of the period that tend too easily to identify ideological signs in the works. At the same time I will examine the artistic language, the chosen styles and responses to influences as part of the mediation of the ideology. Having this goal in mind, one must also admit the limitations: artistic conventions and aesthetic codes may not allow certain statements in art, or may even transform ideology by the modes of representation.38 Exploring the art that was produced in the yishuv during the early decades of the twentieth century, the most studied and best-known period in the canon of Israeli art, may not seem to offer too many surprises. But precisely at the point where art and national ideology are supposed to meet and produce some of the classics of Zionist imagery, quite unexpectedly the Zionist enterprise is virtually absent from the picture. Less surprising perhaps but of no less significance is the fact that the major goal which the artists had taken upon themselves at that time—the creation of an authentic national art that would emerge from the Land of Israel—was fulfilled, at least to the extent that such a task can ever be achieved, through ideas, themes and styles that were imported from elsewhere. That the aim itself was full of contradictions was probably unavoidable—so too was the Zionist ideal and its implementation. It is through these inconsistencies, ambitions, successes and failures that this book aims to interpret this art. And more, it aspires to present the artistic activity within the human environment and social institutions that produced and consumed it.

Part I Bezalel and the myth of origin of Israeli art

According to Zionist art historiography, before the Zionist enterprise Palestine was ‘from the viewpoint of art lovers, largely a desert’.1 The seminal event, which made the desert bloom according to this view, was the establishment of an art school in Jerusalem in 1906. As another critic put it: ‘every historical survey of contemporary Israel art must begin with Boris Schatz and with the establishment of the Bezalel School…. Both the man and the institution exerted a diversified and decisive formative influence on the development of Israel art in its early period’.2 This view that Israeli art was born in a specific moment in history—the founding of Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts by Boris Schatz—is shared by almost every writer who has dealt with its history.3 The idea that before the founding of Bezalel there was no art in Palestine, or at least none of any value, and that ‘Schatz was first among the pioneers who attempted to create a Jewish Art, indeed a Palestinian Art’4 —a view pronounced already in Schatz’s lifetime—reflects the notion that the development of art in Palestine resulted directly from the Zionist revival of which Bezalel was an important part.5 As will be shown below the Bezalel School was not exactly a novelty either in respect of its ideology or in its actual products. The debate about the desired art and culture to be developed in eretz yisrael preceded the founding of Bezalel. Moreover, processes of modernisation and cultural awakening in eretz yisrael during the second half of the nineteenth century were accompanied by artistic activity that should not be dismissed.6 In his re-evaluation of Jewish art and craft in Palestine in the nineteenth century the curator and critic Yona Fischer claimed that in a comprehensive view that embraces not only the art which developed in Israel in the twentieth century but also the art of the previous century, the founding of Bezalel cannot be regarded as a beginning but rather only as an episodic phenomenon.7 Fischer nonetheless sees Bezalel within the Zionist context as a phenomenon ‘which divides past and future’ and stands between ‘a declining society and a new society searching its own definition’. In Fischer’s view however the attempt to represent the Zionist aspirations through a set of symbols that Boris Schatz had offered

Part I: Bezalel and the myth of origin of Israeli art

9

not only lacked true attachment to the old Jewish world but also failed to offer any significant tools for the development of Western secular painting as it developed later. This somewhat paradoxical opinion that Bezalel was in effect a failure, particularly with regard to later artistic developments in Jewish Palestine, is shared by many writers on Israeli art.8 Thus in Israeli historiography Bezalel is represented as a new beginning but also as an unsuccessful one. Nonetheless, Bezalel has secured a place for itself in Israeli art for three major reasons. In the first place, it was the first Zionist institution that was dedicated, at least at its outset, to art. In the second place, of the generation of artists who emerged during the 1920s and gained a reputation and status as prominent figures in the Israeli art world, many were former Bezalel students, among them Aroch, Ben-Zvi, Castel, Gliksberg, Gutman, Litvinovsky, Paldi, Rubin, Shemi, Stematzky, Streichman and Tagger.9 In the third place, the Bezalel Museum that Schatz had founded alongside the School laid the foundations of the Israel Museum and is now incorporated in it. The status of Bezalel as embodying the origins of Israeli art is owed primarily to the ideological incentive behind its establishment and the continuous bearing of this ideology on writers and historians. A great deal of the publicity machine that surrounded Bezalel was generated by the relentless efforts and fervent views of its founder and director Boris Schatz. However, the rosy picture depicted by Schatz was marred by problems that had troubled Bezalel from the start, mainly due to conflicts caused by its triple function as art school, crafts workshops and museum. While Bezalel failed to leave its mark on future generation of artists in Israel, its legacy rests with the numerous objects produced there and long collected by museums and private collectors in Israel and abroad. It is through analysis of Bezalel products, their meaning and style, that we can understand how this organised artistic activity aimed to define its identity as a new national Jewish art in Palestine.

1 Ideological background In the establishment of Bezalel two separate concepts regarding the future prospects of the Jewish people converged. On the one hand there was the will to define and create national art and the belief in the positive contribution of the arts to the development of the Jewish people. These were mainly the views held by artists and their supporters who were involved in Bezalel. On the other hand there was the urge to supply work to the Jewish community in Palestine and the will to encourage what was called ‘the productivisation of the Jews’. Primarily it was the German Jews, who supported the founding of Bezalel, that took this view. That the two tendencies did not get along together very well is evident from the constant difficulties that accompanied Bezalel from its first days. In commenting on the institution and its problems the prominent Hebrew writer Y.H.Brenner noted that what was created was merely a ‘Bezalel mess’ and none of its aims were even remotely realised.1 Bezalel as productivisation project The concept of productivisation was recurrent in the thinking of the haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment) during the nineteenth century. It reflected the widespread image of the Jews as parasites who lived at the expense of the productive classes. This view followed from a change in values in Western society in general since the eighteenth century with respect to commerce, land and production. Alongside the emancipation of the Jews, criticism of their social and economic role by non-Jews was absorbed by the Jewish leadership and educated elite who saw in productivisation a means of moral regeneration and social integration, or, for Zionist leaders, that of nation building.2 The founding of technical and vocational schools for Jews was one of the ways to transform the economic structure in Jewish communities.3 In Palestine, and predominantly in Jerusalem, where the Jewish community grew significantly during the second half of the nineteenth century, the idea of productivisation had a direct and immediate practical purpose: teaching crafts and trades was to bring relief from the deep poverty that many Jews suffered.4 By being able to support themselves they would not need to rely exclusively on the charity of the haluka,5 that was getting smaller as the population grew. Some initiatives for productivisation emerged from the Ashkenazi community of Jerusalem itself6 but it was primarily the work of Jewish philanthropists from central and western Europe who supported this process. They were concerned and partly motivated by Christian missionary activity in Jerusalem that offered Jews medical and social aid together with craft training. There was also a nonJewish philanthropic enterprise of encouraging labour in Jews with no religious purpose, founded by the consul James Finn.7 The involvement of Jewish philanthropists from

Ideological background

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Europe in solving the immediate problem of destitution was accompanied by the hope of correcting the situation of the Jews through education, productive activity and modernisation.8 In the 1850s the opening of a weaving workshop in Jerusalem by Sir Moses Montefiore and a school for girls as well as an apprenticeship project combined with religious education for boys by the Rothschilds marked the beginning of modern education in the yishuv.9 From the 1880s more trade education was available with the opening of the school ha-torah ve-hamelacha of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU). The school taught various crafts from carpentry and shoemaking to wood and stone carving and copper work.10 These efforts towards productivisation were directed to the lower classes and the underprivileged. The Sephardim were usually more receptive to these initiatives since in their communities the gap between the better off and the poor was wider and the haluka money was given only to those who excelled in religious studies. Yet teaching crafts, and for women the teaching of ‘feminine’ crafts—sewing, embroidery and knitting—was not intended to change the traditional social structure or the role of women in it but rather to solve economic problems.11 When the Bezalel founding board in Berlin proclaimed ‘No charity but work!’ in its project programme12 aiming to provide their poor brothers in Jerusalem with the means to earn an honest living and break the hold of the haluka, the idea was no novelty. And when in 1906 Bezalel opened its first department of carpet weaving, so the story went, some four hundred women applied but only forty-five happy women and girls were accepted while the rest remained tearfully at the door.13 The story soon started to circulate in the Jewish and Zionist press accompanied by the slogan ‘No charity but work!’ emphasising the significance of Bezalel to employment in Jerusalem and particularly to the productivisation of the Jews. This episode also demonstrates how, in many respects, Bezalel was a continuation of previous projects in the city. The focus in the Bezalel programme on producing handicrafts for export or as souvenirs for tourists14 was also based on existing tradition. The production of decorative and religious objects from olivewood and other materials that were sold to pilgrims and tourists or exported was developed in nineteenth-century Jerusalem. Jewish craftsmen competed for their share of this market and some gained prizes in international exhibitions for their products. According to a contemporary source, by the 1870s there were about a hundred Jews working in this sector in Jerusalem.15 In goldsmithing, too, Jewish craftsmen gradually dominated the market in Jerusalem and grew in numbers from 6 in 1856 to 71 in 1899.16 Needlecrafts were entirely in the hands of Jewish women.17 At the time that Bezalel started to operate in Jerusalem it was by no means the first or the only institution of its kind. Rather, it competed with existing institutions such as the AIU school resulting in tension between them.18 Other workshops that instructed women in needlecrafts and domestic economy with the intention of liberating them from dependency on charity were founded at the same time elsewhere in the country.19 What made Bezalel different was its aspiration to become a spiritual centre for Jewish creative arts. In this it gained the enthusiastic support of Eliezer BenYehuda (1858–1922), the socalled father of Modern Hebrew. Ben-Yehuda and his circle hoped that the founding of Bezalel would introduce an aesthetic sensibility that would improve the miserable image of Jerusalem and make it the artistic and cultural centre of Palestine Jewry as part of a

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cultural-spiritual and national renaissance in eretz yisrael.20 For Boris Schatz it was never intended solely to supply jobs but rather to create the national Jewish art. Creating national art Zionist historiography tends to emphasise the bitter divisions between major trends in the movement, mainly between what are called ‘Political Zionism’, ‘Cultural (or Spiritual) Zionism’ and ‘Practical Zionism’. Since the establishment of Bezalel involved various individuals with different ideological affiliations, it has been argued that many of Bezalel’s troubles can be attributed to the conflicting views between Cultural and Practical Zionists.21 In actual fact, these quarrels were not of crucial importance. This was particularly the case with regard to culture: despite the term meaning different things to different people, an increasing number of Jews found themselves able to agree upon a vague set of myths and symbols which represented the idea.22 In early Zionism, argues historian Michael Berkowitz, ‘culture’ was not a precise formulation but rather a mood comprised of respectability, Jewish cohesion, Jewish patriotism and respect for education, literature and the arts, with a special reverence for ‘Jewish culture’, ‘laying stress on its “national” (as opposed to theological) content’.23 The visual arts played only a marginal role in Zionist cultural debate; there was no central policy on art and aesthetics in the Zionist movement or any dominant programme.24 When art was mentioned or discussed it was usually in the context of its function within the national movement. Max Nordau mentioned the arts in an article published in 1901, in which he maintained that only by arousing Jewish sentiment would it be possible to attract assimilated Jews to Zionism. The arts, he argued, have an important didactic role in influencing young people. Pictures and sculptures, alongside novels, poetry and drama are much more effective in inducing Jewish sentiment than any logical systematic instruction. However, he contended, most of the talented Jewish artists of recent generations had abandoned Judaism. Nevertheless, such men as Lilien and Nossig25 provided an excellent start that hopefully would develop under the influence of a new Zionist life.26 Nordau’s brief mention of the arts as an instrument of Zionist aims was in accordance with his wider views on art, to which he dedicated a whole book in which he emphasised the social mission of art in the past and in the future.27 A criticism of Nordau’s view was expressed by Martin Buber in his speech on Jewish art at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901. This was the first direct reference to art in the Zionist Organisation and it was complemented by an exhibition at the Congress hall of works by such Jewish artists as E.M.Lilien, Alfred Nossig, Herman Struck, Jozef Israëls, Lesser Ury and others.28 Buber described art as the manifestation of the soul of the nation in the spirit of Herder and the Romantics.29 He contended that developing the arts deserved attention and the aesthetic education of the people should start immediately. Although Buber did not harness art to Zionist aims as bluntly as did Nordau, he asserted the significance of artistic endeavours in furthering the cause of Zionism and believed that a full blossoming of genuine Jewish creativity would be attained only when Jews had their own soil under their feet.30 The first action towards the development of national cultural consciousness was the founding in 1902 of the publishing house Jüdischer Verlag by Buber, Lilien, Nossig and other members of the ‘Democratic Faction’—the first self-

Ideological background

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proclaimed party within the Zionist Movement that advocated concentration on culture. This enterprise, which was to become the foremost Jewish publishing house in central Europe, aimed at disseminating Zionist national culture through publishing, in German, works by Hebrew and Yiddish writers and by reproducing works of Jewish artists in books and as postcards.31 At that stage of promoting art within the Zionist movement no distinction was made between Jewish art (or Hebrew art as it was described in the Hebrew press) and Zionist art. Some attempts to define ‘Jewish art’ were made in the German Jewish cultural review Ost und West in the early years of the twentieth century.32 In years to come the distinction between art made by Jewish artists in the diaspora and that by Jews in Palestine—eretz yisraeli art—would become increasingly important in the self-definition of Israeli art. Yet in the early years of Zionism there was little discussion of what Jewish art might mean. Compilations of art reproductions that were published by Jüdischer Verlag included famous artists of Jewish origin who hardly used Jewish themes, most notably Max Liebermann, alongside artists such as Lilien who made work specifically for Zionist propaganda purposes, as well as lesser known artists who incorporated various degrees of Jewish and Zionist subjects in their work.33 That the importance of art lay primarily in its contribution to the national cause was also the view held by the influential Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927). In his address at the Conference of Russian Zionists in Minsk in 1902 on the question of Jewish culture, later published in the Hebrew periodical he edited, ha-shiloah, under the title The Spiritual Revival’,34 Ahad Ha-Am also mentioned the visual arts. He discussed in particular the Russian Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1843–1902) to illustrate the loss to the Jewish people of artists who preferred to express themselves outside the Jewish context. Antokolsky was the first Eastern European Jew to achieve fame as a sculptor, and is generally mentioned as the first Jewish sculptor, the first Russian Jewish artist and is even considered the best Russian sculptor of the nineteenth century.35 His rise to fame during the early 1870s brought with it a certain interest among haskala Jews as reflected in the Hebrew press but it was marginal in comparison to the publicity he gained in the general press.36 Jewish pride in his success among the gentiles was later replaced by disappointment at the lack of Jewish elements in his art and lifestyle.37 The big funeral and the many eulogies that were published following Antokolsky’s death gave rise to Ahad Ha-Am’s critical responses: We need make no secret of the fact that for us there is a touch of bitterness in the homage which is paid him all over the world, and especially in Russia. It was for Russia that Antokolsky worked while he lived, and it is Russia that gets the glory now he is dead; while we can only reflect sadly how much he might have given to his own people, and how low we have sunk when men like him have to go elsewhere to find scope for their genius.38 Ahad Ha-Am goes on to criticise Antokolsky for choosing as a subject for his most famous sculpture—the one that brought him recognition—the Russian tyrant Ivan the Terrible, instead of drawing from Jewish history a much better example of a tyrant, Herod. Ahad Ha-Am tries here to refute the notion that Jewish culture is of a particular

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rather than universal interest, maintaining that an obscure Russian tyrant, almost unknown outside his own country, cannot be ‘a subject of richer interest and more universal appeal than the tyrant of Judea’.39 He continues with further examples of Antokolsky’s work for which, Ahad Ha-Am postulates, the sculptor, instead of ‘wandering away to the strange world’ of medieval Russia and using his genius ‘in the service of others’, could and should have turned to his own background ‘in the Jewish life of his native town’ as a source for his art.40 Ahad Ha-Am was probably unaware that for Russian artists of the time Ivan the Terrible was not at all considered an obscure tyrant and in fact was the subject of other art works.41 He also seems to disregard the variety of Jewish themes in Antokolsky’s early work and indeed the immense difficulty for a Jew in Russia at that time to practise art, particularly sculpture, let alone be recognised as someone who ‘marks a point of great importance to this art not only in Russia but to the countries of Western Europe’.42 Moreover, as recent studies suggest, Antokolsky’s preoccupation with Jewish themes in his early days was strongly connected with the development of the concept of nationalism in art in Russia including the idea of a Jewish national art.43 As a matter of fact, Ahad Ha-Am’s criticism of Antokolsky and of other unnamed minor artists whose art, he thought, was ‘entirely lacking in originality’ and ‘nothing but…copying of non-Jewish models’44 was in itself similar to demands made by cultural nationalists in nineteenth-century Russia. In search of national art in Russia During the second half of the nineteenth century the trend that was most identified with the search for national art in Russia was realism; that is, the depiction of subjects drawn from the life of the Russian people, as opposed to mythological or allegorical themes, and the representation of these subjects directly and without idealisation. The development of this kind of art corresponded with the views held by the Russian intelligentsia, that art should not be regarded as an autonomous and essentially aesthetic realm, but rather it should be intertwined with ‘life’ and be a means of expressing moral values and the national spirit.45 The Slavophile element of the intelligentsia was particularly concerned with the lack of ‘ethnographic’ specificity in art. They urged artists to reject foreign influences and derive their feelings, thoughts and form from the ‘depth of their souls’ in order to create genuine national art.46 A major spokesman for the revival of Russian national art and music was the critic and theorist Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906), who since the 1860s had advocated a distinctive Russian school with a defined national character, different from other European schools, that would leave its mark in the world.47 Nationalism in art was strongly related to the idea of ‘folk culture’, the repository, it was believed, of the past of the nation and its genuine spirit. It was particularly relevant in Russia where the concepts of ‘folk’ and ‘nation’ (narod) overlap.48 Like scholars elsewhere who studied, collected and published folk art in support of the national art movement, Stasov published, among other works, an illustrated study of ornaments in Russian folk art and of Slavic and oriental ornaments in medieval manuscripts.49 Stasov had also shown a great interest in Jewish art and published a series of articles on Jewish culture mostly in the Jewish periodical Evreiskaya biblioteka (Jewish Library). Impressed by the first Judaica exhibition, held at the Paris World Exhibition in 1878 (the Strauss

Ideological background

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collection) alongside contributions by Jews in other artistic fields, Stasov was convinced of the existence of Jewish national art. His relations with the Jewish artistic and economic elite of Russia and his wider views on Russian culture led him to support the harnessing of the Jewish artistic heritage to the revival of Jewish national culture.50 An important supporter of Antokolsky, Stasov encouraged the sculptor to use Jewish themes, which he considered vital to Jewish art. He believed that genuine national art emerges from something the artist was born with together with images and impressions absorbed from the surroundings of his youth.51 The importance that Stasov saw in ornament as a source of authentic national artistic genius and his belief that a Jewish style can be discovered in the Eastern and Semitic origin of the Jews led to his project of 1886: with the help of Baron David Ginzburg, he compiled and published a portfolio of ornamental illuminations from Hebrew medieval manuscripts.52 Folk art, crafts and national revival This interest in and study of ancient and folk art was not unique to Russia. Throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries intellectuals started to collect, document and publish songs and tales and other items of popular or ‘folk’ culture. This movement—the ‘discovery of the people’ as Burke calls it—was influenced by the writing of Herder, who associated ‘true poetry’ with higher morals of the ‘people’, and the ‘national soul’ with ‘folk poetry’.53 The discovery of popular culture’, writes Burke, ‘was part of a movement of cultural primitivism in which the ancient, the distant and the popular were all equated’.54 This movement, which was particularly active in the cultural periphery of Europe, was closely associated with the rise of romantic nationalism and with movements of self-definition and national liberation.55 The impact of this movement on the Jewish intelligentsia became apparent in the last years of the nineteenth century through to the first decades of the twentieth century. Appeals to the public to collect Jewish folk songs were published in the Hebrew and Jewish press in central and Eastern Europe and in Russia; periodicals dedicated to the study of Jewish folklore were founded; various societies were set up to promote the collection, study and dissemination of the Jewish popular heritage. A great deal of this activity took place in Russia and its culmination was the anthropological expedition into the Pale of Settlement,56 through the Ukraine, Podolia and Volynia, from 1912 to 1914. The expedition was led by the writer An-Sky (S.A.Rapoport, 1863–1920) and received the support of major Russian Jewish cultural figures.57 The material collected in more than sixty towns and villages consisted of thousands of folk tales and folk songs, over 2000 photographs, recordings, written descriptions and documents, manuscripts, ritual objects and crafts. All was brought to St Petersburg and formed the basis of the Jewish Ethnographic Museum that opened in 1914.58 The AnSky expedition is known to have strongly affected developments in modern Jewish art in Russia during the first decades of the twentieth century. The influence of Stasov on these developments in Russia is generally acknowledged and it has been suggested that his ideas inspired, indirectly, the founding of Bezalel. Stimulated by Stasov, Antokolsky formulated a plan for a Jewish art school that would concentrate on handicrafts that were already widespread among Russian Jews. Thus the school would expose Jews to art and provide them with a livelihood, while validating

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folk art as a form of national artistic expression. Antokolsky’s plans were realised in Vilna (Vilnius) only after his death but they might have influenced Boris Schatz who was his pupil in Paris.59 The idea of establishing schools for handicrafts in order to resuscitate folk culture and give the rural population pride in their tradition and livelihood was already current in Russia. Efforts were made from the 1870s by the government and individuals to encourage and preserve folk art by establishing workshops for traditional crafts. Schools that taught drawing for future craftsmen and various applied arts were meant to contribute nationally to the improvement of craft manufacture through their graduates who would go and teach all over Russia.60 Some of the Russian projects were inspired by similar activities of the Arts and Crafts movement in England. This movement, which was led by the theorists and artists John Ruskin and William Morris, set out to revive handwork and traditional crafts in Britain following the rapid process of industrialisation and the concomitant decline of the countryside. It spread the idea in part through schools that from the 1880s onwards were founded alongside guilds and work groups.61 The teaching of crafts to women, usually traditional ‘female’ crafts such as spinning, weaving, embroidery or lace making, in England as well as in Russia, was often philanthropically motivated insofar as it was a means of providing employment in the poverty-stricken countryside.62 Art and cultural nationalism The concept of Jewish art as an expression of national identity—believed to be manifested in the subject matter of the art work and in ‘folk’ art—was well rooted in nationalist ideals current in Russia and Europe. These concepts were part of cultural nationalism, defined by Hutchinson as a movement of moral regeneration which seeks to re-unite the different aspects of the nation—traditional and modern, agriculture and industry, science and religion—by returning to the creative life-principle of the nation. […] Its proponents are not politicians or legislators but are above all historical scholars and artists who form cultural and academic societies, designed to recover this creative force in all its dimensions with verisimilitude and project it to the members of the nation.63 While cultural nationalism involves an intensive scholarly and scientific activity in such areas as archaeology, philology, folklore, topography or history, it is the artist, maintains Hutchinson, who is ‘the paradigmatic figure of the national community’, and ‘the great artists are they who create out of the collective experience of the people, preserved in historical legends, and dramatise their lesson for the present’.64 Ahad Ha-Am, a leading figure in Cultural Zionism (usually referred to as ‘Spiritual Zionism’), had no particular interest in the visual arts yet his views on such matters were influential. Arguing that the material settlement in Palestine (Practical Zionism) could not by itself bring about the true and full mission of Zionism, Ahad Ha-Am asserted that this mission was ‘to provide the foundation for that spiritual centre of our nation which is destined to arise in Palestine’ and to ‘save the Jewish soul’ by joining ‘our scattered

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spiritual forces…in the service of our national culture’. He then proceeds to some specific suggestions: While gradually assembling the skilled labour that is needed to repair the ruins of our country and restore its past glories, we must also assemble the forces of heart and mind and brain that will repair our spiritual ruins and restore the Jewish people to its rightful place of honour in the comity of human culture. The establishment of a single great school of learning or art in Palestine, or of a single Academy of language and literature, would in my opinion be a national achievement of first-rate importance, and would contribute more to the attainment of our aim than a hundred agricultural settlements. […] A great cultural institution in Palestine, attracting to itself a large number of gifted Jewish scholars, for whom it would provide the possibility of carrying on their work in a Jewish atmosphere, free from repression and not unduly subject to extraneous influences—such an institution could even now become a source of new inspiration to the Jewish people as a whole and bring about a true revival of Judaism and Jewish culture.65 It should be emphasised that Ahad Ha-Am’s cultural nationalism was firmly tied to national territorialism. He strongly objected to the idea of establishing a Jewish cultural or scholarly institution in Europe and to the concept of national autonomy in the diaspora.66 He believed that a true revival of Jewish culture could occur only with a setting free from repression and from the influences of non-Jewish models, and this could take place only in Palestine. This idea was to bear fruit in the foundation of educational institutions in Jewish Palestine, most notably the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Technion in Haifa (both opened in 1925), and before that, the Bezalel School and Museum. The concept of national art and how it should be attained was, by the early twentieth century, already a received idea in Europe and Russia. Its espousal, albeit rare and brief, by Zionist leaders may have given Boris Schatz the impetus to actually go and set up a Jewish art school in Jerusalem as a step towards the creation of Jewish national art.

2 Boris Schatz, founder of Bezalel Boris Schatz was a sculptor who by the beginning of the twentieth century had gained a modest reputation in the Jewish world.1 As an artist he was never highly regarded, especially when compared with other Jewish artists of his time,2 but as the founder of Bezalel he was constantly praised within the Zionist Organisation, and problems that arose with the man or the School were rarely mentioned.3 He was known however as a controversial figure who inspired enthusiastic admiration on the one hand and bitter opposition on the other.4 Schatz before Bezalel Zalman Dov Baruch (Boris5) Schatz was born to a poor Orthodox Jewish family in Vorno, a village near Kovno in Lithuania, in the winter of 1866.6 In 1882 he went to Vilna (Vilnius) to pursue his religious studies in a yeshiva. Some time later he began to study art, dividing his days between the yeshiva and the art school. He also joined a group of hovevei tziyon (Lovers of Zion) and came under the influence of the Hebrew writer Peretz Smolenskin. He made a living from drawing and teaching. For a while his employer and patron was a Russian general who taught him Russian and tried to help him gain admission to the Art Academy. In his house Schatz was exposed to various books, languages and ideas about art and culture. In the summer of 1887 Schatz approached Antokolsky hoping to study with him in Paris. But Antokolsky, although impressed by Schatz’s little sculptures, did not think Schatz should follow him to France and instead helped him enrol at the local Academy. Eventually Schatz abandoned the plan. During his time in Vilna Schatz experienced some sort of ideological crisis, lost faith in the purpose of art and became involved with a group of young social activists who were prepared to sacrifice their own careers and privileged life and devote themselves to the education of the masses. As art ceased to be a challenge, passion or even livelihood he decided to relinquish it entirely and choose another occupation.7 Schatz took up sculpture again in Warsaw where he settled in early 1888. His first sculpture was a clay figure of an old ragged Jew whom he had seen standing in the yard being mocked by children. Characteristically, Schatz describes the event of making the sculpture as a turning point: This was my first attempt at propaganda by means of art…. I worked with the passion of a prophet and artist, creating his first work, which fills his entire soul. I longed to show, to throw open to all the soul of a pauper, a Jew, tormented by hunger and cold, and mortally wounded by human contempt; a Jew whose comical rags hide the soul of a being, a man….8

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The sculpture brought him recognition and critical success when displayed in a group exhibition, and this recognition helped him find his destiny in life. In Schatz’s detailed account of the making and exhibiting of this sculpture (written some seventeen years later) he highlights two points: his aspiration to convey ‘the soul’ and to evoke emotion through art; and his belief in the moral mission of art, in particular its power to urge people to help the suffering humanity. In the years to come his views that the essence of art is its ‘soul’ and that art must have a particular role (‘propaganda’) in society were fundamental to his teaching and work. Later that year (1888) Schatz published an article in two parts in the Hebrew paper hatzfira and presented for the first time his ideas about Jewish art and nationality. The article opens with general statements about the universal and natural attraction to beauty; the scarcity of talent; the good fortune of those who developed it to become well-known artists; and the ill fortune of those who could not develop it, particularly among the Jews. Schatz then suggests that the talent for painting and sculpture which was recently recognised among Jews was previously wasted on decorative religious objects. Although the makers excelled in their craft it was not highly appreciated, and they were only titled ‘craftsman’. The art of painting, Schatz continues, unlike its sisters, music and poetry, is able not only to elevate the spirit and evoke sublime emotions but also to bring to life people and deeds of the past. By presenting them to us alive in a painting we are reminded in a single glance of all the forgotten events and vital emotions. When a true artist who understands ‘the soul’ would portray an outstanding personality of literature or religion, and successfully convey in his features and eyes the man’s wisdom, courage and integrity, and the hardships he had bravely suffered, then everyone could read in his face the quality of this soul of mighty deeds and see the strength of this human being to overcome all attempts to suppress the exalted soul.9 This is why, Schatz explains, art lovers of every nation who love their people and whose nationhood is important to them would strive to collect precious pictures that embody the spirit of their people; portraits of celebrated individuals whose life and work influenced the people, or pictures of occurrences and events the memory of which evoke holy sentiments. Schatz refers to the well-known impact of art in promoting Christianity, and adds: ‘Similarly, much was done by the progressive painters, the Realists, in their wonderful paintings depicting the life of the people in order to elevate their spirit and improve their conduct of life and purify their corrupt manners by showing us good and evil in life, cruelty and compassion that go hand in hand with our way of life’.10 Schatz goes on to condemn the Jewish elite for not trying to raise the national spirit through paintings of history or portraits of great Jewish men. Instead they decorate their palaces with pictures of great gentiles, even tyrants or mythological idols. Schatz concludes his article with the vow that he would dedicate himself to seeking the dispersed portraits of great Jews.11 The significance of this article lies not so much in its originality or theoretical clarity but in the fact that this is the only published text by Boris Schatz before the Bezalel period and thus gives us a key to his thoughts, ideals and ambitions at the age of twentytwo when he embarked on his career. Of particular interest is Schatz’s argument that the distinctive value of painting was in its emotional influence and didactic power over the viewer through identification with lively and credible images of great people and events of the past. This quality was especially valuable in evoking national sentiments. More specifically, Schatz’s stylistic preference for Realism also points to links with

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nationalism, mainly through the Russian context. There, Realism was associated with the group of artists known as the Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers), who rebelled against Western academism in favour of art that would convey the ‘spirit of the people’.12 The group gained the support of the critic Stasov, and the sculptor Antokolsky was also connected with it. Schatz’s ideas concerning the role of art in encouraging social and moral improvement have most probably derived from the ideals of the Wanderers.13 In Warsaw he might have absorbed influences from Polish art where the concept of art in the service of the national movement was current at the time.14 These ideas also resonated among some Jewish thinkers and writers who were particularly interested in the visual arts, and thought it was vital for the Jewish national revival. Among them was the editor of ha-tzfira, Nahum Sokolow.15 In his article Schatz emphasised the role of the Jewish elite and intelligentsia in supporting and promoting Jewish national art. He reproached those who aspired to the European education of the time but failed to elevate the national spirit of their own people through the art they collected. Instead, they imitated non-Jews in their artistic taste. In this criticism, directed at assimilated Jews, and in the call for the cultivation of Jewish culture and national pride Schatz followed views by early Zionist thinkers such as Smolenskin. It is also true though that art patronage, particularly art that had no relation to Jewish heritage, was for emancipated Jews an avenue of social legitimacy and a means of expressing patriotic sentiments for their countries of residence.16 Following his success in Warsaw Schatz moved to Paris at the end of 1889. There he decided to study painting rather than sculpture, which, as he wrote later, was not broad enough to express all the themes he had in mind.17 He entered the studio of Fernand Cormon, a traditionalist who painted historical and religious subjects in an academic style. To support himself, his young wife and her father Schatz took various jobs, but most of the time worked as an assistant to Antokolsky and was employed in a ceramics factory where he learnt to appreciate decorative art. On the advice of Cormon Schatz went to the south of France to improve his work with colour. There, in the Mediterranean town Banyuls-sur-Mer on the Spanish border where he spent six months, he not only learned to understand colours, as he later claimed, but his personality, as an artist and a man, emerged also. Schatz described this period as a series of visions leading to his Jewish and Zionist work: he saw Mattathias Hasmonean calling for battle and ‘gathering to his side the last surviving handful of liberty-loving Jews, who would rather meet death as free men than continue their life as slaves’; and he saw the prophet Jeremiah composing the Book of Lamentations, and he saw Moses, ‘the greatest genius …whose light illuminated mankind in its cradle’.18 The beauty of the scenery at Banyuls got him close to nature and subsequently to dreams about natural and free life. He envisaged a group of cultivated people living within a natural surrounding similar to that of eretz yisrael and this group would be the nucleus for future humanity; wisdom would be their shrine and art and labour their livelihood; not industrial work with machines but rather the labour of mind and creativity that brings happiness to mankind. From these vague and delightful utopias, Schatz wrote, evolved his thought about Bezalel.19 What exactly the nature of his experience in Banyuls was it is impossible to say Back in Paris he made some paintings and sculptures on the life of Moses and created his most famous and successful sculpture, Mattathias (Fig. 2.1). In 1895 Schatz moved to Bulgaria for reasons

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not fully known.20 He stayed there for ten years—the peak of his career as an artist— where he grew in confidence and reputation. Following the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule in 1878 numerous projects were initiated to promote the creation of national identity and to bring Bulgaria closer to western Europe. Art and education had important roles in this scheme. Hundreds of monuments and sculptures in various techniques and styles were erected to commemorate the liberation and many parks and urban spaces were decorated with sculptures and fountains, thus opening many opportunities for foreign artists.21 In 1896 the School of Drawing (renamed the Art Academy in 1924) was opened in Sofia with a Czech artist at its head and where Schatz also taught.22 The prevailing Russian and French cultural influences in Bulgaria23 gave Boris Schatz, with his Russian background and his French artistic experience and success (he had won a few prizes in France) an advantage. He produced several monuments and decorative objects, and participated in the Bulgarian exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 and the World Fair in St Louis in 1904. According to his pupil Shmuel BenDavid, who came with him to Palestine, Schatz was nominated court sculptor, was honoured by the King’s ministers and was given almost all government sculpture commissions.24 After several years in Bulgaria Schatz started to change his themes. He had previously created some works on Jewish and biblical figures but these comprised only a minor part of his entire work. Then, in 1903–4 he made a series of reliefs on traditional Jewish customs and ceremonies based on his childhood memories that would become the centre of his art and would be repeated and reproduced many times in the future. It has been suggested that Schatz’s response to a national tragedy, the pogroms of Kishiniev of 1903, changed his ideology and iconography.25 Another version relates it closer to home, to the collapse of his family life.26 Be this as it may, the works show a nostalgic look at his roots and perhaps reflect an attempt to re-define the Jewish element in his art.

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Figure 2.1: Boris Schatz, Mattathias, the Hasmonean, 1894; photograph (original lost). Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem Schatz and Zionism Several years after he settled in Bulgaria, Schatz joined the Zionist movement. He attended public meetings, befriended the Rabbi and Zionist activist Dr M.Ehrenpreis and made his way onto the international Zionist stage.27 Schatz’s involvement with the Zionist movement led him to his big project and, according to Ben-David, it was precisely his experience in Bulgaria that gave Schatz the impetus to establish Bezalel:

Boris Schatz, founder of Bezalel

23

As one of the founders of the art school in Sofia he was always interested in the development of home industries for art in Bulgaria. This small people that cultivates its land allocates huge sums [of money] for maintaining a school with many departments for art and crafts. Why not establish such a school in eretz yisrael? Bulgaria earned about a million francs (at that time) from the production of rugs and even bigger sums from ceramics and chinaware. Would that be difficult in eretz yisrael?28 It was, according to this interpretation, the contribution of the crafts to the country’s economy and their potential source of income to town workers and to farmers outside the field work seasons that motivated Schatz to establish Bezalel. He may also have been impressed by the role of state education programmes in preserving and promoting local traditions.29 The Bulgarian experience was for Schatz, as for the Bezalel supporters, an ideal model although no study of its applicability for Jewish Palestine ever took place. For Schatz the economic considerations were mixed with visionary nationalism, views he presented to Theodor Herzl. Like other events in Schatz’s life the detail of this meeting, its date and location are unsure.30 Schatz’s description of the meeting is imbued with the mythic aura of Herzl. He recounts how he spoke about his ideas ‘with glowing enthusiasm for a full hour’, inspired by Herzl’s ‘handsome presence’ and waiting ‘with beating heart’ for Herzl’s response: ‘Good, we shall do that,’ he said, quietly and resolutely. And after a brief pause he asked: ‘What name will you give to your school?’ ‘Bezalel,’ I answered, ‘after the name of the first Jewish artist who once built a temple in the wilderness.’ A temple in the wilderness,’ he repeated slowly, and the beautiful sad eyes seemed to look into an endless vista, as though he felt that he would never see it himself.31 This ‘blessing’ of Herzl was very important to Schatz and he often repeated this story. After Herzl’s death in the summer of 1904 Schatz went to Berlin to propose his idea to a leading spokesman of Practical Zionism, Otto Warburg.32 Subsequently a committee was organised to deal with the practicalities of the vision; in addition to Schatz and Warburg it included the artist E.M.Lilien and the Zionist activists Drs Franz Oppenheimer and Hirsch Hildesheimer.33 In November 1904 the founding board of the Bezalel Society for Establishing Jewish Cottage Industries and Crafts in Palestine printed a leaflet with its programme that was soon published in the Zionist press.34 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the leading concept in this programme was the productivisation of the Jews in Palestine as the basis for social regeneration. The assumption was that education in crafts and trade would give the population there not only work but also an outlet for individual expression. It would add value to the products and thus increase their competitiveness. Market demand for crafts from Palestine was believed to be secured as a result of the unique status of the country for the three religions and the growing number of tourists and pilgrims anxious to purchase artistic souvenirs. Furthermore, an almost unlimited export opportunity was supposed to exist for crafts from Palestine as decorations for synagogues, churches and cemeteries.35 It seems that

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the economic base of the proposal relied not so much on a rational analysis as on the spiritual and metaphysical status of Palestine as the Holy Land, especially as it developed and was perceived by Westerners during the nineteenth century.36 Apart from the ‘practical’ outcome of the Bezalel project the programme also asserts that it would not be difficult to create an art style suitable for the land’s surroundings and history since there were so many sources of inspiration in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. Archaeological excavations of ancient synagogues, churches and mosques have revealed motifs that provided the inspiration for an artistic expression.37 Schatz in particular believed that a national Jewish art would emerge through some ‘natural’ influence of Palestine on the Jewish artists. Yet the mention of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions in the founding programme indicated an expectation that an ‘authentic’ style of locally made artefacts must stem from the country’s religious heritage and ancient past as a whole, reflecting a somewhat naïve view of the universal sanctity of the Holy Land and overlooking the rivalry between the faiths and the separate spheres in which the different communities conducted their lives in Palestine. The three main principles of the Bezalel programme—its economic significance to the yishuv, the definition of the products as predominantly decorative objects of religious or sentimental value for export, and the belief that a local style of art would emanate from the land itself—would remain key elements in the work of Bezalel but would also be at the root of its problems. Boris Schatz and Ahad Ha-Am In the booklet ‘Bezalel, its Programme and Aim’ that he wrote a short while after the foundation of Bezalel Schatz refers to the problem of Jewish art and why it was not fully developed: In order to develop his talents the Jewish artist must leave his Jewish environment and study in foreign countries, be influenced by a foreign spirit and work on foreign subjects. Thus, gradually, without noticing it, he removes himself from the Jewish people.38 This concept of artistic talents that are ‘lost’ to the Jewish people due to foreign influences echoes the views already pronounced by the leader and major spokesman of Cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha-Am. It has been suggested that Schatz was influenced by Ahad Ha-Am already in his Paris years or even earlier, although this is very unlikely.39 Schatz got closer to Zionism while in Bulgaria and might have been introduced to Ahad Ha-Am’s writing through Ehrenpreis—‘admirer and rival’.40 In October 1902 the famous article by Ahad Ha-Am on the spiritual revival was published in the German cultural review Ost und West.41 Schatz undoubtedly saw it since a reproduction of his own work was published in the very same issue.42 His mentor Antokolsky was discussed in the journal not only by Ahad Ha-Am but also in two other articles that immediately followed the second part of Ahad Ha-Am’s essay. A text by Antokolsky himself was included.43 It is a reasonable assertion that Schatz came to know Ahad Ha-Am’s views on art and culture through this article. He may have been inspired to go and found an art school in Jerusalem by such a statement as The establishment of a single great school of learning or

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art in Palestine…would contribute more to the attainment of our aim than a hundred agricultural settlements’.44 Nonetheless he turned for help in realising the Bezalel project to the Political Zionist leader, Herzl, and later to the Practical Zionist leader, Warburg. Shortly after Bezalel opened in 1906 Ahad Ha-Am was informed about it in a letter from Palestine.45 In the summer of that year he received the booklet about Bezalel and its programme that Schatz published and read it with delight: ‘This is the first time that I believe in the success of a new project that is proclaimed in eretz yisrael’ he wrote. He saw in Schatz’s words the necessary conviction to succeed and appreciated the fact that Bezalel’s founder had limited himself to one direction and was not attempting to conquer eretz yisrael by all conceivable means.46 When Boris Schatz wanted to develop Bezalel further from the crafts workshops to an art academy Ahad Ha-Am was less supportive. By then the criticism of Bezalel had reached him and when Schatz approached him in 1911 hoping for some financial aid Ahad Ha-Am declined politely but firmly.47 He promised however to call upon Schatz in his forthcoming visit to Palestine and indeed in his visit in the autumn of 1911 Ahad Ha-Am spent a whole day in Bezalel.48 His impressions of it were mixed: Its great aim—the development of Hebrew art—was achieved only slightly thus far, and where high art is concerned it has not yet arrived. But what was achieved in the various crafts allows one to believe that here too the ‘confidence to make wonders will grow.’ By and by Bezalel also has become a spiritual wellspring pouring out of eretz yisrael to remote countries. And who knows how many distant hearts were brought closer to their people thanks to the beautiful ‘carpets’ and ‘toys’ of Bezalel….49 Clearly the interest of Ahad Ha-Am in Bezalel was limited but he could appreciate it as part of his own ideal of creating a Jewish spiritual centre in eretz yisrael. In fact he considered Bezalel as one of the centres of creativity he had found in the country, which ‘seemed to join together by themselves and emerge as a single national centre whose influence on the diaspora is already apparent and considerable even now, in its initial state of being’.50

3 The Bezalel Institute

Figure 3.1: Bezalel letterhead and stamp, 1914; emblem design by E.M.Lilien From its very beginning Bezalel enjoyed enormous publicity. The plans to open the school, its proposed programme and every detail of its first steps that were soon followed by photographs, were distributed in the Zionist press throughout the Jewish world. So widespread was its reputation that one writer could claim in 1910 that ‘without exaggeration we say: Bezalel is the most famous Zionist institution in the world’.1 A collection of newspaper cuttings on Bezalel kept in its archive2 shows how aware Boris Schatz was of the role of public relations in gaining moral and financial support and in creating a good image for posterity. That many of these articles owe their source of information to Schatz himself, or were written by enthusiastic supporters of Bezalel who reported on its achievements, may explain how the myth of Bezalel and its founder was born together with the institute itself.3 Likewise, the financial and managerial crises that accompanied Bezalel from its early years were described as a struggle between Schatz the idealist and dreamer who sacrificed himself for the fulfilment of the vision, and the bureaucratic bourgeois Jews who ‘regarded Bezalel as a business like any other’.4 Thus Schatz went down in history as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern Jewish culture in Palestine almost untainted by contemporary criticism of his project from the outside as well as from within the yishuv. As described in Chapter 1 Bezalel set out to solve two different problems: the economic deprivation suffered by Jews in Palestine and the endeavour to promote art and culture in the national movement; the one by establishing workshops, supplying training and jobs and the other by opening an art school and focusing on the creation of national art. The integration of the two strands is said to have stemmed from the Bulgarian model and from Schatz’s experiences there. In fact, attempts to resuscitate popular crafts

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through workshops and the education system in order to improve the economy and to encourage national sentiments were practised in Russia and in other countries from the late nineteenth century onwards. Yet the basic conditions that had produced these initiatives were lacking in eretz yisrael: the Jewish population in Palestine did not have a traditional craft or cottage industry that needed revival, and the country was not industrialised—a major cause of the decline of handicrafts elsewhere. The import of these ideas to Palestine was based not on any real assessment of the situation but rather on assumptions and hopes. For example, one argument for the Bezalel programme was the reputation of the carpet trade in the Middle East since ancient times, and the fact that despite new technologies hand-made carpets had not disappeared from the markets. Subsequent supposition was that the technical aspects of rug making could easily be learned together with some artistic guidance in colour and design. Hence the founding committee of Bezalel suggested the introduction of this industry to Palestine.5 A rug department, the first of the Bezalel workshops, was duly opened, as proposed, in May 1906, a couple of months after the school was set up. Another consideration behind the economic thinking of the Bezalel founders was the low wages of labourers in Palestine. Although not explicit in the original programme, this idea was soon to appear in the writing about Bezalel. Boris Schatz himself counted the first reason why the Bezalel Society had chosen to locate their institute in eretz yisrael to be that ‘in eretz yisrael the craftsman would be able to live off a smaller salary than in other countries’.6 This attitude was fiercely criticised by the Left circles of the Second aliya. The organ of the first workers’ party in Jewish Palestine, ha-poel ha-tza’ir, attacked the whole set of economic presumptions behind the establishment of Bezalel, emphasising two points: (1) that the Jewish worker would continue to be content with little was a totally undesirable condition; and (2) that the livelihood of the people would depend on markets abroad which might undergo sudden and severe changes and every crisis would badly influence the home industries of eretz yisrael.7 This critique was included in the first of a series of articles by the economist and one of the founders and editors of the periodical on the rug industry in the Middle East, Ze’ev Smilansky. The articles covered the history and traditions of the rug trade, the learning and skills involved in weaving, the markets and the labour conditions, and the extremely small wages compared even to the meagre salary of the weavers in Bezalel. The payment of low wages was backed by the view that certain workers needed very little for their livelihood, particularly the Yemenites. Indeed, the majority of workers in Bezalel were Sephardi and Yemenite Jews. ‘This is not a coincidence’, explained K.Silman who taught Hebrew at Bezalel. ‘The Sephardim and the Yemenites are good material; they are more reliable and disciplined in work due to their lack of development. In addition, their living requirements are not so high.’8 The view that the Yemenite Jews were more primitive and therefore more submissive, that they were capable of various work and crafts and would manage on very little was accepted in the yishuv already in the 1880s.9 This opinion had further implications in the employment of Yemenite Jews as agricultural workers in the moshavot (colonies).10

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The workshops

Figure 3.2: A Bezalel carpet depicting Rachel’s Tomb, prior to 1914; 36×42 cm. Anton Felton The carpet-weaving department opened in May 1906 with forty-five girls and women in three sub-departments: spinning, wool-dyeing and rug-binding. But soon there were obstacles in operating the department due to the absence in Palestine of wool and dyeing materials and the need to import such things as well as the expertise needed to carry out the dyeing process. This brought the work to a standstill for months and a year after its opening the workshop had nothing to show of any value. Eventually the department recovered and by 1910 the quality had improved and there were signs of commercial success.11 By that time the school and workshops were settled in two buildings, which had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1908.12 Gradually more departments were added offering training in a variety of crafts. By 1909 there were departments of wood and stone carving, carpentry, silver filigree work and a department specialising in inlaid frames. In 1910 were added departments of Damascene work, cane furniture, copper repoussé and lithography. The following year the number of students

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and workers soared from 140 to 269 and departments of olivewood crafts, work in marble and shell, lacework and photography were opened. This development continued with more departments and in 1912/13 it was reported that the numbers of students and workers had increased to 450.13 This large number of departments was probably very important to Schatz as evidenced by his 1927 memorandum to the Zionist Congress. In this pamphlet he described Bezalel’s achievements by counting the thirty-five different crafts taught in Bezalel since 1906.14 Schatz must have believed that training in numerous crafts was a valuable contribution to the country’s economy, declaring that ‘Bezalel has become a necessity to the Jews in Palestine’. He then argued that ‘by farming alone no nation can survive. Industry is essential and especially the small industries. These require skilled workmen of various trades’.15 This sounds reasonable enough had it been reflected in the actual instruction offered by Bezalel. But instead the school focused on producing ornaments and luxurious objects for foreign markets, and on traditional oriental crafts and techniques that were considered ‘typical’ of the un-industrialised region and thus suitable also for Palestinian Jews. This direction is illustrated by the range of goods offered for sale by Bezalel in 1910. Apart from some Jewish ritual objects the list consisted mostly of such items as pipes, coffee cups and saucers, sugar pincers, tea strainers, purses, jewellery boxes, cigarette cases, hat pins, brooches, bracelets, sugar bowls, fruit bowls, spoons, cups, pots, ashtrays, paper knives, stamp boxes, pencil cases and so on. The majority of these were made of silver filigree, Damascene brass work or olivewood.16 Especially prolific was the silver filigree department whose workers were all Yemenite Jews, men and boys, sometimes of the same family. It was so successful that Boris Schatz intended in 1910 to bring in more craftsmen from the Yemen—he even considered going there himself—and to settle them in a special colony.17 Initially Schatz had the idea that the Yemenite craftsmen would successfully compete with the Arab dealers on the souvenir market if settled in a tourist resort outside Jerusalem. Jericho, in his view, was suitable for Jewish settlement for various reasons except for the extreme summer heat, which was hard on Europeans. ‘But for our Yemenites’ wrote Schatz, ‘the place is as if intended for them, because they were born in this climate, and they would feel better there than in Jerusalem’.18 In Schatz’s vision, fifty trained craftsmen and their families who would each get a house and small piece of land to cultivate for their own needs would be a good start for a Jewish colony. And Bezalel would benefit from the opportunity to market a variety of its goods there during the tourist season. Eventually such a colony was established in 1911 in Ben Shemen on land purchased by the JNF when a few families of Yemenite Jewish silversmiths were transferred there from Jerusalem. But the experiment in combining handicrafts and agriculture was brought to an end early in 1914. The causes for the failure varied from errors in planning and lack

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Figure 3.3: A Bezalel mirror depicting Jacob and Rachel; silver filigree and semi-precious stones, 21.5×13.5 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem. of understanding of the settlers’ culture to the low quality of land that was given to them, the low wages and the unstable relationship between the Yemenite workers and their Ashkenazi foremen.19 In Israeli art historiography the Ben Shemen project is given the role of the first attempt to fulfil Boris Schatz’s vision of an artists’ colony that combined a healthy natural life of art and agriculture. That the vision was unfulfilled, Gideon Ofrat contended, was mainly because of the Yemenite craftsmen’s ineptitude: in not yearning for a ‘natural’ life, neglecting the land given to them, their lax discipline at work and the poor quality of their products in addition to their being unaccustomed to European standards and rules.20 While Boris Schatz and the Bezalel supporters often presented an image of growth and success, in the eyes of critics Bezalel was ‘an experiment that had failed’. What is more ‘Bezalel never was what it wanted to be…all its struc-ture was essentially false…it had never had a natural healthy element…and here was a major fundamental mistake…’.21 This mistake was the conjunction of factory and school; a business intended for profits and an institution relying on charity. Consequently, as ‘the exploitation and the philanthropy converged’, the institute could not justify itself financially, and its income never equalled its expenditure. Worse, its products never had a natural market; they could

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not compete in price, quality or style with similar products from Europe or the East. And yet production grew bigger while the demand remained small. The goods accumulated, the reported profits were unreal ‘and thus after eight years of artificial respiration Bezalel got into a crisis’.22 This harsh criticism was written against the backdrop of the crisis at Bezalel, which reached a critical point in 1913 and resulted in change of management, closure of departments and the dismissal of hundreds of workers.23 Actually the problems had started much earlier and from 1908 onwards the breach between Boris Schatz and the Bezalel Board in Berlin regarding the purpose of Bezalel and ways of achieving it grew wider. There were disputes over the number of departments and the type and style of their products, over nomination of teachers, over fund raising and over almost every aspect of Bezalel activity.24 In his interpretation Ofrat-Friedlander focuses on the power struggle between two opposing views and two competing control centres. It may also be the case of both sides demonstrating a great deal of mismanagement, loss of control and ill judgement. The incompetence among management was the major criticism at the time, and an urgent need to separate the two functions of Bezalel was clear even to its keen supporters.25 In spite of the crisis production continued in a different setting. Many of the dismissed workers organised themselves into craft shops that were subsidiaries of the Bezalel School. These continued to be directed by Schatz and benefit from his promotional work and commercial contacts. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 aggravated the situation but Schatz refused to close the school. He managed to get a little financial support from the USA and later on from the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organisation. The famine that spread through Palestine, the conscription of teachers and students in 1916 to the Ottoman army and in 1918 to the Jewish Legion of the British army, the exile of Schatz to the Galilee during 1917–18, and the stoppage of sales brought activity in Bezalel to its lowest ebb.26 In the early years of the British Mandate the work at Bezalel and the subsidiary workshops resumed. Again, there was a wide range of products in some twenty-three crafts and applied arts. A new Bezalel Company was founded in 1925 and Schatz continued to develop his grandiose plans. He also continued with his efforts to promote Bezalel products in exhibitions abroad. In 1924 Bezalel displayed some of its major objects in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and in 1926 the largest ever Bezalel exhibition took place in New York City. It was held at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue and included a display of Schatz’s own work in sculpture and painting. However not many items were purchased and Bezalel could not be rescued from its inevitable demise.27 In Jerusalem, Bezalel teachers and graduates were dominant among the Jewish participants in the first arts and crafts exhibition held at the Tower of David (the Citadel) in April 1921. The exhibition was organised by the English architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee for the Pro-Jerusalem Society that was founded by the Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, in order to protect the city’s cultural assets and improve the life of its inhabitants including their arts and crafts.28 A year later the second Exhibition of Palestine Crafts and Industries was held at the Citadel while a separate exhibition of painting and sculpture organised by the Jewish Artists’ Society was held elsewhere. In both Citadel exhibitions works by Jewish and Arab artists and artisans were displayed. However in the yishuv the exhibitions were regarded primarily as signifying

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the cultural revival of the Jews in Palestine.29 The works themselves did not escape criticism, and Bezalel was accused of producing ‘fancy articles for luxurious tourists’ whose aesthetic value ‘is not of this time’.30 During the 1920s Tel Aviv, the new Jewish town (founded 1909) north of Jaffa saw massive growth. Economically and ideologically motivated, Schatz hoped to incorporate Bezalel in the building boom. He proposed to decorate the new houses with ceramic tiles made by Bezalel. Using these tiles for street signs and decoration with various images would add to the buildings’ ‘artistic beauty and a Hebrew national character’.31 This was one of the few attempts of Bezalel to expand beyond Jerusalem, in recognition of the growing role of Tel Aviv in the cultural life of the yishuv during the 1920s. The settlement in Tel Aviv of newly arrived artists whose interest in modern art was fundamentally different from those of Schatz, and who fairly quickly became prominent in the local art scene, meant that Bezalel works were rejected as old fashioned and irrelevant to the new life of Jews in Palestine. After Bezalel closed in 1929 the annexed workshops also began slowly to decline.32 But the production of Bezalel objects did not cease. The Industrial Art Studio founded in 1923 by two pivotal Bezalel teachers, Ze’ev Raban and Meir Gur-Arieh, continued its activity until the late 1940s. Some of Raban’s designs in the Bezalel spirit were in commercial use for many decades.33 The Yemenite silversmiths continued to produce silver articles in Bezalel style using the Bezalel trademark into the 1930s and 1940s. Various objects and souvenirs bearing reliefs with typical Bezalel motifs continued to be made in the 1950s and beyond.34 When Bezalel reopened in 1935 with a different artistic orientation and objectives it was named New Bezalel to distinguish it from the ‘old’ Bezalel spirit, which still prevailed in some quarters.35 The school For the opening of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem Boris Schatz brought with him from Europe two teachers: E.M.Lilien, the famous Zionist artist and a member of the founding board of Bezalel, and a decorative painter, one Julius Rothchild of Weimar who was chosen from eight candidates. Neither of them stayed long. Lilien left after a few months before submitting promised carpet designs, and Rothchild resigned following the students’ protest about his competence.36 It was not until the arrival in 1908 of Shmuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), a prominent Jewish painter of the time, that the school had the opportunity to develop into a serious and respectable art school. Sadly Hirszenberg died several months later. Other teachers who arrived in later years were either invited by Schatz or sent by the Berlin board as was A.S.Schur.37 Some of the senior students became teachers or heads of workshops, among them Ben-David, Gur-Arieh, Leaf and Persoff.38 But as a whole throughout the period it was Professor Schatz himself who was the dominant and influential teacher of drawing, painting and sculpture.39 His art, his artistic preferences and taste and his general views on art were major guidelines for Bezalel students. Occasionally there were other influences. In 1913 Abel Pann (1883–1963) came to Bezalel from Paris having been invited by Schatz to teach painting. His year in the school was remembered as a fresh experience in the use of

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colour, the introduction to modern French art and above all the liberation from the ‘misery’ of Jewish painting: In his works we found none of the dramatisation of poverty, ruins of ancient buildings, dark alleys and blind Jewish beggars as painted by Herman Struck, Hirszenberg, Lilien and Schatz; at Abel Pann’s there were pictures with colour harmonies, light pastel drawing, and love for people blended with a delicate sense of humour….40 According to the school’s curriculum students aged from fifteen to twenty-one could apply.41 This was different from the workshops and the evening school that accepted children as young as nine years old. The period of study in the school was four years in eight semesters, nine months a year. All classes were compulsory but it was possible to move from one class to the next before the end of term and some students were accepted directly into higher classes. The studies were free of charge except for a one-off payment for materials but the students had to prove that they could cover their living expenses. There was also a system of ‘free’ students who had to pay the fee and could select their classes but who were not entitled to a diploma, a teaching certificate or a grant. From the various documents it seems that only a limited number of students completed the fulltime, four-year course. For instance the students’ register of 1914–16 shows that the majority of the students left after a year or a year and a half and several after two or three years.42 While some entered the army in 1916 there were others who were expelled from school on disciplinary grounds, usually for missing classes. In one case a student named Brilliant was summoned to a teachers’ meeting to explain his absence from class. He simply answered that ‘he could not come to work because it was not interesting for him’.43 The student was warned and later dismissed. This was probably not a unique case of a student being disappointed at what was offered in Bezalel. The writer Y.H.Brenner who reported on the problems of Bezalel and its workshops also paid attention to the art students who came from abroad and their deep disappointment: In the halls of the institution some twenty youngsters wandered about, those who were lectured to day and night about their role as the bearers of the revived Hebrew art. However this lecturing was not really intended for them but rather for the wide world that should know that there was an art academy in Jerusalem. […] But as far as I could talk with students on the state of the School I realised that to this day it is still in the same situation it was five or six years ago…lacking any basis or programme…Many had the air of people ‘deceived’—the creator of Bezalel deceived them in his promises and gave them incorrect information—and the dream of returning abroad was the best of their dreams.44 Brenner was especially sensitive to the gap between ideals and reality in eretz yisrael. The deep sense of frustration he describes here derived not only from unfulfilled promises but also from the gap between the concepts of ‘art’ the students might have had and the actual crafts they were required to produce. Reuven Rubin who studied in Bezalel

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wrote in his memoir about these feelings. He arrived there in 1912 at the age of eighteen, hopeful and excited. Soon however he realised that Although called the ‘Bezalel Art School’, it possessed no fine arts section, and other young people who, like myself, had come to study there were forced to turn to souvenir making for a living. I was very dissatisfied at the turn things had taken and disliked the mechanical nature of the work I was doing.45 Rubin left Bezalel and later studied art in Paris, returning in the 1920s to become one of the leading painters in Palestine. Other artists of his generation had a similar experience: Pinhas Litvinovsky studied in Bezalel for a year and returned to Russia to the academy of St Petersburg while Yisrael Paldi studied for several months in Bezalel before going to the academy in Munich. For those who wished to combine their national sentiments with an aspiration for high art, Bezalel and its focus on souvenir production proved unsuitable. The emphasis on decorative arts is clearly manifested in the curriculum. A typical day in the school consisted of three to four hours of drawing, usually of plaster casts, still life, heads from live models and figure compositions; two hours of decorative art—stylised flowers, geometrical ornaments—and from the third semester designs for various objects and decorations; three hours (later only one and a half hours) of modelling ornaments, basrelief, masks, heads; two hours of practice session (from the third semester onwards) in ivory carving, repoussé, lithography, decorative paintings. Hebrew was taught six hours a week and there were classes in art history, perspective and anatomy. In the 1920s the term ‘painting’ was used instead of drawing but the objects of study were the same, mainly head and torso from life. There was emphasis on sculpture where making a head and a full body from life was the main objective. However there is no mention of nude models. Advanced classes in decorative art worked on larger projects such as Torah Arks (Fig. 3.4) and on commercial art (posters, advertisement). Students were also required to take practice sessions in different crafts either in Bezalel or in the affiliated independent workshops. The syllabus reflects an amalgamation of several traditions in art education that were current in Europe.46 One was that of the academies, especially the French academy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where drawing was the major skill taught through copying of casts and life drawings. Admiration for the antique made classical subjects predominant. The absence of nude models made the instruction in Bezalel different from the academic tradition but the emphasis on the human body and face as the supreme subject for art was in the same spirit. Instead of classical subjects Bezalel preferred biblical themes but there are examples of works showing males or females in the nude. These were probably made after classical or Renaissance art works.47 Another tradition, also developed since the eighteenth century, and which in Russia was supported by the government during the nineteenth century, was that of teaching drawing to future artisans. In Bezalel, this was mainly the role of the evening school. Originally it was intended for practising artisans in order to develop their artistic sense in production, but in reality it also accepted many children.48 Another tendency was that of the German Gewerbeschule (as Bezalel was originally called)—training workshops that were closely

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geared to the needs of industry. In England an anti-industrial approach, typical of the Arts and Crafts movement, promoted teaching manual crafts as part of wider social and national ideals. It has often been suggested that Boris Schatz was influenced by Arts and Crafts ideas.49 However it is difficult to establish a direct connection, particularly in view of the spread of the Arts and Crafts movement’s social and aesthetic influences throughout Europe. A significant enterprise that emerged from these ideals was the Wiener Werkstätten, an organisation of designers and craftsmen established in Vienna in 1903 that is said to have influenced Bezalel ceramic design.50 The influence of Arts and Crafts was equally important in Russia in the founding of artists’ colonies consisting of workshops where artists designed objects based on folk art. These initiatives, along with the opening of schools for training peasant children in traditional skills, were meant to help the peasant as well as to revive national art.51 To the obvious tension between those traditions Schatz added his strong objection to modern art. Not only did he praise Classical art but he also claimed, and made his views well publicised, that modern art was nothing more than ‘a mixture of artificial naivety, cynicism, silly hints, antiquated Romanticism, prosaicness, infantile incompetence, crude ignorance…and unashamed impudence’; in short modern art was like ‘a contagious disease that is dangerous only to feeble people’.52 No wonder that during the 1920s there was growing friction between Schatz and the newly arrived artists, among them former students who had absorbed the influences of European modern art. Bezalel continued to attract young Zionist art students who came from abroad during the 1920s. Some of them—Aroch, Gliksberg, Stematzky and Streichman—would become leading figures in Israeli art in later years. But they too left after less than two years and often went to Europe, mainly to Paris, to pursue their art education. Others turned to alternative art schools that opened in Tel Aviv. The influence of Bezalel on the further development of Israeli art is thus hard to trace. By the mid 1920s Bezalel School was considered by the supporters of the new trends as not just old-fashioned but an institution that had not succeeded even in its own terms. Bezalel’s intentions to revive Jewish art in eretz yisrael and its aspirations to create original national art, argued the critic Yitzhak Katz, had failed. It was, as he explained, because the people who inspired the Bezalel project misunderstood the Jewish artistic spirit; they mixed different styles that removed them from their original aim and adopted some long-forgotten trends. Eventually Bezalel turned into an institute of cheap paintings and a factory of amulets in an outmoded exilic manner. Moreover, All those Stars of David, paintings of Yemenites and lions found in Bezalel do not attest to the existence of Hebrew art in this place…[but] this view is still prevalent in and around Bezalel and for a long time was upheld by writers and artists who were influenced by it, refraining from seeing the new life arising in the country, the national home that is gradually being built, the pioneering and the industry that is being created.53

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Figure 3.4: Bezalel artists, Holy Ark (with scenes from the life of Moses, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, symbols of the twelve tribes, the Zodiac and Biblical verses), 1916–23;

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brass, semi-precious stones, enamel, silver, filigree, ivory and shell, 175.26×88.9×Z70 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago. (Designed by Z.Raban with Y.Zucker and D.Rivkind; ivory carvings: M.Gur Arieh) For this and other critics Bezalel art was regarded as not only outdated but, more crucially, as out of touch with the life of the yishuv. A similar criticism would be directed later at the opponents of Bezalel. The museum The historic and religious heritage of Palestine and the archaeological excavations that had been conducted there had already been pointed out by the Bezalel founding board as an important source of inspiration and as a model for local artistic creation. There was no mention of establishing a museum however. This was probably Schatz’s own initiative, said to be based on the museum in Sofia, Bulgaria and on Jewish museums in Europe.54 The practice of collecting, studying and displaying artefacts and folk objects was part of national revivals throughout Europe and Russia. These museums, alongside flags, anthems, monuments, folk tales and forms of customs and manners, were part of a language of symbols and rituals that expressed the collective ‘self’ and communicated abstract ideology into concrete terms, which could then create emotional responses in the public.55 The evolution of Jewish museums in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, the Bezalel Museum included, can be regarded as part of this phenomenon.56 Bezalel Museum, however, was not initially organised as a Jewish museum or indeed as an art museum. It was mainly a natural history museum with a collection of insects and reptiles, butterflies and stuffed birds from Palestine. From Schatz’s point of view the birds and butterflies would function to inspire local motifs for the carpet weaving. Thus the Bezalel products would represent ‘what is characteristic of our land, what is particular to it!’ and ‘this would make us as original as other nations and we would not have to imitate other countries’.57 Photographs of the museum in its early years show that among the various creatures there sat the The Messiah by Enric Glicenstein, a Jewish sculptor who lived in Rome. Besides a glass cabinet full of specimen containers there was another cabinet with a porcelain vase and some archaeological findings. On the wall hung portraits, among them a big portrait of Herzl. The mixture of Palestinian natural history, archaeological items, Jewish ritual objects, and paintings and sculptures by Jewish artists was characteristic of the museum’s collection for many years. By 1910 the natural and archaeological collections grew richer and were separated in different rooms. Schatz proudly reported on

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a priceless collection of ancient Jewish oil lamps, many of them of the Second Temple period, and on the collection of ancient glass, an ancient Torah scroll, a collection of Hanukkah lamps and a collection of amulets. As for art, only a few of the Jewish artists who promised to send their works actually did so and most of the objects in the museum were gifts. Schatz was well aware that ‘the term “museum” is not really appropriate to describe our small collection. Nevertheless, it is also true that the inhabitants of eretz yisrael can pride themselves on the fact that they have their own collection, however small’.58 Schatz continued to express national pride in the museum in his later recounting of it. In his 1927 memorandum to the Zionist Congress he mentions some 6000 items of ancient and new art collected over twenty years, not including the 1500 items of natural history (that eventually were transferred to the Hebrew University) or the archaeological items that were transferred to a separate museum and manuscripts that were given to the national library. The museum, he claimed, was recognised by the British government as a national museum; it enjoyed all the rights of a national institution and received gifts from other national museums. Finally Schatz boasted that ‘it is not alone the best museum in Palestine and Syria, but the largest Jewish Museum in the world. One can find there a number of things of which many a museum abroad would be proud. It receives tens of thousands of visitors every year’.59 Far from the reality this declaration was just another way in which Schatz tried to save Bezalel from collapse. By 1927 the state of the museum was so desperate that Mordechai Narkiss, the director of the museum, who was not paid for months, informed Schatz that he and his family were on the verge of starvation.60 Schatz’s exaggerated account probably aimed to show the potential national significance of the museum as well as to hide the bitter truth. In this report on the museum, as in his report on the school, Schatz was more keen on showing numbers than demonstrating essence or quality. Since the museum collection was based on donations there was limited room for choice. The museum was first opened to the public in 1912 but the crisis in Bezalel and the war prevented any further development. It was mainly during the 1920s that it started to develop according to a new plan. In June 1925 the museum, occupying fourteen halls and now named National Museum Bezalel, was officially opened. Schatz presented it in his grand manner as ‘the opening of the first national Jewish museum in Eretz Israel and in the entire world’.61 The reality was all too different. Support for the museum by the Zionist Organisation and by the public was diminishing due to dissatisfaction with the way the museum was managed, and with its content and policy. In 1922 the treasurer of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine, Zadok Van Vriezland, wrote a memorandum on the museum.62 This report followed Boris Schatz’s proposal to transfer the museum (which he had previously directed ‘on behalf of the Jewish people’) to the Zionist Organisation. Since the Zionist Organisation was unable to manage the collection by itself it was suggested that a Board of Management be set up consisting of Jewish collectors and artists, and a temporary committee was duly established in Jerusalem. One of the first practical steps suggested was ‘the weeding-out of duplicate objects and objects of insufficient merit’ and displaying them for sale. The future of the collection, the report proposed, should be put in the hands of an independent purchasing committee abroad that would have contacts with Jewish and Zionist organisations and with other national museums. Priority in the collecting process should be given ‘primarily to works by Jewish artists and, in the

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second degree, to works on Jewish subjects. General works of art should not be refused but should be arranged in a separate part of the museum’.63 These and others ideas in the memorandum faced a major problem: Schatz’s refusal to co-operate with the committee (of which Van Vriezland was a member), thus preventing it from carrying out its plan. Two years later Van Vriezland wrote another report. This time it discussed Bezalel in general, covering the school, workshops and museum and its economic, educational and aesthetic aspects. Regarding the museum it again stated that ‘more than fifty percent of the articles should be at once eliminated’. This time the report was fiercely reproachful and personally directed at Schatz, who, in the view of its author ‘has a deadening influence on the development of art life in Palestine’.64 But as in past cases the recommendation (to dismiss Schatz) was not implemented and Schatz, who was fond of declaring himself ‘an old-timer in the Zionist cause’,65 continued his lonely struggle to keep Bezalel his way. The Bezalel Museum survived the demise of the school in 1929 mainly thanks to the efforts of Mordechai Narkiss who was in effect the museum head from the mid 1920s but who became fully independent after Schatz’s death in 1932. Narkiss prepared the first catalogue of the collection, published articles on various subjects from Jewish ritual objects to modern Jewish artists and organised temporary exhibitions. He maintained a good relationship with the New Bezalel and often collaborated with Tel Aviv Museum (opened in 1932). Narkiss continued to be the director of the Bezalel National Museum until his death in 1957. In 1965 the Museum was incorporated as a division in the newly founded Israel Museum.

4 The iconography of Bezalel art The works of art and crafts that were produced in Bezalel are usually classified according to the material and techniques employed in their making. The analysis of the objects usually emphasises matters of style whereas the iconography is discussed in broad generalisation or linked with stylistic aspects.1 The prevalence of stylistic study of Bezalel art reflects the aspirations of Bezalel founders to create the much desired ‘original Hebrew style’. It also abides by art historical conventions that prefer to treat decorative art and handicrafts in terms of materials, form and quality of execution rather than in terms of themes or ideas. Looking at the subject matter of Bezalel works separately from the specific objects, their function or techniques, will offer further insight into the purpose and meaning of these works, and consequently into the ideas and ideologies behind their making. The main source for the following subject classification is the exhibition catalogue of the most comprehensive survey of Bezalel art to date that was held at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem in 1983. This catalogue describes about 1450 items, over 200 of which are photographed.2 In its brief description of Bezalel iconography the catalogue mentions the following themes: the Hebrew letter; Jewish and Zionist symbols; Zionist figures; the fauna and flora of eretz yisrael; Jewish art and archaeology of eretz yisrael; scenes of eretz yisrael; ethnic types; pioneering life in eretz yisrael; and biblical subjects.3 To some extent these categories might represent the variety of themes in Bezalel art, albeit without according weight, popularity or significance. Jewish symbols The recurrent Jewish symbols in Bezalel works are the Menorah, the Magen David (Star of David), the Tablets of the Law, the Ark of the Covenant and lions. But the Menorah, often flanked by heraldic lions, exceeds by far all the other symbols.4 The popularity of the Menorah is interesting, especially when measured against the Magen David, since both were adopted as national symbols by the Zionist movement. The hexagram that came to be known as the Shield of David (Magen David) is commonly identified with Zionism, Israel and the Jews. Gershom Scholem has shown that it ‘is not a

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Figure 4.1: Bezalel (Sharar group), Hanukkah lamp depicting a Menorah and winged lions, 1920s; brass repoussé, 20.1×26.×5.1 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago Jewish symbol, much less “the symbol of Judaism”’.5 It is an ancient symbol found among many peoples and cultures as a protective sign of magic and this was also its principal significance in Jewish circles until the nineteenth century. Since the sixteenth century in Prague and later on in other cities the Shield of David became also the insignia of the Jewish community and was used on official seals and printer’s marks. But it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the emblem started its great dissemination, a result of the efforts of emancipated and Enlightened Jews to find ‘a symbol of Judaism’ to match the symbol of Christianity, the cross. When chosen as the Zionist insignia it was known to everyone. What made it so effective, writes Scholem, was that it was in fact an empty symbol, ‘it lacked any clear connection with religious conceptions and associations. This fault became a virtue: rather than calling to mind past glory, it addressed hopes for the future, for redemption’.6 The Menorah on the other hand had been the most widely used and the most important emblem of Judaism.7 Since antiquity

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and throughout the Middle Ages the seven-branched candelabrum—believed to be the form of a central ritual object of the Temple—was depicted in a variety of forms and materials in all contexts, from funerary art to synagogue decorations, and was strongly connected to messianism and expectation of future redemption. In the modern era the Menorah continued to be a recurrent motif in the synagogue and can also be found throughout the Jewish diaspora on ritual objects for the home, particularly the Hanukkah lamp and other personal objects of Jewish significance. Gradually it came to imply secular values and primarily national identity.8 The Menorah had a significant status in Bezalel although not an official one. The emblem chosen for Bezalel was the Ark of the Covenant and was designed by E.M.Lilien.9 It appeared on the school’s flag, signpost and documents (Fig. 3.1) as well as on Boris Schatz’s personal ex-libris plates. Drawn according to the biblical description (Exodus 25:10–21) the Ark, like the name of Bezalel Ben-Uri, the first Biblical artist who was commissioned to make the sanctuary’s ritual objects (Exodus 31:2–12), was meant to establish a direct and legitimating link between art and Judaism, and between the new project and the ancient tradition. Schatz liked to compare Bezalel School to the sanctuary in the desert.10 In some variations to the image of the Ark a bearded man with tools in his hand is seen in front of the Ark, representing Bezalel Ben-Uri himself. The association between the first artist who made the shrine for the Israelites in the desert and the modern artist who established the art school was made fairly obvious.11 In images showing the biblical artist seated, leaning his head on one hand in a thinking position, as in a 1918 sculpture by Boris Schatz, the association with Schatz is enhanced as he was often photographed in a similar pose. Nevertheless it was not the Ark of the Covenant that became a popular symbol in Bezalel but the Menorah, also described in the Bible (Exodus 25:31–40). A seven-branched Menorah was erected on the roof of the Bezalel building, a feature that appeared among others on the cover of Schatz’s utopian novel yerushalayim ha-benuya (Jerusalem Rebuilt). Several Menorahs were produced by Bezalel artists and it featured as a main motif on carpets and numerous objects, including many Hanukkah lamps (Figs 4.1, 4.2, Pl. A). The popularity of the Menorah in Bezalel art may have a straightforward explanation: Bezalel products were aimed primarily at the Jewish diaspora, so the use of such a well-known symbol as a means of identification with the Jewish people is reasonable. It is significant, though, that the predominant Jewish symbol in Bezalel art was the Menorah, which was rich in religious associations, and not the more national-secular Magen David. More than any other symbol the Menorah could promote the image of Bezalel as preserving or even re-creating traditional Jewish art while at the same time being part of the Zionist enterprise. It could best symbolise the link between past and present and between the various Jewish ethnic groups; a unifying symbol that could bridge over the growing gap between religious and secular Jews. Moreover, the messianic connotations attached to the Menorah, and particularly its association with Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that celebrates the struggle for cultural and political independence in ancient eretz yisrael, made this symbol even more relevant in the Zionist context.

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Figure 4.2: A Bezalel carpet depicting Menorah, prior to 1914;146×98 cm. Anton Felton

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Holy Places The theme referred to as ‘scenes of eretz yisrael’ was in fact a set of rather traditional images of the Holy Places, mainly in Jerusalem or its vicinity. These sites—often several of them are shown together—include Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, the Tower of David (the Citadel), the Temple Site (mekom ha-mikdash) on the Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, Absalom’s Tomb and a few others. These are by no means representations of eretz yisrael as a geographical entity or a type of land-scape. Rather, they are schematic pictures of specific buildings in a formula well established in Jewish art. They can be traced back to the Middle Ages when sacred sites of the Holy Land first began to be illustrated in Hebrew manuscripts. Since the sixteenth century, and more so with the spread of printing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pamphlets about the sacred shrines in eretz yisrael were popular and served as sources of information and as guides for visitors. The illustrations in these pamphlets were often imaginary or based on non-Jewish sources. In the nineteenth century such images of the Jewish Holy Places were produced in Palestine in various forms: in Hebrew books and other printed material; embroidered on Sabbath tablecloths and napkins; painted on succah decorations; painted and printed on mizrah pictures; and on decorated souvenirs from the Holy Land.12 Some of the images were fairly accurate in representing the forms of the shrines and specific features. But on the whole they cannot be regarded as ‘views’ of the land in the sense of the tradition of landscape painting in Western art. Nor are they related to the tradition of Holy Land pictures in paintings, prints and photographs that was developed by Western artists and travellers during the nineteenth century. Jewish images of the Holy Places were essentially pictures of a building—a tomb or a shrine— presented separately in an emblematic manner. The shrines were destinations of pilgrims, places of Jewish gathering, worship and prayer for personal and collective redemption. The increase in messianic expectation contributed to the growing immigration of Jews to Palestine during the nineteenth century.13 Subsequently the symbolic function of the Holy Places was enhanced and with it their recurrent appearance in Jewish folk art. The growth of tourism and pilgrimage to Palestine had also encouraged the development of a souvenir industry. For the Jewish market these souvenirs carried a specific meaning when showing the Jewish Holy Places.

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Figure 4.3: Marvadia workshop, Bezalel, carpet depicting Rachel’s Tomb, 1920s; 55.9×116.2 cm. Photograph: Michele Liebowitz. Spertus Museum Collection, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago

Figure 4.4: A Bezalel stencil, Souvenir from eretz yisrael, with depictions of (from top left), the Western Wall, Tsower of David, the Temple Site,

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Tiberias and (centre) Rachel’s Tomb; sheet metal, cut-out, 16×20 cm. Collection: Davara Family, Herzliya, Israel Bezalel artefacts conveying images of the Holy Places were then a continuation of this tradition. The most recurrent site in Bezalel art was Rachel’s Tomb (Figs 3.2, 4.3, 4.4), the shrine that excluding the Western Wall was the most important and most frequently visited by Jews for generations.14 Bearing in mind the intended market for Bezalel products the continuation of traditional imagery of eretz yisrael is not surprising. Nonetheless these images gradually merged with Zionist iconography. A typical example is the picture of Theodor Herzl leaning on a hand rail—based on a famous photograph taken in Basel at the time of the first Zionist Congress in 1897—looking towards the Tower of David in Jerusalem. This combination first appeared on one of the stamps of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and was a popular motif for wall rugs (see below, Fig. 4.12). As Berkowitz argues, by associating Herzl with the Jewish national landscape of eretz yisrael his image served as the bridge between secular-national aspiration and Jewish messianism. In the same way Bezalel items served to transform the Jewish religious symbols into national symbols.15 New ‘holy’ places Alongside the traditional Holy Places new images of national significance had developed, based in form and mode on existing conventions. The most recurrent of these new images was the Citadel, an ancient structure guarding the western entrance to Jerusalem’s old city. It was built and destroyed several times in the last two millennia and in its present state is mainly Ottoman (1517–1917). The Citadel is known in Hebrew as migdal david (Tower of David) but this is not a sacred place in any sense. This fact has not prevented it from being frequently depicted in Bezalel works alongside other shrines. For decades the Tower of David has continued to be a very popular symbol of eretz yisrael for both official—for example on postal stamps—and non-official images. The status of this structure is curious. It has been suggested that due to its geographical location, historic continuity and the aesthetic appeal of its architecture the Tower of David became a significant site in eretz yisrael and especially in Jerusalem.16 Yet the role of the Citadel as a Jewish national symbol and how and when it acquired this role still needs to be clarified. The early depictions of the Tower of David in Jewish art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were imaginary and its first ‘real’ picture was made in Palestine in the nineteenth century. The Jewish scholar of the history and geography of eretz yisrael, Rabbi Joseph Schwarz (1804–1865) who settled in Jerusalem in 1833, produced in 1837 a lithograph consisting of a map and pictures of the city and its important sites (Fig. 4.5). Of the five pictures two (on the left) show separate views of the Tower of David, annotated as view from the inside and from the outside. Images from Schwarz’s lithography soon spread, distributed through printed books. In particular his depiction of the Western Wall with a row of cypresses behind it became the most common motif in the representation of Jerusalem in Jewish popular art of the nineteenth century. However the pictures of the Tower of David were far less popular.17

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During the early twentieth century this situation changed and the Tower of David featured in numerous works, souvenirs, ceremonial objects, decorative objects and others that were produced in Jerusalem. In Bezalel art the Tower of David is the second most popular image among the the Holy Places and appears either on its own or alongside Rachel’s Tomb, the Temple Site (Temple Mount) or the Western Wall (Fig. 4.4, Pl. A). Its form has also changed completely. It is no longer based on the schematic model of Schwarz but rather looks like a silhouette as viewed from the southwest, with the minaret as its central feature. This image follows numerous nineteenth-century representations of the Citadel by European photographers and artists. But realistic representation cannot be the only reason for the popularity of the Tower of David. It was probably the fact that it is a historic monument that goes back to the heroic period of the Jews in Palestine—it was first built by the Hasmoneans in the second century BCE—but one which bears no religious connotations. Unlike the Western Wall, a sole remnant from the Temple, and unlike the Temple Site, which is occupied

Figure 4.5: Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, Views from Jerusalem, 1836–37; lithograph, drawn in Jerusalem, printed in Hurben, Germany, 30×43 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem by the Muslim Dome of the Rock, and unlike dubious burial sites of prophets and sages, the Tower of David represented a potent image of substance and continuity. It offered a highly visible and immediately recognisable symbol of Jerusalem in the same way that the Eiffel Tower signifies Paris.18 In Bezalel art the Tower of David was made a kind of secular ‘holy’ place; a monument that represented the past of eretz yisrael in political and

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military terms, rather than in mythical or religious terms, and thus also offered hope for the future. Bezalel artists added two other monuments to this selection of important Jewish sites: the Bezalel building itself (Fig. 4.6) and the Herzliya school in Tel Aviv. The Bezalel School—two Ottoman buildings purchased by the JNF and given to Schatz in 1908— featured on a number of objects such as rugs, ivory and metal works. Representing Bezalel buildings in a similar way to the Tower of David or Rachel’s Tomb helped to bestow on Bezalel a parallel status. This status was made rather explicit when Bezalel was actually shown alongside traditional Holy Places as one of those ancient places of religious and national significance. The Herzliya School in Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew secondary school in Palestine, appeared much less in Bezalel works, and was usually shown alongside Bezalel buildings or the new Jewish colonies as symbols of Zionist activity.19 Presenting the different places on equal terms works to secularise and nationalise the religious symbols. At the same time it grants the new places an aura and value previously reserved for shrines and places of worship.

Figure 4.6: A Bezalel carpet depicting the Bezalel building, 1920s; 45×147 cm. Anton Felton Maintaining the tradition One of the characteristics of Bezalel art was the way in which new national ideals were incorporated into existing formulas and traditional forms. Among these was the perception of eretz yisrael not as natural scenery or spatial landscape but rather as a series of isolated spots, each of them dominated by a building of historic or ritual significance. Occasionally a natural feature such as trees may be added for the sake of composition although it may well be part of the actual site. It is worth noting that Bezalel students visited many of these places on trips organised by the school. Nevertheless the principle has not changed: eretz yisrael continued to be perceived in their art as an ideal or a concept rather than as a concrete reality. To be sure the continuation of this tradition was one of Boris Schatz’s ambitions, which he traced in his writing back to his childhood. One of his memories was the exciting visit by an emissary from eretz yisrael. The look of his charity-collecting box caught the boy’s attention:

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I still remember the pain that seized my child-heart when I saw a little carved box, upon which there was a sort of potato-shaped figure, with the inscription—‘Tomb of our Mother Rachel’. There was also the picture of a wall with four brooms standing behind it and designated the ‘Wailing Wall’. I regarded this as a profanation of our sanctuary, and I swore within my heart that as soon as I should be grown up and become a good artist, I would betake myself to Jerusalem and draw the sacred places so beautifully that all Jews would have a delight therein.20 Retelling this story in association with Bezalel made a clear statement about its founder’s beliefs as to the role of art in Jewish tradition. Schatz’s respect for tradition was imbued with nostalgia for a lost sense of unity. This sentiment was accompanied by a fierce criticism of the diverse and rival trends (‘isms’) that characterised the modern age.21 The production of Jewish art in its traditional sense, i.e. ceremonial objects decorated with traditional symbols, was therefore an important objective in Schatz’s view of Bezalel. These objects, he hoped, would help preserve a sense of identity; they would ‘add to the joy and dignity of the Jew as a people’.22 Biblical subjects The iconographic analysis of Bezalel works reveals that biblical themes play a considerable part and are prominent among the figurative works. With the exclusion of portraits, biblical figures comprise about half of all the figure representations, and biblical themes exceed by far other historic and Jewish themes. Although the themes are varied and some occur only rarely certain tendencies emerge in the choice of biblical subjects:

Figure 4.7: Bezalel cameos, shell carving: Left: Judith, 5×4 cm; Right: Ruth, d. 4 cm. Collection: Davara Family, Herzliya, Israel

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1 There is an emphasis on figures that represent leadership, heroism and salvation: Moses, David, Samson (Figs 4.10, 4.11), Judith (Fig. 4.7) and Esther. 2 There are numerous scenes of exile and redemption: By the waters of Babylon, the Exodus from Egypt (Fig. 4.8), the prophet Elijah who proclaims the redemption and prophecies of the last days, particularly those describing ideal peace. Especially prominent in this category is the image of the two spies carrying the cluster of grapes, thus expressing their view of the land of milk and honey (Fig. 4.9). One may also add to this group images of Adam and Eve in Paradise. 3 There is particular attraction to romantic pastorals in ‘oriental’ scenery, mainly the meeting of Rebecca and Eliezer at the well, Jacob and Rachel (Fig. 3.3), and the figure of Ruth (Fig. 4.7). Above all the ideal of romantic love is depicted via the Song of Songs (Pl. B).

Figure 4.8: A Bezalel Passover plate with depictions of the Exodus from Egypt; wood inlaid and shell, d. 31.2 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

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Figure 4.9: Erich Goldberg, Drawing for the Spies; 1911–14; ink, pencil and watercolour on paper, 11.5×11.2 cm. Collection: Mishkan Le-Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod Generally speaking, no conflict, war, disaster or negative aspect of biblical life are depicted (with rare exceptions of the selling of Joseph, the Expulsion from Eden and the Binding of Isaac). Also rare are themes that involve contact between humankind and the divine such as meetings with angels or miracles. The focus of Bezalel biblical themes was on the human factor and on a benign image of life in the Land of Israel. From the perspective of Jewish art it appears that some of the biblical themes employed in Bezalel had precedents in the history of Jewish art but others were fairly new in the Jewish context. For example, Judith, who was traditionally associated with the feast of Hanukkah and the heroism of the Hasmoneans (Fig. 4.7) featured alongside Ruth or Rebecca, who appeared far less commonly in Jewish art. When mentioning here Jewish tradition in art it is worth the reminder that most of the current knowledge of the history of Jewish art was not yet known at the time of Bezalel’s first period. The sensational discoveries of figurative art in ancient synagogues had not yet occurred and the practice of collecting and displaying Jewish ritual objects was also in its infancy.23 The study of Bezalel biblical art must now follow a different path: the role of the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish national revival of which Bezalel was part. The role of the Bible as a source of inspiration for Jewish artistic expression in the modern age goes back to the earliest days of the haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe. Already in the eighteenth century biblical epic poetry was published in Hebrew but it was mainly during the nineteenth century that the Bible, its language, figures and historical events were used as the basis for a revival in Hebrew literature. For the

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maskilim (Enlightened Jews), fostering a renewal interest in the Hebrew Bible could serve many purposes. As David Patterson summarised it: A realisation of the glory of the national past might help to alleviate the degradation of the present; the pastoral and agricultural background and imagery of scripture might serve to re-establish the contact with nature which had been severed by centuries of ghetto life; the exalted poetry and sublime language of the Bible might similarly awaken dormant aesthetic feeling and encourage an interest in literature for its own sake.24 In short, the Bible could contribute important values for the revival in three directions: national pride, contact with nature and aesthetic interest. The first Hebrew novel published in Vilna in 1853 was a biblical novel, Avraham Mapu’s ahavat tziyon (The Love of Zion). This novel had enormous and continuous effect in its glorifying of the Jewish past, emphasising national independence and depicting the natural connection of people with the soil. The Love of Zion had a profound influence on generations of young readers and prepared the mental climate for the growth of the Zionist idea.25 As the writer Ya’akov Fichman put it, the book was not merely a vision of ancient times but rather a manifesto for a new life, ‘a voice calling to get out from the dark narrow habitation to the wide open good land’.26 One young reader who was deeply impressed by the novel was Boris Schatz, the founder of Bezalel. Finding quite by chance ahavat tziyon in his religious seminary opened his mind to haskala literature and encouraged him, as he later attested, to pursue a direction in his life other than religious studies.27 While it is difficult to trace any direct influence of Mapu’s novel on Schatz’s own art, many of the Bezalel works convey the pastoral, idyllic and romantic notion of love and life in eretz yisrael as portrayed by this writer who of course never saw the country It is the sense of a calm and benign nature, which is echoed in many Bezalel images and bestows them with ‘biblical feeling’. This atmosphere is particularly apparent in the work of Ze’ev Raban and his illustrations for the Song of Songs (Pl. B) and other biblical images, as well as in his posters and commercial advertisements.28 As in the case of the Holy Places, many of these depictions continued to portray the country through received conventions and recognised symbols as if they were not actually being produced in eretz yisrael. Likewise, Hebrew fiction written in Palestine by First aliya writers followed literary tradition of stories and legends about eretz yisrael, its mysteries and magic, along with novels on biblical subjects. They preferred the ideal to the real and a sentimental attitude over rational observation.29 This idyllic genre of eretz yisrael that was developed since the 1890s was fiercely criticised by Second aliya writer Y.H.Brenner as a false and superficial banality.30 The Hebrew Bible had a significant role in shaping the worldview of Bezalel students. The Bible was taught as part of the curriculum at the school under the course heading of Hebrew together with ancient Jewish history. That is to say, the Hebrew language, the Bible and the history of the Jews were delivered as one subject and by the same teacher.31 Teaching the Bible primarily in historical terms as the story of the Israelites was rooted in the modern schools of the haskala in Germany where Bible study had replaced the study of the Talmud. In eretz yisrael modern schools used Bible teaching as a means of spreading the Hebrew language.32 In Bezalel the Hebrew class along with lectures and

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other events held in Hebrew aimed not only at widening the students’ horizons but also at cultivating their national values and ties to the Land of Israel. The Hebrew Bible and the national revival Schatz firmly believed in the prospects of developing national Jewish art in Palestine. As mentioned earlier in this book he contended that although there were gifted Jewish artists in the diaspora, they could never, no matter how hard they tried, be Jewish in their art due to the influence of a ‘foreign spirit’ on their life and work. Schatz believed that in eretz yisrael the artist’s real Jewish identity would emerge by itself. In eretz yisrael, the great past of our people in our country must leave its imprint on the painter, because here everything reminds him of the golden age when we were a healthy and free people in this place.33 The use of history and particularly the notion of a golden age was a typical strategy employed by national movements in building sets of values and national mythology. The concept of nationalism as developed in Europe has put a great emphasis on the link to a historic homeland, the cradle of the nation where the heroes, prophets and scholars once lived, worked and fought, and made this territory unique and its geographical features venerated.34 Such a link made between geography and history in promoting a national ideology characterises most versions of Zionist thought.35 Connecting the two to a sacred text and proclaiming the whole set as the desirable source for a ‘true’ national art—art that reflects the moral and creative regeneration of the nation—is a typical trait of cultural nationalism.36 One of Schatz’s ambitions was ‘to see in each Jewish home a Jewish corner, or better, a special room set aside for things Jewish’. Devised initially as a scheme to promote Bezalel’s products among potential buyers in a last attempt to rescue Bezalel, it was presented as part of a wider vision. Its aim was to bring back memories of the nation’s mythical past, ‘the early days in the life of Israel’, when as a nation, it dwelt in a beauteous land, making the glorious tradition which is our sacred heritage, and the great gift of mankind. In such a room one will feel the great spirit of our freemen ancestors; the intense spirituality, and the great idealism of our prophets; the unbounded courage of our fighting heroes who defended our land.37 Schatz held that the land of the Bible by itself could impart a genuine and positive influence on the nature of the art produced there by Jews. Their products, in turn, when distributed in the Jewish diaspora would deliver the message of national revival by evoking pride in a biblical golden age. During the nineteenth century the growing interest in biblical studies, especially among Protestants, combined with the re-discovery of Palestine and the development of biblical archaeology supported the notion of the biblical period as the classic epoch of the people of Israel. This view and the use of scientific and aesthetic methods in analysing the biblical text influenced Jewish thinkers. In his introduction to biblical studies published in Hebrew in 1916, Menahem Soloveitchik asserted not only that the Bible

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period was the classical period in the history of the Jewish nation but also that the scriptures were the culmination of independent Hebrew creativity. Lamenting its neglect by both Orthodox Jews and Enlightened Jews he called for a return to the Bible and its study. An understanding of the biblical world, he argued, would reveal the Jewish national self by uncovering the primary and principal foundations that had remained intact throughout the meandering of history. Moreover, the scientific, historical and literary examination of the Bible would find in the scriptures ‘the reliable base for the creative national and spiritual work in the future’.38 Similarly, the writer and literary critic Reuven Brainin called for a return to the scriptures because ‘he who distances himself from it also distances himself from the source of our national lives, from the source of the Hebrew language and from the source of the spirit of the Prophets’.39 Since the time of the haskala the call for a return to the study of the Hebrew Bible was also based on the belief that the Bible could serve as a bridge between Jews and non-Jews in Western culture. Works of art on biblical themes were often thoughts of as part of the Jewish heritage and became part of Jewish collections. They were occasionally identified as ‘Jewish art’ on iconographic grounds.40 When Herzl’s graphic collection of over a hundred prints, mostly on biblical subjects, was deposited at the Bezalel National Museum in 1940 Mordechai Narkiss, the museum director, observed: The collection is very typical of the mentality of Herzl’s surroundings in his early Zionist days, which perceived, as it were, biblical depiction as Jewish art’.41 Art and the Bible A typical example of the Jewish perspective on biblical images in Western art is the essay by the Hebrew writer and Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow on the picture gallery of Dresden. In this essay Sokolow focuses on biblical paintings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian masters. Being well aware of the artists’ Christian perspective in interpreting the stories in the Hebrew Bible he nevertheless criticises them for being incorrect in historic and geographical detail. With a few exceptions he thought their work beautiful but false. But if were there to be great Jewish painters, and if they were to describe the history of their people, they would surely ‘bestow spirituality’ upon their paintings.42 Sokolow also criticised the Jews who failed to support Jewish artists and complained: ‘why should our work be done by others?’43 He believed that future Jewish artists would depict the heroic period of the kings and prophets, hitherto neglected by Christian artists. There would be great Jewish artists who would draw from the spiritual sources of their people and would sprout not from a foreign soil but from the soil of eretz yisrael, then, ‘only then shall we see the history of our people in all its glory depicted according to our mind and taste’.44 Boris Schatz had similar views to those of Sokolow. Not only did he believe that genuine Jewish art could emerge only in eretz yisrael but he also thought that Christian artists who depicted the Bible in many of their paintings could not really understand its spirit. Because, Schatz wrote, in order to perceive the Bible and its Hebrew spirit one must also be Jewish. Thus the Bible lacked a true interpretation in pictures: ‘and the Bible awaits us in the same way that the country awaits us’.45 It is very likely that Schatz knew of Sokolow’s writing and presumably had met him already in 1888 when he published his article on art in the Hebrew newspaper ha-tzfira of which Sokolow was the editor.

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Sokolow was one of a few Zionist leading activists who had a genuine interest in the visual arts and he published a number of articles on the subject. His views on art often touched on issues of national identity, for example whether or not there existed a Jewish aesthetic or some sort of Jewish style.46 He particularly emphasised the importance of art to the national movement: The national movement is not a concrete thing but rather an idea, a hope; it is not a single act in a single place but a series of small actions— Hebrew periodicals, school books in Hebrew, developing the spoken language, Hebrew art and various organisations—birth pangs.47 Sokolow preceded Schatz in using the biblical name of ‘Bezalel’ in referring to a modern Jewish artist, calling Antokolsky, in his obituary, ‘Bezalel of the diaspora’ and ‘son of Bezalel’.48 Sokolow’s view was similar to that of Buber and Ahad Ha-Am; he believed that genuine Jewish art could develop only in eretz yisrael, away from foreign influences. This might well have influenced Boris Schatz, who by 1904 when Sokolow’s collected essays were published was already close to the Zionist movement and had begun to develop his own views on Jewish national art. By the time Sokolow voiced his hope that Jewish art would be based on biblical themes, only a handful of Jewish artists, and these mainly in Russia, had actually chosen biblical subject matter as a manifestation of their identity.49 Jewish artists who wished to cope with Jewish themes often turned to recent events or portrayed traditional Jewish life in the shtetl, occasionally imbued with nostalgia for the world that the artists had left behind. At the turn of the twentieth century Jewish cultural circles embraced biblical art as part of the Jewish heritage while in reality it played a marginal role in the work of most contemporary Jewish artists. This situation was well illustrated in the German Jewish monthly Ost und West, which first appeared in Berlin in 1901. Through essays, stories and pictures the journal promoted Jewish nationalism and aimed at uniting eastern and western European Jews while retaining the diversity of Jewish identities.50 In its first few years special attention was given to art as a component of Jewish cultural renaissance. Features on prominent Jewish artists and art reviews were part of an attempt to define Jewish art that was regarded then as a new phenomenon.51 At the same time the journal was richly illustrated with painting and sculpture, mainly on biblical themes, by famous non-Jewish artists—Raphael and Michelangelo, Rubens and Poussin, Rembrandt and Murillo—alongside lesser-known European artists. Of the biblical figures in these illustrations Moses was the most common. Other popular figures were Judith, Samson and David. There were also some biblical figures by Jewish artists, most notably by Lesser Ury,52 but most of the works by contemporary Jewish artists represented Jewish religious practices in the form of Jews at prayer or studying the scripture. By combining images of the heroic ancestors of the Jewish people as depicted by eminent old masters within its texts the journal not only reclaimed the Bible for Jewish heritage but also the high achievements of European culture since the Renaissance. The idea that art related to biblical themes is a legitimate part of the Jewish national culture has continued to be upheld, for example in exhibitions displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.53 In shaping the concepts of national art in Bezalel Ost und West must have played an important role. Of all Jewish and Hebrew periodicals of the time this was the main

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platform for discussing Jewish art and had distinguished contributors such as Ahad HaAm and Martin Buber, as well as leading Jewish artists who were involved in Bezalel or supported it, notably Hirszenberg, Lilien and Struck, all of whom featured regularly in the journal. Boris Schatz’s own works were published in Ost und West as well as supporting articles on Bezalel. It is no wonder then that the way in which Jewish art was presented in this journal—as a mixture of images of traditional Jewish practices and depictions of a heroic biblical past—served as a model for Schatz in the development of national Jewish art in Palestine. This combination was particularly apparent in Schatz’s paintings and reliefs, which depicted a mixture of Jewish characters, religious customs and biblical prophets and heroes.54 Bezalel students regularly trained in portraying Jewish religious customs and biblical themes. For example, in the summer term of 1914 students were required to submit compositions on the Ninth of Av at the Western Wall, the blessing of the etrog and Balaam and the she-ass.55 In 1929, the year the school closed, the composition class worked on a cycle from the life of Samson and the stone sculpture class completed tablets depicting Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.56 Of the drawings and studies made by Bezalel students that have survived a number are on biblical subjects such as Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, the Burning Bush, Ahasuerus and Esther, and By the Waters of Babylon.57 In contrast to images of misery and exile in Jewish life in the diaspora that were repeated time and again in works by contemporary Jewish artists, the biblical vision of eretz yisrael in Bezalel art was idyllic and heroic. It was regarded as a source of inspiration for the new life of Jews in Palestine. And as former student Nahum Gutman put it, through the Bible they hoped to achieve ‘a deep-rootedness greater than that of life in the diaspora shtetl’.58 Models for Bezalel biblical art While the choice of biblical themes in Bezalel was strongly linked to the Zionist idea of the Jews ‘returning’ to their ancient land of origin, the actual works were often based on models borrowed from European art. Biblical art in the West was at its peak from the Renaissance to the seventeenth century and was gradually pushed aside in favour of other genres, such as land-scapes and scenes from everyday life. By the nineteenth century biblical art was mainly the domain of orientalist painters. In addition there were prints made for illustrated Bibles. Biblical images of that time often aspired to achieve historical accuracy using studies of Near East archaeological remains as well as views of people and landscapes of Palestine.59 This attempt was based on the assumption that the people of the region and their way of life, much like the archaeological remains, had not changed since antiquity. Thus their present image faithfully represented the looks of the biblical ancestors.60 A typical example was the French artist James Tissot, whose pictures of the Old Testament were published posthumously in the early 1900s. For Boris Schatz however Tissot’s work was worthy merely as an ethnographer who collected material as it ‘did not convey the spirit and soul of the Bible’.61 Nonetheless Tissot had a direct influence on works by Schatz, Pann and other Bezalel works.62 The recurrence of the figure of Ruth holding the sheaf of wheat (Fig. 4.7) or scenes at the well, Rebecca and Eliezer and Jacob and Rachel (Fig. 3.3), might also derive from their popularity in nineteenth-century orientalist paintings. Scenes and figures that presented heroism and physical strength were usually modelled after Renaissance and classicist art. The figure

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of Samson rending the lion was particularly popular (Figs 4.10 and 4.11) and his muscular physique was close to images from Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.63 Pictures of the heads of David and Moses in Bezalel works were usually based on the famous sculptures of these figures by Michelangelo. Thus the highly admired achievements of European masters were incorporated into the efforts to create Jewish national art as if these figures were already ‘Jewish’ and resided naturally within Jewish history and culture. Several European models for biblical art in Bezalel could be found at the museum that Schatz founded at the school. As discussed in the previous chapter the collection of works by Jewish artists, ritual objects and archaeological findings from Palestine had a clear ideological mission: to reflect the nation’s continuous contribution to culture. Moreover it aimed at ‘a proof of our creative powers and our life in Palestine in the distant past’. At the same time European art by non-Jewish artists in the collection was considered ‘a guide in determining the standards to aim at as a cultural nation’.64 It is not surprising that as a guide to quality and a bridge to the nation’s past many of these works were on biblical themes. An acquisition of the painting Abraham and the Three Angels attributed at that time to the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Murillo was proudly published in the press.65 And a bronze sculpture of David by Italian Renaissance artist Verrocchio (a copy of course) is seen in photographs of the museum display from the 1920s and is recorded in the museum inventory.66 Works by minor or anonymous artists on biblical themes were also recorded in the museum collections. This tendency to collect art on Hebrew Bible themes by European Old Masters has continued and is reflected in the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. However, after the Bezalel period biblical themes ceased to be a model for Jewish artists in the yishuv and Israel.

Figure 4.10: Erich Goldberg, Drawing for Samson and the Lion, 1911–14; pen on paper, d. 4.7 cm. Collection:

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Mishkan Le-Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod

Figure 4.11: A.Rabin, Bezalel student, plate with depiction of Samson and the Lion, late 1920s; copper repoussé, d. 48 cm. Collection: Alec Mishory, Tel Aviv Portraits Among the figurative motifs in Bezalel art a great part was dedicated to portraits. Portraits appeared in a variety of media and techniques, from rugs and ceramic tiles to brooches. One group was portraits of Bezalel artists, either by themselves or by fellow artists, and of their relatives. Another group, usually done after existing portraits, was of famous personalities. Schatz’s view that portraits of the nation’s great people should make up an important part of the national art was already publicised in his first essay on art in 1888. A significant part of Schatz’s own work was dedicated to portraits, usually in the form of relief made in terracotta or plaster or, rarely, cast in bronze. Many of these portraits were of Zionist leaders: David Wolffsohn, Otto Warburg, Ze’ev Jabotinsky,

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Herzl, Ben Yehuda, Nordau, Ahad Ha-Am. There were also portraits of artists and writers who were connected to the national movement such as the Zionist artist E.M.Lilien, the poet and author of the national anthem ha-tikva N.H.Imber and the poet who was known as the ‘National Poet’, H.N.Bialik.67 Schatz had started making portraits of famous Jews early on in his career. He later attributed this mission to a vow he took in his youth to make portraits of the great men of Israel. This decision was motivated by Schatz’s view that unlike ‘all the enlightened nations’ where ‘pictures of their famous men’ are popular, ‘only we, a great cultural people…cannot fulfil the great precept it has laid itself down: “Let your eyes behold your Masters”’.68 In reality though this claim by Schatz was far from being accurate. The custom among Jews of having portraits of venerated rabbinical figures already existed in sixteenthcentury Italy and later spread in European Jewish communities to become from the end of the eighteenth century a highly popular phenomenon in Orthodox circles.69 Schatz was aware of this tradition when he mentioned in his article of 1888 seeing such portraits in collections of the Polish nobility.70 But he was also very critical of paintings of Jewish notables he saw which ‘were so ridiculously caricatured that a cultured person cannot set bounds to his feeling of disgust’.71 There was probably some truth in this remark. Numerous copies that spread in Jewish folk art did not always constitute high quality art but the value of the rabbi’s portrait was not in the physical appearance but in ‘its inherent spirituality that had the ability to inspire, encourage and uplift’.72 In Schatz’s view, as proclaimed in 1888, the purpose of the artists in portraying notables from the literary or religious world was to reveal, through the expression of the eyes and the face such virtues as the sitter’s wisdom, courage and integrity. Once again, Schatz’s ambition towards the making of national art was a continuation of an existing tradition, not only among the nations but also among Jews. Where Schatz’s effort to create pantheon of Jewish portraits diverted from this tradition was in his concentration on leaders of the national movement. People who contributed to the national cause, even if not Jewish, were also commemorated in portraits in Bezalel, including Sir Herbert Samuel, the (Jewish) first High Commissioner of the British Mandate in Palestine, General Allenby, the commander of the British army that conquered Palestine, and Lord Balfour. A number of portraits in Bezalel were dedicated to Boris Schatz himself, reflecting the great admiration of Bezalel students for their teacher. The image of Boris Schatz was widely spread in the Jewish world through photographs and through his continuous efforts to advertise Bezalel and its products and to gain financial support. So much so that in the eyes of many Schatz and Bezalel were one and the same thing.73 Herzl The most popular portraits—almost half of the portraits made in Bezalel—were of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Already in his lifetime, but more so after his untimely death, the founder and leader of Political Zionism ‘had been transformed into the personification of the great Idea—the rebirth of the Jewish nation’.74 The iconization of Herzl’, writes Wistrich, ‘has been a useful and unifying cohesive force for Zionism…but it is perhaps less the content of Herzl’s Zionist programme than his image itself, which captured the imagination of the Jewish people’.75 According to Berkowitz, it was Herzl’s physiognomy which was to most Zionists the symbol of Zionism’s aspiration; his

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manliness and handsome looks rebuked the anti-Semitic stereotypes while at the same time remaining recognisably Jewish.76 Herzl’s handsome features and his long, thick, dark beard were highly significant in the spread and popularity of his portraits. Artists were fascinated by his looks, as Herman Struck who made several portraits of Herzl recalled: ‘it was this divine gift of beauty which left the deepest and most enduring impress on my mind’. But, he added, ‘such amazing beauty was not purely physical’ and there was something in Herzl’s bearing of ‘an uncrowned king’.77 Already at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 Herzl’s kingly appearance was enthusiastically merged into messianic expectations that were deeply rooted in the national movement, and then reflected back on the myth of Herzl: ‘The myth of the reborn King-Messiah evoked both the ancient Davidic kingdom and its glories as well as the theatrical methods of modern mass politics’.78 The myth and image of Herzl spread rapidly in the Jewish world and art played a major part in this phenomenon. The image of Herzl often suggested the figure of Moses, as in Lilien’s illustrations to the Bible (1908) where Moses was given the features of Herzl.79 An analogy to the leader who viewed the Promised Land from a distance is also suggested by others including Boris Schatz. The most recurrent form of Herzl’s portrait was in profile, looking ahead ‘to the future’, as in the widely disseminated paintings and print by Herman Struck or in the 1897 photograph (attributed to E.M. Lilien) showing Herzl leaning on a balcony railing. Many other Jewish painters and sculptors depicted Herzl, and hundreds of medals were made in his honour and portraits in micrography with the text of his famous books Altneuland (Old-New Land) or Judenstaat (The Jewish State) were popular in middle class Jewish homes in Russia and Poland.80 In western and eastern Europe and in the USA Herzl portraits were widely spread in popular art and various forms of applied art: on New Year greeting cards and postcards, on cigarette boxes, on cups, pots and ashtrays, jewellery, clocks, and household ornaments such as statuettes and rugs (Fig. 4.12). In addition, Herzl’s picture was used on certificates and stamps of the JNF and was displayed in all the gatherings of the Zionist Organisation. Bezalel took part in this widespread tendency and Herzl’s portrait was reproduced in many techniques: on ceramic tiles, ivory and wood carvings, encrustation on wood boxes, silver brooches and so on. Like other Bezalel objects of traditional Jewish themes, those with Herzl’s portrait were also intended for export to the Jewish diaspora. As a purely Zionist image the portrait of Herzl

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Figure 4.12: Wall rug with depiction of Theodor Herzl and the Tower of David, early 20th century; 102×61 cm. Anton Felton

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continued to be popular in Jewish Palestine and Israel long after Bezalel closed. Alongside the Tower of David it was one of the most enduring symbols of the national revival found in crafts and in popular art. Ethnic types One of the recurring themes in Bezalel art was the feature of ‘Jewish types’. The majority of these were of oriental ethnic groups, Yemenite, Bucharan or Moroccan Jews, usually old bearded men or young women. Strictly speaking, these pictures cannot be regarded as portraits since the sitters are not identified and the pictures were intended to portray the typical rather than the individual. Nonetheless they were drawn from life and employed the conventional format of portrait painting. Several photographs of life classes in Bezalel and students’ works that survived show that portraying ethnic types in drawing, painting and sculpture was common practice in Bezalel. The sitters were ordinary people from the community who were paid modestly for sitting five or six times.81 The recurrence of models from oriental ethnic backgrounds may be explained in part by their readiness to take this job, being as they were less suspicious of Bezalel than the Ashkenazi orthodox community in Jerusalem. Besides, Yemenite Jews and Sephardi girls were already at Bezalel as students and workers. But there is more to it than the availability of models. Bezalel teachers, Ben-David, Gur-Arieh, Pann, Raban, Schur (Figs 4.13 and 4.14) and others also portrayed Yemenite or other oriental men and women. Abel Pann was particularly prolific in painting oriental types, and is said to have drawn them from memory based on what he had seen in the streets.82 Pictures of different types alongside views of the country were considered to have commercial potential and were produced by the lithography department already in 1910. Above all, these images were thought to have a vital role in creating the national Jewish art. Schatz firmly believed that the Jewish artist could find his Jewish themes only in eretz yisrael where every step would remind him of the ancient past and where the streets and markets would offer an abundance of original subjects. Bezalel students, he asserted, would study art with Jewish

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Figure 4.13: Ahraon Shaul Schur, A Yemenite rabbi in Jerusalem, 1917; charcoal on paper, 44×28.5 cm. Collection: Schur family

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Figure 4.14: Ahraon Shaul Schur, A Bucharan girl from Jerusalem, 1930; watercolour on paper, 31×23 cm. Collection: Schur family models while hearing the sounds of Hebrew. All these would inevitably help them ‘express in their works our hopes and national aspirations’.83 In Schatz’s view, the encounter with the historical sites and with the local Jewish population would naturally affect the artists in making genuine Jewish art. By the turn of the twentieth century the Jewish population in Palestine numbered some 55,000 souls or about 11 per cent of the total population. But in Jerusalem, the 35,000 Jews were the majority, at about 63 per cent.84 The growth of the Jewish population in Jerusalem during the nineteenth century was the result of continuous immigration from Europe and gradually the Ashkenazi Jews became the majority among Jews in the city.85 By 1913 oriental Jews accounted for around 10 per cent of the Jewish population in Jerusalem.86 The number of Yemenite Jews at that time, although among the largest

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groups of oriental Jews in the city, is estimated at 5,000 in Palestine as a whole.87 The Bucharan Jews at that time comprised 3.3 per cent of Jerusalem Jews.88 Nevertheless the Yemenites, the Bucharan and other oriental Jews featured frequently in Bezalel art. And as the figures quoted here suggest, their popularity as a subject for art could not have derived simply from having been seen everywhere but rather from a conscious attention to their looks, costumes and customs. Fascination with ‘exotic’ Jews was not new in the Jewish world. The journal Ost und West published in its first three years a number of illustrated articles on Jews of central Asia, east Asia and the Yemen.89 Reports and researches on the life and culture of Jews outside Europe were published in Hebrew periodicals already in the late nineteenth century.90 The legends about the lost Ten Tribes of Israel that had circulated in Jewish communities for several centuries gained special impetus during the nineteenth century. Letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries concerning the tribes were now published in Jewish periodicals, and emissaries from eretz yisrael went searching for them in Arabia, Africa and Asia and spread further rumours.91 Scholarly researches too were often tainted by the romanticised image of the noble and ancient Orient and resulted in descriptions of the Yemenite Jews as exotic ‘lost brothers’ for whom time had stopped and for whom ancient traditions were preserved as they were.92 This view of oriental Jews, and the Yemenites in particular, was embedded in the Western perception of the Orient as inherently primitive where people ‘had not been subject to the ordinary processes of history’.93 This was precisely the view of Eliezer BenYehuda who in 1886 commented on the Yemenite Jews in Jerusalem as still having ‘the social condition of Israel as it was at the time of the mishna’.94 The concept that oriental Jews preserved some kind of authentic characteristics of the ancient Hebrews had specific implications in the national movement. This was particularly relevant in the ‘revival’ of Hebrew as a spoken language and the acceptance—already common among Ashkenazi scholars of the haskala—of the oriental Sephardi pronunciation as the ‘correct’ one.95 Being the largest group of oriental Jews who came to Palestine with the First aliya, many Yemenites joined the moshavot (colonies) and became closer to the Zionist Ashkenazim. Subsequently the Yemenite Jews in Palestine became the subject of numerous representations in art, literature and theatre performances. Almost all writers of the First aliya and some of the Second aliya described the Yemenite figure. They usually created some sort of typical collective image based on the opposition between the miserable external appearance and the pure, just and modest inner being. Thus the Yemenite is always portrayed as lively and optimistic in spite of enduring suffering and difficulties.96 The vision and myth of the Ingathering of the Exiles, argues literary historian Yaffa Berlovitz, was a principal motive of First aliya writers in writing about the oriental Jews and the Yemenites in particular.97 This undoubtedly underlay the popularity of their representations in Bezalel art, too. The images of oriental Jews that were produced in Bezalel did not involve any narrative and almost always concentrated on facial features, hairstyle, particular clothes and hats. The focus was clearly on the variety of Jewish types, ‘from the four corners of the earth’, who gathered in Jerusalem.98 Bezalel, with its various workers and students, prided itself on being the manifestation of the Ingathering of the Exiles.99 Yet despite the aura of the authentic descendants from ancient Israelites, oriental Jews hardly featured in historic or biblical scenes in works

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from the school. As discussed earlier, those scenes were usually based on existing archetypes of ‘oriental’ people or on classicist models, rather than on actual sitters. Schatz probably brought with him the subject of ‘types’ from the academy in Sofia, where Bulgarian types were depicted in their folk costumes. While in Bulgaria, Schatz made series of figures of different ‘types’: a praying Gypsy, Bulgarian farmers and market hucksters, street urchins, a fortune teller, a Bulgarian bag-piper, a Macedonian woodcutter and others.100 The artistic interest in lowly peasants and in market scenes has a respectable tradition in Western art especially during the seventeenth century. Yet images of individual figures that are not part of any narrative or moral scene may be understood in the spirit of the mainly nineteenth-century phenomenon that was concerned with the ‘discovery’ and preservation of folklore and popular culture. The focus was usually on uneducated folk and especially the peasants who were said to have preserved primitive customs longer than anyone else.101 These ideas were linked to romantic nationalism and to the search by various national movements for their ‘authentic’ ancient past. The interest in Bezalel art in Jewish ‘types’ of oriental origin indicates a similar perception. While belonging to the physical environment of the Orient these people were also seen as a living testimony of the nation’s past in the East. Thus painting the features of Yemenite Jews or Bucharan girls was a step towards a Jewish national art in Palestine. Yemenite Jews were seldom depicted carrying out agricultural work, in spite of their role and presence in the moshavot. One notable exception is the binding of the JNF’s second Golden Book of 1913 (Fig. 4.15). This collaborative ornate work of art made of metal and ivory carving by Bezalel artists presents an idyllic pastoral image of eretz yisrael as the expression of the Zionist ideal—of the return to the land of the forefathers and to agricultural labour. The biblical reference in the figures of the spies bearing the bunch of grapes at the lower panel, and the ploughing farmer in the centre, were both popular Zionist symbols. The small side panels show Yemenite Jews, dressed similarly to the people in the biblical scene, performing various agricultural works such as sowing, planting, threshing as well as Jewish prayers and rites. The connection suggested here between the Bible, agricultural labour and the oriental Jew is fairly straightforward. There is certain poignancy in these images in view of the real conditions of the Yemenite Jews as agricultural workers in Palestine during the unsuccessful and often painful experiment known as the Yavnieli aliya (1910–14). Following a spontaneous immigration in 1909 of Yemenite Jews who then settled and worked in the moshavot, an emissary was sent to the Yemen from Palestine to encourage more Jews to come. The intention was that they would replace the Arab workers in the Jewish settlements as part of the struggle for the so-called ‘conquest of labour’.102 Shafir points out that in

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Figure 4.15: Bezalel artists, binding for the second Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund, 1913; repoussé, ivory, silver, filigree, precious stones, gilt, leather, 67.5×54 cm. Photo archive: Keren Kayemeth Lelsrael/Jewish National Fund. (The ploughmen after E.Goldberg; ivory carving: M.Gur-Arieh) this initiative, which combined the planters’ preference for cheap labour with the Zionist preference for Jewish agricultural workers, ‘Yemenite Jews were ideally suited to satisfy both nationalists and capitalists interests since they were Jewish workers who were to be

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paid Arab wages’.103 In view of the important role that the JNF played in this enterprise it would be difficult to see the binding of the 1913 Golden Book simply as a naïve expression of Zionist imagery on behalf of Bezalel artists as it is usually described. These idyllic pictures of the oriental Jew as an agricultural worker were intended to portray the Yemenite workers in an ideal setting. But they also helped to conceal the truth about the hardships that the Yemenites had suffered in this project. Add to this the problematic Bezalel/JNF collaborative Ben Shemen colony of Yemenite craftsmen described in Chapter 3 and it would not be hard to see this Golden Book Bezalel binding as selfserving propaganda work of the first rank. All in all, the Yemenite Jews rarely featured in Zionist art of this kind and it is no wonder that the bookbinding of the third Golden Book of the JNF featured agricultural workers with distinctive Western appearance.

5 A‘Hebrew style’ The early quest for local Jewish art If you want a living Jewish art, Jewish skilled hands— If you want a specific national Jewish art style— If you want to feel the Jewish spirit and its poetry at your home and synagogue— If you want to decorate your vessels and books— If you want that every nation shall praise the beauty of our Jewish work— If you want to concentrate the sparks of the spirit of the Old Israel— If you want to elevate the fate of Jewish art to ourselves and in the eyes of all nations— If you want a generation with an open eye—Support the art of ‘Bezalel’!1 This little manifesto, intended to promote a membership scheme to help rescue Bezalel during its last years, makes it clear that by now the major argument to support the institute was its role in generating Jewish national art. Apparently the concept of Jewish art here is that of traditional art: decorative ritual objects for the home or the synagogue. It indicates a certain shift away from the purposes proclaimed in the early years. In the founding programme of Bezalel the aspect of artistic style was still marginal, but it soon appeared in the writings about Bezalel by Schatz and others. In his first report on the school Schatz proudly described his senior students who ‘compose paintings in a particular style and endeavour to create a Hebrew eretz yisraeli style’. He went on to explain how the collection of Palestinian fauna and flora and antiques in Bezalel Museum was ‘a useful material in our search for the eretz yisraeli style’. He also emphasised that a distinctive style was vital for the commercial value of works, declaring: We have already begun to create a specific style in Hebrew lettering. We have succeeded in making beautiful ornaments with them and in giving the ancient letters a new modern form. We transfer these new designs to the carpet-weaving workshop at once.2 Indeed the Hebrew letter was the most obvious element of this new ‘Hebrew art’ and letters appeared in Bezalel works throughout the period as decorative motif and as text. Stylised Hebrew monograms of Zionist leaders designed in Bezalel were published abroad and were soon accepted as the beginning of ‘a new Palestinian style’.3 Hence, the

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major carrier of authenticity in the new Jewish art in eretz yisrael was in fact the Hebrew language. At the same time influences of Islamic calligraphy and Art Nouveau typography are clearly evident. It is generally agreed that, in spite of the declared efforts to create a unique artistic expression, stylistically most of Bezalel works are characterised by a mixture of influences of Eastern and Western styles.4 A few words must be said about the terms ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jewish’ in this context. It has been customary to distinguish between the two in the cultural discourse in Jewish Palestine: ‘Hebrew’, as both noun and adjective, was used in the sense of the Jew of eretz yisrael, and one spoke of Hebrew labour, Hebrew dance or Hebrew army, while ‘Jewish’ was used in the sense of the diaspora.5 According to historian Ya’akov Shavit, the separation of the history of the Jews into the ‘Hebrew’ chapter, which is essentially secular and earthly, and the ‘Jewish’ chapter, which is theological, goes back to nineteenth-century historicism and German romanticism followed by developments in biblical studies and biblical archaeology. These trends influenced Jewish thinking that was willing to adopt a particular picture of the past as a utopian model for the future. The Hebrew chapter was regarded as the primordial period of natural link to the land and the soil, a period of sovereignty and military power as opposed to the rabbinical Jewish chapter of exile and dependency. The Zionist movement adopted this model and Hebrew became equivalent to the ‘New Jew’, the modern, rational, native eretz yisraeli person as opposed to the exilic (galuti) Jew.6 And yet there was never a clear distinction between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Hebrew’, especially with regard to culture. By the turn of the twentieth century the terms Hebrew artist, Hebrew aesthetic or Hebrew style were applied in the Hebrew press merely to Jewish European art and artists. Similarly, the writing about Bezalel, including this chapter’s opening quotation, used the term Hebrew when writing in Hebrew and the term Jewish when writing in English. Hence, Hebrew art and Jewish art should be regarded in this context as simply synonymous. Since the 1920s, however, the term ‘Hebrew art’ has been used in the yishuv mainly according to the above-mentioned division into Hebrew and Jewish. Boris Schatz’s own views on the nature of the national art have changed in focus with regard to the difference between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jewish’ art. In the early years he placed stress on the country itself—its landscapes, its flora and fauna, and its population—as a major source and model for the emerging national art. In later years he shifted the emphasis to the continuity of Jewish tradition in the diaspora—‘Old Israel’ in his words, or some kind of Jewish spirit. ‘National art’, he said in one of his aphorisms, ‘is the art coming from the heart that beats in unison with its nation’.7 That is to say: it is no longer the place, the land of Israel itself—its specific nature and history—that inspires and nurtures the national art but rather a spiritual emotional element shared by Jews everywhere. When Bezalel art was criticised as being exilic, old fashioned and out of touch with the reality of the yishuv in Palestine it was not an accusation entirely without base. It has been mentioned in previous chapters that Bezalel products were aimed from the outset to be exported or sold to tourists. Their main marketing strength was the potential buyer’s sentiments towards Palestine, particularly among Jews. And despite a declaration of achieving a unique local style, the claim for authenticity in Bezalel works relied not on style but on the products actually being ‘made in Jerusalem’ and on subject matter linked

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to eretz yisrael. As the iconographic analysis of Bezalel art has shown, recurrent themes were those that were already familiar in Jewish tradition—Jewish symbols, the Holy Places and even the portraits. Biblical themes too were based on existing artistic traditions and even the most ‘local’ of subjects—the variety of Jewish ethnic types—was no novelty and was well known in Orientalist art and photography. The attempt to create Jewish national art in Bezalel resulted, in fact, not only in a mixture of styles but also in a mixture of subjects, traditions and views, mostly brought in from the outside. The idea that in eretz yisrael the Jewish artist will be liberated from foreign influences was ungrounded. In reality everything in Bezalel, from the initial ideas through themes and styles, to teachers and art students, was imported, and this co-opting of outside influences was often based on presumptions rather than on acquaintance with the reality of Palestine. If the vision was shattered time and again this was due to a reluctance to see clearly the surrounding reality and its potentials rather than to an attempt to impose on it unfeasible fantasies. To some extent, the failure of Bezalel was inherent in its original programme. Nonetheless, Bezalel must be credited with the introduction of the idea that the Jews in Palestine should have a distinctive art that reflects both their Jewish origin and their old/new homeland. If in almost every aspect Bezalel followed received ideas, at least here was a new attempt to give a specific identity to the art works made in Jewish Palestine. What the nature of this identity is has been ever since a matter of debate. Bezalel’s solutions were ardently rejected by the generation of the 1920s. Yet, and as will be shown later, some of Bezalel concepts were in the end adopted by this generation as part of its own endeavour to create authentic Jewish art in Palestine.

Part II Art for the nation

The work of Reuven Rubin There is no more effective medium than good art to transmit the beauties of Palestine. […] And the nearer one approaches to the reality of Palestine the more one appreciates the charm and fascination of the land. Few artists have been as successful in propagandizing Palestine as Rubin. The New Palestine, 19281 If there is one artist who is firmly rooted in Eretz-Israel, who formed his vocation through it and became one with it, that artist is Rubin. H.N.Bialik, 19272 By the end of the 1920s the reputation of Reuven Rubin was such that he was appreciated in Palestine and abroad as ‘one of the main foundation stones of Hebrew painting’, as a leader of a group of Jewish artists who brought to Palestine ‘the fresh vision of modern art’, and even as the founder of a new style, ‘the Palestinian style’.3 The prices of Rubin’s paintings were also very high and reached five times those of his colleagues.4 Rubin’s status undoubtedly was a result of his intense artistic activity, his network of social contacts and the exposure of his art to a wider public through exhibitions in Palestine and abroad. Beyond the individual achievement Rubin’s art, and the profound appreciation of his themes and style that it garnered, indicate certain developments in the yishuv culture during the 1920s. First and foremost was the transformation of the artistic scene. During the first half of the decade painters and sculptors, Rubin among them, who followed the new trends of modern European art, settled in Palestine. They challenged Bezalel, its art, its ideological premises and its status, and have gradually gained the dominant position. This achievement was linked, as the above quotations demonstrate, to the quest for a particular quality in the artistic expression of Jewish Palestine; a quality that would

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reflect the artist’s rootedness, and subsequently would be recognised by viewers as a true representation of the country’s essential charm. Rubin’s artistic achievements during this period both epitomised these expectations and enhanced the belief in their fulfilment.

6 Beginnings in Romania Rubin’s reputation today and during most of his career has relied primarily on his success in Palestine during the 1920s. But by the time of his immigration he was already an artist with some international experience. Unfortunately only a handful of his pre-Palestine works survive and information available about his activity prior to settlement is sometimes lacking or confusing. Nonetheless, it was during this period that Rubin absorbed significant influences and formed his views on art and on the artist’s role. The early years Rubin (Riven) Zelicovici1 was born in November 1893 to a large and poor Jewish family in the Romanian town of Galatz (Galati) to the east of the Danube. It has been suggested that Rubin came from a Hasidic family.2 However if the portraits he painted of his parents in his youth (now at the Rubin Museum in Tel Aviv) are of any indication— showing them in modern urban clothing, his father with a tie and a jacket and bareheaded—they cannot support this claim. In his memoirs of 1969 Rubin described his father as the cantor, beadle and general factotum of the little synagogue next door to their home. The father was occupied most of the time with synagogue matters and hardly found the time to earn money. He particularly looked forward to the Jewish holidays and the Sabbath ‘when he could let his voice rise in prayer and sing with all his heart’.3 But in a previous account of his childhood written some four decades earlier, Rubin’s father was ‘a small tradesman with no capital, busied continually with the difficulties of existence’. Moreover, in this version Rubin came to know traditional Jewish life only after the family moved north to rural Falticeni in 1908: The little ghetto of Falticeni with its many ancient synagogues, its orthodox Jews, and its narrow crooked streets, exerted a powerful influence on the boy of sixteen. There I came to know the famed Sabbaths and festivals of the Jewish tradition, and also the suffering and poverty of these simple, misunderstood people.4 Like most Jewish boys at the time Rubin was sent to heder at the age of three for a basic religious education and it was then that his talent for drawing became apparent. Throughout his youth, described vividly in his memoirs, Rubin’s artistic ambition continued to accompany him as he struggled through various schools, poverty and antiSemitism in addition to his parents’ indifference to both his education and his drawings.

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At fifteen he left school and began working to help support the family. In 1912 Rubin went to Palestine to study in Bezalel. This was a disappointing experience and in his memoirs Rubin was particularly critical of Bezalel as an art school.5 However, as a young artist at the outset of his career Rubin still kept positive memories of his days in Bezalel, and he proudly informed Boris Schatz of his recent success. Sending him the catalogue of his first exhibition in 1921 he added the message: ‘he always liked to remember the pleasant moments he had spent there [in Bezalel], and in particular the fond memories he had of his teacher Professor Schatz’.6 It is difficult to assess the influence of Bezalel on Rubin, or even to determine exactly for how long he had stayed there.7 In his account of 1926 it was not the art but the country’s scenery that he kept in his memory when he left: ‘Disenchanted, but filled with the sunlight and landscape of Palestine, I returned to the little town at the foot of the Carpathians’.8 However, five years earlier he is quoted as saying that it was actually Egypt which had profoundly impressed him: when I was eighteen, in 1912, I went to Palestine. From there I went to Egypt and lived for a year without money. I became impregnated with the mysticism of the East, the grand colors of the desert, the magnificence of sunrise in solitude.9 The difference between these versions is probably due to Rubin’s attempt to offer a suitable context for his art at the time, which, as we shall see, underwent along with his status and country of residence a significant change between 1921 and 1926. A less romantic version of Rubin’s adventures in Egypt is told in his memoirs.10 Such variations make it hard to establish an accurate picture of Rubin’s activities and movements during those years. Most of the biographical texts on Rubin are based on the artist’s own later testimony and thus provide little help in clarifying the picture.11 Returning to Romania in 1913 Rubin worked as an accountant and a corn trader before arriving in the spring or summer of 1914 in Paris where he enrolled as an external student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The official biographical outline states 1913–14 as his time in Paris, but Rubin’s own accounts from the 1920s and other documents suggest that he spent only a couple of months there before the outbreak of the First World War.12 Most of the time, as he later recalled, he was on his own, making drawings from antique sculpture casts. He also visited the Louvre daily to study paintings by Old Masters, being entirely unaware of the developments in modern art in Paris at that time.13 When the War broke out Rubin had to leave Paris and return home, to an unsatisfactory life in little Falticeni. He worked in a leather factory, continued to draw and began writing poetry in Yiddish. In 1915 while on a business trip to Italy Rubin was able to visit museums and study the Italian masters. But after Romania joined the war in the summer of 1916 things got worse. Rubin describes a period of misery and despair when people around him died of disease, hunger and cold, among them his beloved brother. But the war was for Rubin also a period of intensive reading of literature and philosophy, and a time when his social skills as organiser and leader came to the fore.14 Fortunately, Rubin was exempt from active military service in his capacity as a factory worker.15 After the war, under pressure from his family, Rubin started a manufacturing venture which ended in failure. Only in 1919, after moving to Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, did Rubin finally start his life as a full-time artist.16

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Rubin and Zionism From early childhood, Rubin tells us, he had dreamed of going to Palestine. The dream was nourished by a biblical romantic image of the country found in such books as The Love of Zion by Mapu that his father used to read aloud on Friday nights, and by emissaries from eretz yisrael who had visited their home. Gradually, through reading on Palestine and on Jewish history Rubin learned about Zionism and befriended those who shared his feelings.17 The opportunity to fulfil his dream came when Rubin was sent two gold coins as payment for drawings that were exhibited at the Zionist Congress in 1911. The coins came in a letter from the Zionist activist Adolf Stand advising Rubin to go to Bezalel. An invitation letter from Boris Schatz soon followed.18 Rubin tells of this episode as an amazing, almost miraculous, event, emphasising that he had not sent any drawings to the Congress (but maybe one of his friends did).19 Writing about his early period Rubin usually refrains from mentioning direct contacts with Zionist organisations even when he was clearly involved, for example as an illustrator for the Zionist journal ha-tikva. (Fig. 6.1) Rubin’s preference to highlight in his story his personal and emotional attachment to eretz yisrael should not conceal the intensive Zionist activity in Romania of which he must have been aware. Rubin’s birthplace, Galatz, was until 1919 the headquarters of the Romanian Zionist movement headed (until 1906) by Shmuel Pineles.20 It was from Galatz that the first ship of Romanian Zionist immigrants left port in August 1882 to establish in Palestine two colonies, Zamarin (later Zichron Ya’akov) and Rosh Pina on the land purchased by the Romanian popular Movement for Settlement in Palestine.21 Pineles, the general secretary of the movement’s central committee and later the president of hovevei tziyon in Romania, supported Herzl and was involved in the preparation for the first Zionist Congress of 1897. The Congress was opened by another Romanian Zionist, Dr Karpel Lippe, and Pineles was elected one of three vice-presidents.22 Rubin mentions no specific or direct involvement with Jewish or Zionist groups or organisations. Yet he is known to have been a member of the Jewish sport association Maccabi in Galatz in 190823 and probably had known Pineles whose portrait he drew in 1921.24 After returning to Romania in 1914 Rubin joined a group of young Yiddish writers and poets who gathered in the city of Yasi, organised literary evenings all around Romania and published a literary journal called licht (Light). Its first issue was published in December 1914 and Rubin designed its frontispiece.25 Rubin’s illustration of a winged angel covering his face clearly owes something to E.M.Lilien, whose influence may also be noticed in Rubin’s illustrations for the Zionist Romanian journal ha-tikva (The Hope). Rubin contributed illustrations to ha-tikva during the year of its existence from June 1915 to July 1916 and also designed the title page of the journal (Fig. 6.1). This design shows figures on both sides of the title text: on the right, in front of cypresses bowed by the wind, is an old bearded man with a youth beside him who points towards the left side. There a young agricultural worker stands among newly planted trees near a palm tree and turns his gaze towards the figures on the right. Heyd compares this composition to Lilien’s famous 1901 design for the Fifth Zionist Congress in which an angel points the way eastwards, towards a Jewish ploughman, to an old seated Jew (Fig. 6.2). She then suggests that Rubin came to know Lilien’s work while in Bezalel and that he adopted his style when necessary in order ‘to convey Zionist aspirations in the diaspora’.26 The extent

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of Lilien’s actual influence on Bezalel students following his brief contact with the school in 1906 deserves a separate examination, but it should be stressed that Lilien’s motifs and style were spread throughout the Zionist world and that illustrators who have had no connection to Bezalel often followed his example. Besides, the theme of Rubin’s illustration—the old orthodox Jew contrasting with the young pioneer farmer—was current in Zionist imagery even before Lilien’s emblematic version, either as a portrayal of unanimity between generations in the Zionist vision or the dichotomy of old ‘exilic’ wandering Jew and its young counter image of the agriculture worker.27 It is worth dwelling a little on the differences between the images of Rubin and Lilien. Unlike the old Jew in Lilien the old man in Rubin does not necessarily personify the helpless, passive, exilic Jewry. Rather, his tall upright body in a long robe and sandals bring to mind another perception of the Jew: that of an ancient biblical people now led by the young generation to be replanted in its land of origin. This formula of the young leading the old to the land of hope was current in Zionist iconography of the early twentieth century.28 Stylistically, too, one should not overstate Lilien’s influence, particularly in view of the various styles Rubin employed in his illustrations for ha-tikva. Rubin apparently did not share Lilien’s taste for ornamentation both in the detail of his images and in the patterned borders of his illustrations (in tune with the Art Nouveau style of the period), nor did he adopt the refined curved lines and classical allusions. Quite the opposite, Rubin

Figure 6.1: Reuven Rubin, title page, ha-tikva, Publica, tie Zionista Bilunara, Romania, 1915

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Figure 6.2: Ephraim Moses Lilien, souvenir postcard for the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901 preferred a loose line, much fewer details and figures with dramatic expressions or gestures, as is shown in his illustration of Moses.29 Similar features in another figure of Moses appeared several years later in a poster that Rubin designed for keren ha-yesod (Palestine Foundation Fund) (Fig. 6.3). Here the man with the long white beard raises his muscular arms to Heaven and proclaims (in the Hebrew text): ‘Go up and inherit the land’. Behind him on the right are seen miserable Jews, seated, exhausted, with their heads bent down, while on the left young men are standing with agricultural tools in their hands. In the background eretz yisrael is concealed behind a big wall and closed iron gates symbolising the obstacles in implementing the Zionist vision. The call for Jews to open their hearts and their wallets to bring about the redemption is in Yiddish: ‘Jews! The key to Zion is in your hands, open the gate!’. The heroic figure of Moses who leads his people to redemption, a current theme in Zionist iconography of the time, also echoes Boris Schatz’s sculpture Mattathias (Fig. 2.1), familiar to Rubin from his time in Bezalel and from later publications in the Zionist press.30 It is not easy to explain why Rubin omitted from his memoirs his contributions to hatikva and licht and other Jewish journals and at the same time mentioned caricatures for Italian newspapers.31 Perhaps he thought of them as not ‘real’ art, merely illustrations, or maybe he did not want this activity to diminish the impact of the War years in his story, which emphasises misery and despair. The first mention of his meeting with Zionist leaders, according to the memoirs, was in 1921 in New York, where, Rubin ‘discovered’ hanging on a wall in a Zionist office the poster which he had designed a couple of years earlier.32 This was however the same poster mentioned above, which is dated 1921 (Fig.

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6.3). Lapse of memory occurs several times in his book, but the total neglect of Rubin’s Zionist involvement prior to 1921 remains problematic.

Figure 6.3: Reuven Rubin, poster of keren ha-yesod, 1921; 84×59.3 cm. Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

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Early career and influences Rubin’s awareness of the Zionist vision and his involvement with the movement did not yet have any personal implication and in the years following the First World War his main concern was his development as an independent artist. In Czernowitz Rubin joined a group of Jewish intellectuals, writers, playwrights and actors led by the poet Eliezer Steinberg.33 Among them was the Jewish painter Arthur Kolnik whose academic background enabled him to teach Rubin painting techniques.34 Rubin and Kolnik became friends and the two worked closely together and in 1921 went to New York to exhibit there. Several years earlier Rubin had discovered the art of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) whose role in Rubin’s development was substantial: it included composition and stylistic elements; subject matter; specific motifs; and a theoretical base. It is not inconceivable that Rubin found in Hodler a role model on the personal level also. Hodler, whose origins lay in the Swiss proletariat and who from childhood was faced with the harshness of life and death, became an internationally successful artist and his art is recognised by the Swiss as mirroring the essence of their nation.35 Rubin’s encounter with Hodler was a powerful experience, and as he put it: These works gave me a shock and decided my destiny at once’. In this early account Rubin’s fateful encounter with Hodler occurred in 1915 when he ‘went to Switzerland, to Bern, to see the paintings of Hodler’.36 In his later memoirs Rubin describes a visit to Hodler’s exhibition in Zurich and a meeting with the artist himself, but again this visit is connected to Rubin’s 1915 sojourn in Italy.37 However Hodler’s retrospective exhibition in Zurich’s Kunsthaus took place in the summer of 1917 (and he had no exhibition in 1915) and it is hard to imagine Rubin visiting it during the war. It is thus difficult to conclude when and where Rubin first saw Hodler and whether it was a single experience. Be this as it may, the impact of Hodler on Rubin’s painting is apparent in works done from 1919 to 1922. The direct borrowings seen in some paintings suggest that Rubin kept a copy of a catalogue or an illustrated book on Hodler which continued to inspire him several years after the first encounter. The works that particularly influenced Rubin were those Hodler had made between 1890 and 1903, his symbolist period, and which had brought him recognition and success. Symbolism was a movement in art and poetry that developed in central Europe from the 1880s. Art historian Robert Goldwater described Symbolism ‘as a reaction against naturalism…as part of a philosophical idealism in revolt against a positivist, scientific attitude’.38 A principal characteristic of the movement was the concern with theory and meaning. But unlike traditional allegories a symbolist picture begins in personal experience and emotion which, in order to make it meaningful and indicate a wider frame of reference, the artist connects with humanity at large, wishing ‘to give pictorial form to the invisible world of the psyche’. In reaction to Impressionism and other naturalistic forms of representation Symbolism turns inwards, to notions of solitude and silence as part of its anti-material concerns, and the desire ‘to express mood rather than interaction with the world’.39 It is fairly reasonable that Rubin’s own search for meaning and purpose in life, his efforts to remove himself from the continual preoccupation of his family with material achievements, his poetic inclinations and philosophic interest, and his frequent moods of despair and restlessness led him to

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embrace Symbolism as a means of self-expression. In particular the idealism and conviction of Hodler, the artist who ‘saw in art a means towards edification rather than mere delectation’,40 was an appropriate guide for a young Rubin in search of his own way in art and in life. An example of Hodler’s influence can be found in one of Rubin’s earliest surviving paintings, The Temptation in the Desert (Fig. 6.4). It shows a close similarity to Hodler’s painting Night (Fig. 6.5) in which the artist exposed his own fear and frustration. In this painting Hodler portrayed himself as the central figure who awakens, horrified, to find the dark-draped phantom of death crouched upon him. Around him, lying asleep on the ground, are naked or half-draped men and women. For Hodler whose childhood had been constantly accompanied by death, losing members of his family one by one, fear of death was very real. Another autobiographical reference in this painting is the two women in his life at that time who are depicted in the foreground.41 The figures in this painting are arranged horizontally, parallel and almost symmetrically with alternating areas of dark and light colours between the barren open landscape and the black draperies. A measured rhythm of symmetry binds this image of nightmare of death and sexual seduction.42 Several features of Night are found in Rubin’s painting. The four figures are lying on the ground in symmetrical arrangement around the central upright man, two on each side and two parallel at the top and the bottom. The latter is a half naked woman seen from the back and pulling at the drapery of the central figure. The colour scale is limited and the dark draperies of the figures are contrasted with the light colour of the landscape. As in Hodler, this is a kind of non-place but it can be identified as a desert

Figure 6.4: Reuven Rubin, The Temptation in the Desert, 1920–21; 98.5×132.5 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

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Figure 6.5: Ferdinand Hodler, Night, 1890; 116×299 cm. Kunstmuseum Bern, Staat Bern by the several cactus plants on the left. The nightmare atmosphere is heightened by the fearful expression on the faces of the lying figures while the central figure embraces himself with his eyes shut. When discussing this painting at the time of its exhibition in 1921 Rubin specifically identified the figure in the middle as himself: It has the face of my brother, who was killed in the war. I saw him on his deathbed and his head is in many of my canvases. But it is myself there. It is I resisting temptation, continuing on my way of suffering in spite of the hands that reach out to grasp me. You see…she is trying to hold me back, but I am going on. I shall go on.43 In the same spirit Rubin described his intensive period in Czernowitz when he and Kolnik worked together as leading ‘the life of hermits. I withdrew entirely from the world and read, studied, painted’. Determining on ‘an ascetic attitude, resisting all temptation of the flesh, of the world and of art’ is how Rubin described his state of mind even earlier, before he went to Paris in 1914.44 By using terms such as ‘hermit’ and ‘temptation of the flesh’ Rubin endows his art with religious overtones. The title itself has Christian connotations alluding as it does to such themes as the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Rubin also made other works at that time with direct Christian references: the painting titled The Suffering of Christ and the sculpture Christ Homesick were included in his exhibition (shared with Kolnik) at the Anderson Galleries in New York in November 1921.45 Rubin’s use of Christian imagery was not exceptional in his cultural milieu of that time (Pl. C). As Hamutal Bar-Yosef has shown, there was a growing interest in Christianity and in the image of Jesus in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the second decade of the twentieth century, when writers mythologised and universalised the Jewish experience by using Christian symbols and particularly Jesus, who ‘separated from the Church …became a universal tragic figure, a symbol of human suffering’.46 In the visual art the portrayal of Jesus as a Jew by Jewish artists goes back to the nineteenth century, in Antokolsky among others, and continued into the twentieth century, notably with

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Chagall.47 But Rubin’s inspiration must have come from literature, probably Yiddish literature where Jewish identification with Jesus became a trend, for instance in the poetry of Itzik Manger and the stories of Scholem Asch, who were both familiar to Rubin.48 Symbolism was another channel through which Rubin, like other Jewish artists and writers, could adopt Christian myths and make them part of his own inner world.49 Rubin’s images of Jesus can be interpreted in view of his concern with human suffering, death and despair. The titles of many of his works in his 1921 exhibition suggest precisely this: The Prophet among the Life-tired, Ruin after the War, The Weary, The Meal of the Poor, Anxiety, The Tired One, The Blind, Voices of the Abyss, The Prophet and the Refugees. Themes of human misery were current in Jewish art at the turn of the twentieth century, usually in connection with the suffering of Jews in pogroms and exile.50 Similar expressions of despair showing people seated with their heads bent down or held in their hands can be found in works by Van Gogh (Sorrow, 1882) and Gauguin (Human Miseries, 1888–89). Rubin considered both artists as his forebears alongside Hodler. Hodler’s paintings The Disappointed Souls (1891–92) and The Disillusioned (1892) were undoubtedly a source for Rubin in their composition which showed five old men seated facing front on a bench, not interacting with each other, as if hopelessly waiting for death. Rubin adopted a similar composition of five men seated on a bench for his The Prophet among the Life-tired. As in Hodler there is a half-naked central figure, but he is bigger than the others in Rubin’s painting and he stretches his arms to the sides like a crucifix.51 Unlike Hodler though, and in a similar approach to the composition in The Temptation in the Desert (Fig. 6.4), Rubin did not keep a strict symmetrical balance. Instead, he preferred to juxtapose the different poses and ages of the figures. A Hodler-like pattern of the sitting men appears again in Rubin’s painting Jesus and the Jew (Pl. C). This time with only two men sitting on a bench, on the left edge is an old orthodox Jew with his head bent and his hands leaning on his stick, and on the right edge Jesus sits straight in a white robe, his arms laid loose on his knees showing the crucifixion wounds on his hands.52 The enigmatic character of Rubin’s works at that time, many of which are now lost, only allows for a general outline of his views and art at the beginning of his career. The theme of suffering may be based on his experiences during the war but Rubin directed it towards a wider and universal perception of human fate. The struggle of the individual against negative forces and the ability to overcome these as underlined in The Temptation in the Desert shows Rubin’s faith in human willpower. At the same time the reference to prophets and the search for God (one painting was titled The God Seekers) suggest an inclination towards mysterious supernatural powers. This may also be related to Symbolism and the concept of ‘art as a new religion, a way of life to which the artist was called and to which he gave himself utterly’.53 Rubin clearly identified with this role when he said: I am not at all interested in copying nature. I wish only to express the idea of a Supreme Being. I am a seeker of God, a new God who will end the suffering of humanity. I seek Him in color, line, movement. The old God is dead. He is impotent; He has confessed Himself a failure. I know what I speak of, for I have seen much suffering.54

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A certain influence of Nietzsche seems to be implicit here and Rubin read his writing alongside that of other philosophers. But Rubin was no theorist and his main concern at the time of his exhibition in New York was to present himself in the correct context. By declaring that ‘my forebears are Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Hodler, the Swiss painter’ he made clear that his interests as an artist were not in naturalism or Impressionism but in the realm of ideas and emotions. At the same time he presented himself as a follower of the great masters of modern painting, of whom Hodler was the least known.55 Later on Rubin also claimed that through Hodler he began to understand Cézanne.56 His early works show little evidence of Cézanne’s influence but a coupling of Hodler and Cézanne was not unusual and at the time the idea circulated in a successful book.57 While Cézanne’s influence was not yet apparent the influence of Van Gogh and Gauguin was also limited in the early works. Rubin probably discovered them at a largescale exhibition of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism that was held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York during his stay there.58 In his memoirs Rubin particularly mentions Van Gogh and Gauguin and his deep impressions of them. The experience of seeing their painting, he wrote, ‘injected new life into my veins’ and ‘made me feel that I would find my way out of the dead end at which I had arrived’.59 The influence of Gauguin was to become apparent in a few years’ time, when Rubin settled in Palestine. But his immediate response can already be seen in a painting he showed in his New York exhibition titled Negress with Oranges and Lemons.60

Figure 6.6: Ferd inand Hodler, Truth (II), 1903; 208×295 cm. © 2003 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved

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Figure 6.7: Reuven Rubin, False Prophets, 1922; 110×96.5 cm. Private collection, New York. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation Rubin spent some eight to nine months in New York City.61 A significant influence during this period, according to his own testament, was the encounter and conversations with Alfred Stieglitz and the modern American paintings Rubin saw in Stieglitz’s gallery.62 It is quite possible that some of Rubin’s later ideas which would be developed after his settlement in Palestine were seeded then under the influence of Stieglitz. In particular, the aspiration of Stieglitz and the circle of artists around him to create American art based on the sense of place and the artist’s authentic response to the place.63 In the short term however the effect of Rubin’s New York experience after returning to Romania was mainly that his palette became lighter and more colourful. But the influence of Hodler was still strong and is manifested in some of his paintings exhibited in

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Bucharest early in 1923.64 A very close reference to Hodler’s painting Truth (Fig. 6.6) appears in Rubin’s painting False Prophets (Fig. 6.7) originally titled Truth and the False Prophets.65 In Hodler’s painting, six male half-naked figures with black draperies over their heads, representing evil or death, are seen receding into the background as if dispelled by the central figure of truth personified by a naked woman. In Rubin’s painting we see only two figures in the background, and although fully covered with dark drapery, in their postures they unmistakably derive from Hodler. In the centre a figure dressed in white is kneeling, his arms extended forward on the ground with the palms upward, either in prayer or in desperate submission. Between his arms a tree is growing and on the left there is a circle of stones with a lamb inside. This can be interpreted as an altar and subsequently as a reference to a biblical ritual.66 A similar arrangement of stones, in a square, around a young tree, is found in another painting by Hodler, The Consecrated One (1893–94). Rubin may have begun the painting with a biblical theme in mind, but eventually turned away from a direct literary reading of his work.67 Apparently Rubin was influenced by Hodler not only in composition and figures but also at the level of ideas—connecting truth with art. If for Hodler ‘art could only be the communication of truth on the highest level of human cognition’,68 Rubin, too, was anxious to convey the truth as it came directly from his emotions and inner self. Reporting to a friend at the time he was tormented while working on this painting ‘solely with my life-blood’.69 Another painting that reflects Hodler’s influence is Madonna of the Homeless of 1922 (Fig. 6.8). Four men are sleeping on the ground in a barren landscape at the seashore. In the centre, on a separate hill, a woman is sitting, one breast bare and in front of her on his back a naked baby. The gesture of the woman’s arms echoes a similar gesture made by the central female figures in Hodler’s paintings such as Art (1897), Day (1900) and Truth (Fig. 6.6). Rubin’s woman holds in each hand a little red flower, another typical Hodlerian motif found in such paintings as The Consecrated One and The Dream (1897– 1903). In some of Hodler’s female portraits the sitter is portrayed with a flower in her hand as an indication of meditation.70 Rubin’s Madonna, according to Ofrat, conveys the idea of salvation as opposed to the suffering of previous paintings. This interpretation interlaces the images with the artist’s life as a narrative of suffering in exile and the redemption achieved by immigrating to Palestine.71 Yet Rubin continued to paint themes of suffering: Chaos, The Lost Wanderer, Job, The Meal of the Poor and The Conquered were all titles from his 1923 Bucharest exhibition. His Madonna in the landscape of desert is closer to the abstract spirituality of woman found in Russian Symbolism that also influenced Hebrew literature.72 Her exposed breast suggests as a source a fifteenthcentury French painting, Virgin by Jean Fouquet.73 It is possible that there is a certain personal significance for Rubin in this painting, and particularly the woman at its centre, which cannot be fully deciphered.74 In addition to the Symbolist paintings the exhibition in Bucharest included landscapes, portraits, some still-lifes, interiors and genre scenes. A further shift in his themes accompanied by a major stylistic transformation occurred after Rubin’s emigration to Palestine.

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Figure 6.8: Reuven Rubin, Madonna of the Homeless, 1922; 130×180 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

7 Rubin in Palestine First success After his successful trip to New York Rubin returned to Romania in the spring of 1922, moving to Bucharest where he continued to work. However a year later he went to Palestine, where he was to remain. Rubin’s return to settle in Palestine has usually been dated at 1922.1 In support of this dating several paintings are said to have been painted in Palestine in 1922, most notably Houses in Tel Aviv (Pl. E), and some are actually dated 1922 on the canvas.2 In view of Rubin’s activities during 1922, including his studio exhibition in Bucharest in early 1923 and documentary evidence, above all his passport, the dating of Rubin’s arrival in Palestine must be changed now to April 1923.3 Rubin then settled in Tel Aviv4 and towards the end of that year was preparing works for his first solo exhibition.5 The exhibition of ‘oil paintings and drawings from life in eretz yisrael’, to cite the title, was held at the Citadel (Tower of David) in Jerusalem from 9 March to 1 April 1924 and moved later to Tel Aviv. The exhibition was, as Rubin put it, ‘a great moral success’ as well as a ‘respectable material success’.6 There were positive reviews in the press and the exhibition attracted a large number of visitors.7 Moreover, it established Rubin’s position among the cultural elite of the yishuv8 And a major work in the exhibition, the triptych First Fruits (Pl. D) was considered for purchase for the National Library in Jerusalem.9 There were also some suggestions that Rubin would paint murals for the Hebrew University.10 Rubin’s successful entrance into the cultural milieu of the yishuv happened at a time of growth and diversity in artistic activity following the renewal of Jewish immigration in the early 1920s. Exhibitions by artists newly arrived alongside the Bezalel artists were held in Tel Aviv.11 And in Jerusalem the recently founded Jewish Artists’ Association held group exhibitions at the Tower of David that soon would become the stage for competing artists and different approaches to art The 1924 exhibition, held at the Citadel shortly after Rubin’s solo exhibition there, is considered the turning point after which the artists who were later known as the Modernists took the lead. Mapping the new trends in the art of eretz yisrael in a 1925 article Yitzhak Katz presents Rubin as a clear opposition to Bezalel art: Rubin…has proven to us that one can be a Hebrew artist without painting the Mount of Olives or the Western Wall and be precisely purely Hebraic with all the mysticism and godliness of the Kabalists. […] He does not decorate or beautify and his well-known triptych ‘The Shepherd—The Fruits of the Land—and Serenity’ was suddenly revealed to the Jewry of eretz yisrael in its full contrast to the Jew in Exile by Hirszenberg and brought with it a sense of relief.12

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In his fierce criticism of Bezalel, Katz presents Rubin’s monumental triptych as a valid modern alternative to the decorative art for tourists, the sentimental character and traditional symbolism of Bezalel art. Moreover, he views it as a far better expression of the Jewish national revival in eretz yisrael. Rubin undoubtedly succeeded in positioning his art as the new voice of the nation. At the same time his art was also acknowledged as an authentic expression of the artist’s inner self.13 Art for the nation The reviews of Rubin’s exhibition said little about the subject matter of his paintings, except for mention of titles. But it would be fairly inconceivable that the warm reception awarded Rubin’s exhibition was based entirely on an appreciation of his style. The success of this exhibition was due no less to the images chosen to represent the country. To an extent, Rubin intended his art to be seen and understood at the national level; as representing ideas and values that were important in the process of national revival. This is particularly evident in his triptych First Fruits (Pl. D). This sizeable work (406 cm total width), for which Rubin made special efforts in obtaining a large canvas from abroad,14 could not have been intended for other than a public setting. That the initiative to purchase the painting for the National Library emerged on the opening night suggests that Rubin had paved the way in advance.15 Rubin was also very enthusiastic about the idea of painting frescoes for the Hebrew University and a promised commission for murals in the planned municipality building in Tel Aviv. ‘In this way all my dreams would be fulfilled’, he wrote at the time, ‘because one of my dreams was to paint big murals on large walls of Jewish public buildings.’16 Having no specific background or technical skill in mural painting17 it is clear that this dream could not have been merely an artistic challenge. Rather, it shows Rubin’s ambition to make art for the nation; art that would be seen in the context of prestigious public institutions that symbolised the national revival. Rubin might have been inspired by Hodler who painted murals on historic themes for civic institutions such as city hall and universities. The impetus to act in this direction had appeared already by the summer of 1923 after a visit to Bezalel Museum that left Rubin deeply disappointed: I feel like crying when I see Bezalel: ruin, dust and ashes. Where is the gloss of days gone by…. where is the vitality? […] Now, six years after the [Balfour] declaration and…two years since the [British] mandate the Jewish people, the chosen people, does not show itself, and we are caricatures, all of us. In Bezalel, more than anywhere else, I arrive at this conclusion; we do not have even the courage to die a beautiful death and we live a degenerate life. Schatz sticks to his chair and wanders around those who make a living from selling by the metre the ruins of our past and the beauty of biblical verses. No one dares to stand up and drive the merchants and the peddlers out of the temple. One should cleanse the temple! The people of Bezalel asked me to donate a painting to our national museum and I answered that first I want to see this national museum. I am

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still bewildered how unashamedly they led me to that filthy stable and showed me the most revolting collection one could ever imagine. These feeble-minded, helpless old people established here a distorted caricature of a museum and covered the walls with smears of the impotents who make Jewish art (with a few small and respectable exceptions…) […] I am disgusted by them. But I promise you…that one day I will pluck up courage, my fist will be strong and my voice will be resonant and the time will come when I will sweep all of them away….18 Rubin apparently believed in a direct link between the artistic expression of the people and the development of the national movement. Following recent political events he expected the Jewish people to ‘show itself’, and as an artist he obviously thought of art as the appropriate showcase. Despite his criticism of Bezalel Rubin did not dismiss the impact of the past as a source for his own art. Quite the opposite; an awareness of the history of destruction empowered him. He came to Jerusalem, as he explains in this letter, to spend there the Ninth of Av, a day of mourning in Jewish tradition in commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. He wanted to experience it in all his senses, to stand quivering ‘in front of this immense destruction that for generations was imprinted on our backs in order to depart from here invigorated and capable of convincing’. Although somewhat hesitant about the topic of his project—adding ‘convince who? and in what?’—Rubin seems fairly confident in the mission itself. Thus, in what he expected would be his first public work Rubin was to reveal himself as a committed Zionist artist. Symbolism in transition The triptych format enhances the claim for a public status for the work First Fruits. The triptych is familiar in Christian art, mainly in altarpieces in churches, but at the turn of the twentieth century it was often chosen for secular subjects to emphasise the depiction of universal ideas. In Rubin’s work the ideas remain a bit vague. The artist Avraham Melnikov had already pointed out at the time of the exhibition that the components of the picture are not unified by content but rather by composition.19 In many respects the work is a continuation of previous paintings by Rubin that were inspired by Hodler. The landscape, which is often thought of as representing Palestine, is similar to the desert landscapes in The Temptation in the Desert and Madonna of the Homeless (Figs 6.4 and 6.8), and the pose of the central female figure and the sleeping man in the right-hand panel are also reminiscent of these paintings. The painting as a whole (Pl. D), with its stage-like arrangement of the figures, follows the large figure compositions that Rubin made in his Symbolist paintings. The side panels show Arabs: on the left The Shepherd, a traditional, even stereotypical, image of a shepherd in a long ‘biblical’ robe playing the flute and surrounded by sheep; the right panel Serenity (or The Bedouin) shows a man sleeping on the ground near a pack camel.

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Figure 7.1: Reuven Rubin, Fruit of the Land, 1923, central panel of First Fruits; 188×Z202 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation The figures in the central panel, titled Fruit of the Land (Fig. 7.1), are usually agreed to be Jewish. On the left side stands a Yemenite family, a theme that in the following years Rubin would paint in several variations, always as the emblematic nuclear family of a man, a woman and a child. Oriental people and the Yemenite Jews in particular evoke a sense of rootedness and belonging, and the idea of continuity of Jewish tradition in the East, exemplified by the institution of the family. In this painting the way the Yemenite woman carries her child on her shoulder closely resembles the pose of the Tahitian Madonna in the painting Ia Orana Maria (1891) by Gauguin (Fig. 7.2) that probably served as its source. Rubin must have seen the painting in New York in 1921 when it was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition, as described in the previous chapter, profoundly impressed Rubin. The pomegranate in the hand of the Yemenite woman—one of ‘the seven kinds’ of the Land of Israel (Deut. 8:8)—has a long tradition as a Jewish symbol of fertility, abundance and beauty.20 Pomegranates appeared in other paintings in Rubin’s exhibition and would continue to be a recurrent theme in his art.

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Figure 7.2: Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria, 1891; 114×89 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The other two figures in this panel are more difficult to interpret. The giant man on the right who carries a watermelon on one shoulder and a bunch of bananas in his left hand has been usually identified as a pioneer. However his dark skin and his profile, which resembles the profile of an Arab fisherman in other paintings by Rubin,21 makes his identity rather ambiguous. A possible source for his posture can be found in another work by Gauguin. The woodcut Bearer of Bananas (1897) shows an almost naked man seen from the back, his head in profile, making a large step forward and raising his arms to

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hold a pole with the banana bunch at its edge. Bananas appeared frequently in Gauguin and the significant position of this tropical fruit in Rubin’s painting may reflect this influence. That the banana was ‘imported’ here together with its exotic meaning is emphasised when taking into account that by the time Rubin painted this triptych banana growing was not yet widespread in Palestine.22 Occasionally a single banana plant was found in a garden as an exotic decorative tree and as such it appears in the background of several Rubin’s paintings.23 Like the man on the right, the woman at the centre of the panel was also identified as a pioneer.24 Yet her open dress that reveals her breast and the long loose hair could hardly fit the clothing norms of Jewish women in Palestine at the time. Rather than resembling real pioneers the man and woman in their bare feet, partial nudity and fruits in hand evoke the image of a modern Adam and Eve in Paradise.25 They may also represent a certain ideal—that of physical labour, of direct contact with the soil and of making the desert bloom—ideals that were often connected in Zionist texts to the concept of the New Jew and the pioneer. The role of women in this picture retains traditional female functions in art and society: that of the beautiful fair-skinned erotic object and that of the mother—a subject that will be discussed later in this book. The title Fruit of the Land for this panel emphasises the unity of land and people in the ideal of fertility. In the midst of an ancient and sleepy oriental environment, represented by the Arabs in the side panels, the products of labour and the prospects for future growth are pronounced; in the fruits that have been grown already and in the young green crops that sprout on a brown strip of land in the middle ground behind the figures. Rubin’s viewers at the time could have equated these ideals with the Zionist enterprise. Yet for some the work was not specific or clear enough. Yitzhak Katz who in 1925 praised the triptych was more sceptical two years later: This triptych tells us a story about eretz yisrael, a story that belongs to Rubin alone, and not to the Hebrew people. It has a kind of selfconception that has not yet penetrated the essence of eretz yisraeli existence…. One thing is missing to complete the picture—rhythm, the rhythm of our national revival. His types are rigid, lacking the agitation that connects our pioneers with the work of national revival.26 The ambiguity of meaning in this painting continues some themes of Rubin’s Symbolist paintings of previous years. There, too, he was concerned more with evoking a mood or feeling rather than with a coherent narrative or a recognisable subject. A series of woodcut prints that Rubin produced during the same year show other transitions in motifs and style that emerged following his settlement in Palestine. A new quest for the spiritual Like the triptych the album of twelve woodcut prints on the theme of The God Seekers was planned a short time after Rubin came to Palestine.27 It, too, was aimed at creating a wider audience for his art, this time by distributing the prints abroad.28 The title of the series shows Rubin’s long concern with the quest for spiritual experience, already apparent in his 1921 exhibition in New York. The series opens with three prints that have

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clear biblical references—The Burning Bush, The Prayer on the Mountain, The Prophet in the Desert (Fig. 7.3)—and it ends with a tormented looking self-portrait. In the rest of the prints the quest for God is shared by dancing Jews (Fig. 7.4) and pensive Arabs, by loving couples, by a Family in Exile (Fig. 7.5) and by humble working people of the likes of a Water Carrier in my Little Town and The Galilean Fisherman. In these prints Rubin combined his earlier anxious pursuit of meaning and truth with newly discovered simplicity and calm, themes taken from his childhood memories combined with themes derived from his new environment. Reviewers at the time identified the strong religious element in the series and proclaimed the artist himself to be ‘a religious character’ or ‘a mystic’.29 But they also noticed his individual interpretation of religious themes which suggested that the whole notion of God could be understood as an ideal of self-perfection, or an aspiration to something remote or sublime that is to come in the future.30 The style was also regarded as a clear assertion of modern art and a true expression of the artist’s self. Indeed the series shows Rubin’s search for a new mode of expression that would reveal his feelings and ideas through form and composition and not solely through the symbolism of the figure. It was probably a conscious attempt to distance himself from Hodler’s influence and to adopt more overtly modernist, non-realistic language. This new language is particularly visible in the distortion of space and scale, the use of geometric forms and the sharp contrasts of black and white offered by the woodcut technique. In modern art woodcut is often associated with the work of the German Expressionists who found its boldness, simplicity and roughness of line suited to their needs. The revival of this printing method in the late nineteenth century owes much to the work of the Frenchman Paul Gauguin. It is very likely that Rubin, who was deeply impressed by Gauguin’s paintings, was also familiar with his primitivistic prints, or with woodcuts by artists who were inspired by Gauguin, among them the group known as Les Fauves (‘the Wild Beasts’).

Figure 7.3: Reuven Rubin, The Prophet in the Desert, 1923; woodcut, 33×28 cm, from the series The God

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Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

Figure 7.4: Reuven Rubin, The Dancers of Meron, 1923; woodcut, 33×28 cm, from the series The God Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation It is hard to trace exactly Rubin’s sources of influence at that time but they were probably coming from Paris rather than from Germany. Paris for Rubin was always an important aim and object of his yearnings, and he felt he knew the city both from experience and from books and journals.31 Anxious to keep up to date with artistic life there he urged his friend in Paris, shortly after settling in Palestine, to send him exhibition catalogues, art books and a list of periodicals.32 Rubin certainly knew some of these art journals previously from his time in Bucharest and he was not too selective as to their artistic content or orientation.33 Art journals have been, and still

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Figure 7.5: Reuven Rubin, Family in Exile, 1923; woodcut, 28×33 cm, from the series The God Seekers. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation are, an important means of dissemination of information on artists and artistic trends around the world. They contributed to the internationalisation of modern art while at the same time promoted the authority of particular centres that produced the journals vis-àvis marginal artistic communities who received them. The role of art journals in the artistic activity of Jewish Palestine has not yet been considered. Yet it is fairly clear that this was a regular source on which artists relied to the extent that Melnikov set out to criticise his fellow artists for this dependency. He reproached them for yearning to ‘go on a pilgrimage to Paris, since who among us does not dream of the French Mecca?’34 Rubin undoubtedly dreamed of Paris. He was constantly occupied with the planning of and preparation for his first exhibition there, which eventually took place in the spring of 1926. Rubin’s stylistic transitions during the 1920s are related to French influences and his 1923 woodcuts echo in particular the art of Chagall, with details such as figures with their heads turned upside down (Fig. 7.4) or the huge figure of a water carrier who hovers over the little town. Chagall’s mixture of motifs from Jewish and Russian folklore and modern geometrical forms was probably the main attraction for Rubin. The combination of a modern non-naturalistic style with images from Jewish folk art characterised the

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work of several Russian Jewish artists around the time of the Russian Revolution, most notably Issachar Ryback, Nathan Altman and El Lissitzky. The use of folklore as an inspiration for artists was a known practice within the framework of cultural nationalism. This tendency, as mentioned before, was particularly developed in Russia and no wonder that Jewish artists there also adopted this view. Avram Kampf pointed out that ‘many of those who concerned themselves theoretically with the development of a specific Jewish national art…saw in Jewish folk art and primitive art (the terms were used interchangeably) a true basis for the fine arts…their true origin and ancestor’. And they believed that ‘on the basis of folk art a true national style could be built’.35 The relationship between the movement for Jewish national art in Russia and the Jewish artists in Palestine has yet to be explored. It remains only to speculate to what extent Rubin was aware of it. He must certainly have known of Chagall, whose fame by the early 1920s was wide-ranging, through Yiddish literary publications or French art journals. Rubin’s series of woodcuts and the corresponding oil paintings he made at the time demonstrate his search for a new artistic expression following his settlement in Palestine—looking both for new themes and new forms. ‘Palestine’s Gauguin’ Rubin’s first exhibition, which summarised his first year in Palestine, also revealed the transitions during this year in his themes and his technique and treatment of light and colour in response to his experience of the country. These transformations were noticed at the time and were ascribed to the intense influence that the encounter with the country had on Rubin both personally and artistically. In his first paintings made in Palestine, claimed Melnikov, ‘the artist quivers between the light of the country and the darkness of exile and has not yet awaken’.36 The exhibition as a whole, argued R. Benyamin, shows how the painter during this year ‘was true to himself and redeemed himself as he found in the East his land, his colours, his environment’.37 A couple of years later Rubin himself proclaimed similar ideas in an article appropriately titled ‘I Find Myself’: Here, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Tiberias, I feel myself reborn; here, life and nature are mine; the grey clouds of Europe have disappeared; my sufferings, and the war too, are ended. All is sunshine, clear light, and happy creative work. As the desert revives and blooms under the hands of the pioneers, so do I feel awakening in me all my latent energies. I live with simple people, I walk the Galilean roads, and ride on horseback from Ir-Ganim to Tel Aviv with milkmen and farmers. The horizon has broad curved lines, the air is clear and transparent, and the perspective of European atmosphere no longer deforms nature for me. The men here are simple dreamers; life is full of surprises for them; everything is new and their wide open eyes regard the world with wonderment. I have pitched my tent on these ancient hills, and my desire is to tie together the ends of the thread that history has broken.38

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Like previous comments on his life this description, too, was made in order to provide a desirable context for Rubin’s art. The artist’s experience and feelings when in Palestine offered some explanation of his paintings, at least as to their subject matter. Indeed, many writers relied on this declaration when discussing his work. The paintings were thus assumed to be an authentic expression of this perfect happiness. Rubin had already eliminated from his work Christian themes (the woodcuts are the last use of these subjects) and other images of suffering, and had brightened his pallet with light ochre, light blue and pink. The notion of ‘simple people’ can be found in Rubin’s paintings of a fisherman, a milkman and a street sweeper, the majority of whom are oriental people, Yemenite Jews and Arabs. They are often seen in the countryside, barefoot or seated on the ground or, as some Arabs are shown, seated on low stools. They are also shown frequently in company of animals, mainly donkeys, camels and goats (Figs 7.5, 9.8, Pls K, P). Consequently their association with ‘nature’ (rather than with ‘culture’) is underlined. In his paintings of women a sense of exotic eroticism is often discernible in the figures of oriental women. Presenting their body to the viewer and often holding plants or fruits (Fig. 7.1, Pl. N) they suggest a direct analogy between ‘woman’ and ‘nature’, an association well established by tradition. The lure of the Orient and particularly the focus on oriental ‘types’ was already part of Bezalel repertoire. The notion of the land and its people in Bezalel art stemmed primarily from the established European view of Palestine as the Holy Land and the Bible Land. In Rubin’s art and in the work of other artists of his generation the focus now was on features that convey simplicity, primitiveness and happiness in an unspoiled landscape. These ideals are often found in the art of Gauguin, who is especially famous for his Tahitian paintings (Fig. 7.2), but his search for the ‘primitive’ and his attraction to ‘simplicity’ was already evident in his paintings of peasants in Brittany, France. Robert Goldwater pointed out that Gauguin rendered them ‘not as individuals who happen to be peasant, but as examples of the typical peasant. Their expressions…are without variation, and their gestures…remain, in the symmetry and angularity of their motions, symbols rather than portrayals of religious reverence’.39 Later on in Tahiti Gauguin continued his pursuit of the primitive ideal and despite the hardship he endured there, Colin Rhodes maintains, ‘the paintings he sent home to France were almost without exception images of noble savages living in harmony with a fertile and bountiful nature’.40 Rubin’s work in Palestine in the 1920s shares similar characteristics both in the depiction of types in symbolic gestures and in the idealisation of their ‘simple’ life. Gauguin’s paintings left a strong impression on Rubin when he saw them in New York in 1921 as he admitted many years later, and several images show direct borrowings. But the influence seems to have been beyond motifs or style. Rubin might have perceived himself in a situation comparable to that of Gauguin, i.e. as a ‘discoverer’ of the pure and unspoiled beauty of Palestine, as hinted in such statements as ‘I live with simple people’ and ‘I feel myself reborn’. This comparison was indeed suggested when Rubin was dubbed ‘Palestine’s Gauguin’: It seldom falls to the lot of an artist to find virgin soil in the outer world, at the same time that he is discovering new seeds springing from an inner virgin soil. Gauguin may be thought of as having done this, when, breaking away from the sophistications of Western civilization… he

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became the discoverer not only of Tahiti but also of the new Gauguin. In similar fashion, though with deeper spiritual emphasis, Rubin may be regarded as the artistic interpreter of Palestinian life and landscape as envisioned by a new Rubin.41 The article was published in an American Zionist journal to coincide with Rubin’s New York exhibition of 1928 organised by the author of the piece George Hellman, an American Jewish art critic, writer and art dealer.42 The close relationship between Rubin and Hellman, who was Rubin’s agent and whose portrait Rubin painted, makes it hard to imagine that this comparison did not receive Rubin’s consent. In fact he may well have initiated it. Whether Rubin genuinely believed he was the new Gauguin or whether this was a clever way to appeal to his Jewish audience who would prefer to imagine Palestine from a distance, it seems that it was an effective allusion. Like Gauguin, Rubin was successful, at least in terms of his immediate public, ‘in putting Palestine on the map of the art world’43 and in convincing them that the images and colours of his paintings ‘speak now of the authentic life of Palestine’, that ‘to see them is to breath the air of Palestine’.44 Reality and exultation In public, through his paintings and texts published in the press, Rubin presented an idyllic image of harmonious life in Palestine where one finds happiness, like sunshine, in abundance. In reality, as his private correspondence discloses, his life in Palestine was not free of trouble and distress. Although very happy and confident with his own work Rubin was constantly anxious about money, and he regularly discussed the sale of his pictures, his debts and his financial needs. He often complained of unhappiness, loneliness and of having no one in whom to confide. In the summer of 1925 his brother who also immigrated to Palestine fell seriously ill and Rubin himself suffered illness and long physical and psychological weakness.45 Later that year his father died in Romania and Rubin brought his mother and sister to Palestine.46 Subsequently he had to provide for them, which added to the pressure on him. In the summer of 1926 upon his return from his exhibition in Paris Rubin found the country in a deep recession. This sudden recession and mass unemployment ended a period of prosperity and intensive construction (for the main part this took place in Tel Aviv from mid 1924 to early 1926).47 Rubin admitted then that he was unable to work under the pressure of the crisis.48 A couple of months later however he was immersed in work and grandiose plans concerning film scripts on life in eretz yisrael that he had written. Dreaming of a great American success Rubin also hoped that keren ha-yesod would buy the film for propaganda purposes ‘because my film is imaginative, dramatic, visionary and passionately optimistic’.49 Like some other plans nothing came of the film project but it demonstrates Rubin’s ambition to make big public art that would serve not only his own aspirations but also the national cause. As the economic crisis continued Rubin could find comfort and delight in painting:

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In Tel Aviv there are 8,000 to 9,000 unemployed. It is sad and one no longer hears singing voices. My heart is broken. And I continue to be lucid and add more pink to my pink paintings, the blue becomes lighter than ever and the fresh leaves are green like buds.50 Rubin was then preparing for his second one-man exhibition in Palestine with paintings that revealed nothing of the difficulties that haunted him personally. While the crisis had a direct influence on the sale of his pictures Rubin was also genuinely troubled by the effect of the crisis on the yishuv and the Zionist project as a whole. He writes about Palestine as ‘this country of ours which I love so much but the great majority of our people are not sufficiently concerned with its fate.’ He adds that ‘this poor lovely country, pearl of beauty is suffering so much in endless want’, receiving no help from world Jewry, ‘a criminal indifference of an entire people.’ He then admonishes that because of the apathy of the diaspora ‘generations on generations will suffer, all the worthy ones, the chosen, those who brought their sacrificex’.51 Expressed in private and as part of his sincere account of his emotions and experiences, these thoughts should be accepted as Rubin’s real sense of identification with the country and with the Zionist ideal, as well as his self-recognition as one of those chosen few. The spirit of the locale With such commitment and belief it is not surprising that Rubin’s paintings were far from reflecting the grim existence around him. The time of painting trials and tribulations was over. Now Rubin was occupied with myths and ideals. Art for him had little to do with everyday reality, not only in its style and in the modern manner of representing figures or space, but also in its subject matter. Personally Rubin had a great admiration for the pioneers whom he described as the ‘crucified’ of the present.52 His paintings however emphasised the exhilaration in being reborn ‘on these ancient hills’ rather than the particularities involved in implementing the Zionist dream. His viewers could recognise this tendency and not all approved—Yitzhak Katz commented on the missing ‘rhythm of our national revival’. Highly appreciative was the poet H.N.Bialik (1873–1934), the doyen of Hebrew poetry who had exerted immense influence on the cultural life of the yishuv. Bialik, who also purchased three pictures from Rubin, wrote an introduction to Rubin’s second one-man show in Palestine that was held in Tel Aviv in February/March 1927 and which later moved to Jerusalem.53 In Bialik’s view the legendary non-realistic aspect of Rubin’s paintings evokes Jewish tradition of commentary, midrash and collection of legends and tales about eretz yisrael. Moreover, Bialik maintains that despite the modernism of Rubin’s paintings, in content and perception they pertain to the past, to ‘the land of the forefathers’ rather than to the present, to ‘the land of the sons’. For Bialik, though, this was the right way to develop national art: It is clear to me that Hebrew art, like Hebrew epic, if it has any hope, must be rooted in the legend of our past. It will sprout from this past and will delve deep into it in search of influence. Without it its root would rot and its blossom would wither. The ways of Hebrew legend of the past are the ways of Hebrew art of the future. There is no other way.54

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Bialik goes on to compare Rubin to Chagall. He states that both artists, each in his own way, created the basis for a true and definite Hebrew art that is Hebrew (i.e. Jewish) in its essence. In this emphasis on the Jewish nature of Rubin’s art as well as on the Jewish attributes of eretz yisrael in his paintings Bialik pointed out a certain shift in Rubin’s iconography that had occurred since his settlement in Palestine. In his earlier works Rubin depicted primarily various ‘types’ of the country’s population—Arabs and Jews (Figs 7.5 and 9.8, Pls D, K and N). He then added still-lifes and landscapes, mainly of Jerusalem and the Galilee (Fig. 8.2, Pl. F). And as images of Arabs gradually diminished and merged into the landscape, pictures of Orthodox Jews now took centre stage. Among the larger and most imposing works in Rubin’s 1927 exhibition were Succoth in Jerusalem (Fig. 9.6) and Dancers of Meron (Pl. M), both depicting Orthodox Jews celebrating Jewish festivals. These two themes—the festival of Succoth and Hasidic dances—had already appeared in Rubin’s work of 1923–24 and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9. Bialik, who focuses in his introduction on the Jewish tradition in Rubin’s art, goes further and attributes a distinct religiosity to the paintings. He even claims that ‘he who wants to see eretz yisrael…in its supreme purity should go to the paintings of Rubin’.55 For Bialik, the sense of spirituality in Rubin’s paintings and their legendary quality rooted in the Jewish tradition of story telling qualify Rubin’s art to become national art. It is art that is essentially Jewish in being deep-rooted in the people’s culture and history, and at the same time it is eretz yisraeli, being ingrained in the locale. Bialik, who had long been admired as the ‘national poet’ and who had dedicated many years to gathering and publishing Hebrew texts of the past, including legends and folk tales, was all but bound to interpret Rubin’s art as he did. The poet also notes the magical and inexplicable power of the paintings as being the true expression of the artist who, in Bialik’s view, not only bound his destiny to the land but ‘became one with it’. Other writers were less enthusiastic about the Jewish elements in Rubin’s work. The critic Koplevitz maintained that it was not the Jewishness or the symbols that were important in Rubin’s paintings but rather the motionless decorative quality of the images.56 Katz meanwhile found in Rubin’s recent painting a strong French influence—too strong an influence he thought. In his view the mysticism and primitivism in Rubin’s painting were not intuitive but rather the result of an intellectual calculation: In spite of being the greatest among the painters of eretz yisrael Rubin’s Hebrew purity is still enwrapped in a westernised talit [shawl]. The truth he seeks will be reached only when he will discharge himself from the European memories that are still leaving their mark on his work.57 Unlike Bialik, Katz thought that Rubin had not yet achieved uniqueness and authenticity as an artist, or ‘Hebrew purity’. Moreover, these goals, according to Katz, could be accomplished not by delving into Jewish tradition but rather by ridding oneself of Western influences and by being genuinely involved with the local environment and with the project of national revival. These different views were typical of a wider debate in the yishuv in those years among artists, critics and the intelligentsia concerning the desired identity of the national art and the national culture in general. Rubin’s own view on the matter was not easy to pinpoint. When asked whether there existed a Hebrew eretz

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yisraeli art he was hesitant. He said there was an aspiration towards such a thing and excitement and even some modest signs that the main road to this aim was gradually being built. He was more certain however as to what was not required and stated, with more than a hint to Bezalel art, ‘that neither the Magen David nor the Menorah are essential for our national art’.58 Rubin’s concern with Jewish tradition, a subject pretty much overlooked hitherto, should be viewed in light of both his own subject matter in previous years and the cultural context of the yishuv during the 1920s. Rubin’s interest in mysticism and spiritual emotions was a solid presence in his early works from 1920–22. Shortly after his settlement in Palestine expressions of agony during the religious experience were replaced by images of joy and meditation. The most fundamental change occurs in the image of Orthodox Jews. In his paintings from Romania they often looked hunched, tired and miserable.59 But in pictures done in Palestine they are always upright and happily devoted to their religious practices. In his early paintings from Palestine Rubin depicted Orthodox Jews alongside Arabs and oriental Jews as part of the different ‘types’ of Palestinians, and as people who belonged to the place since antiquity. It was through these pictures of blissful Judaism that Rubin demonstrated the importance of Jewish life in Palestine as opposed to life in the diaspora. Rubin was not alone in this view as the following episode from the life of the Hebrew theatre in Palestine demonstrates. In 1926 an ideological dispute erupted between the theatre group teatron eretz-yisraeli (known in acronym as TAI) and its director Menahem Gnessin. At the heart of the quarrel was S.An-Sky’s play about Jewish exorcism, ha-dibuk, and the director’s plan to remake the successful production of the play at the Hebrew-Russian theatre ha-bima. The actress and director Miriam Bernstein-Cohen recounted how the actors objected to the director’s plan claiming that the style of ha-bima production was not suitable for a play produced in Palestine. After all’, she writes, ‘here lived and worked the greatest Kabalists, and Safed the city of secrets and mystery is here’. She then adds: An enthusiastic supporter was the painter Rubin who has a painting that shows young men and young women standing on two sides of a Safed wall…the boys are dressed in light blue and the girls’ attire is pink…dreamy silky lads and innocent looking maidens who are yearning for love. And gradually above their heads the legend of the supreme love takes shape, the love that is at the heart of An-Sky’s dibuk. If only it was possible to express in costumes and music the magic world of this Israeli [sic] Song of Songs! And on the other hand to stress the hard, dark and dim side of the world of tradition and depressive religion, of the deadly black ‘verse’, of the forces of hatred and black enmity. This is how we saw the Israeli perception of this play.60 Eventually the director got his way after a split in the troupe. Responsibility for stage and costume design was given to the painter Litvinovsky and not to Rubin who had previously prepared designs for the theatre production of halom Ya’akov (Jacob’s Dream). The play was successful but the dispute continued in public. Some critics argued that the play was irrelevant to life in eretz yisrael of the 1920s while others favoured the preservation of Jewish folklore of the diaspora.61 It is most revealing, though, that for

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Bernstein-Cohen, as for Rubin, the authentic joyful Jewish life in eretz yisrael is represented by Hasidic Jews who had little to do with the Zionist ideals. For an ardent Zionist such as Rubin the choice to depict Orthodox Jews was not a nostalgic yearning for the lost tradition of the diaspora but rather an assertion of the continuity of the status of eretz yisrael as a Jewish place at least on the spiritual level. ‘My people, my family, my country’ Rubin’s attachment to the country of Palestine was not solely spiritual and a concrete link to the soil had for him a major personal significance. His immense success in New York in 1928 where he was received enthusiastically and his paintings sold for high prices62 allowed him to fulfil a dream: together with another investor he purchased a piece of land for planting an orange grove.63 Organising the work in the grove occupied him a lot during 1929. It brought him happiness but also numerous troubles and financial difficulties.64 Rubin was very proud of it and used to invite visitors to see his grove and take part in the planting. The French Jewish writer Edmond Fleg recounted such a visit during which Rubin implored his guest: ‘Plant an orange grove, Fleg,’ said Rubin to me; ‘Plant a forest, plant something. That binds you to the soil…. I have a clod of earth on Carmel, a clod of earth here. Not that I care about being a landowner; before living in Palestine I had knocked about a bit everywhere, in Roumania, in Austria, in France, in America; nowhere, I assure you, had I thought of planting anything. But here now, I simply must, it is a need…’.65 Even without such a declaration the fact that Rubin chose to invest his money in a grove in Palestine speaks for itself. By that time Rubin’s international success was growing rapidly with museum purchases, exhibitions and reviews.66 He was recognised widely as the painter of Palestine. Then, as before, it was clear to Rubin that art was not a record of his true feelings or experience at a given moment. His art was above all about the exultation of the country’s beauty. In a letter in 1929 he reports on a mixture of good and bad news and then adds: And in the midst of all the occurrences I am sitting on a little Arab stool and painting a landscape of Safed in bright colours, shades of blue, silver grey and light pink. I rejoice when I look at the treetops of the ancient olive trees and on the white houses with their flat roof on top of which stalks of wheat and oat grow. My painting needs not to know any of what excites and what confuses the head of poor Rubin.67 While painting a Galilean landscape in his Tel Aviv studio as a memory, if not a sheer idealisation, Rubin admits that the process of painting was entirely detached from his emotions and inner self. At best, the act of painting was to bring comfort and happiness to the artist with matching colour and subject matter. Without doubt Rubin identified fully with the mission he took upon himself as a selfnominated national artist: to present Palestine in the most favourable manner possible, as

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a place to love and to yearn for. In so doing he was successful not only during those years but later too, and this is exactly how he has been remembered historically. In 1955 the director of the Tel Aviv Museum, Eugene Kolb, wrote in Rubin’s retrospective exhibition catalogue: Rubin has grown and matured together with his homeland…. He taught a whole generation to see the beauty of our landscape, our olive groves and old cities, our people, flowers and fruits—all through the eyes of a creative artist.68 In the same spirit wrote Haim Gamzu, the Museum’s director at that time, of Rubin’s 1966 retrospective: Rubin is an artist who is in love with this land, who intimately knows its winding paths and byways, who excels at painting its scenery, its fruits and flowers… Rubin does not belong to those Jewish artists whose work is heavily charged with the tragedy of their people’s fate…. He simply loves life, enjoys whatever he sees and seeks to convey his feeling of optimism to his canvas or sheet of paper. […] ‘I paint’ he says, ‘what I love: my people, my family, my country. To paint means to sing, and every artist must make his own voice heard’.69 By the time of this exhibition Rubin’s art was no longer seen as relevant to contemporary art or to life in the country. Quite the opposite; it was considered art that for a long time had totally ignored the true local reality.70 Nonetheless, Rubin’s art of the 1920s has traditionally been accepted as some kind of ‘true’ representation of the country; at least of the ‘atmosphere’ or the spirit of the age. Even though the reality of the country and its population of Jews and Arabs, and Rubin’s own experience there remained entirely out of his pictures Rubin has been admired as the artist of Palestine ever since the 1920s. This is not to argue that art should or could be a ‘true’ representation of exterior reality, or that art is necessarily a reflection of the artist’s inner life. Following the earlier mentioned propositions on the collective nature of the meaning of art, and that successful art is not solely the result of some intrinsic objective ‘quality’, it is worth looking at Rubin’s public image in relation to his work. The dreamy unreal character of his pictures was for the most part obvious to his first viewers, and some appreciated it more than others. His status as an artist who not only knew intimately the country and ‘excelled at painting its scenery’ but who also imparted his love of the homeland to generations owed to various factors beyond mere artistic talent. It was to a great extent a consequence of Rubin’s understanding of the role of art in creating a national mythology and its potential contribution to the national revival. Some critics were aware of his self-conscious efforts. But the broad appreciation of his idealised picture of the country which existed among collectors, writers, museums directors and the general public also indicates a deeply held desire to see the Zionist enterprise in aesthetic terms of natural beauty, harmonious life and joyful love of the homeland, a sheer opposite to the tragedy expressed by Jewish artists in the diaspora. The vision of trouble-free simplicity in the land of the forefathers

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was too good to be equated with reality. Over the years, temporal distance helped this vision of the 1920s seem more believable and even gain a patina of authenticity of a sort.

Part III The Modernists of the 1920s

By the mid 1920s Bezalel and its aspiration to produce genuine Jewish art in Palestine was considered a failure by many artists and writers. It was the newly arrived artists— known as the Modernists—who were now expected to express the spirit of their time, place and society. The situation was defined in June 1925, in an article by Yitzhak Katz, as a fight between two trends, that of Bezalel and that of ‘the young amongst us’.1 The artistic challenge to Bezalel by the young artists was, according to this view, equivalent—if not actually identical—to the opposition between the developing Hebrew culture and life in eretz yisrael, and the misery of the Jew in exile. The fact that the Modernists were newcomers whereas Bezalel artists were veterans in the country reinforced the claim of the former to the ‘new’ (a word repeated many times in Katz’s essay) on a wider scale. It echoed such concepts as the New Jew or the New yishuv that by then were well rooted in the secular Zionist community of Jewish Palestine. Over the years most writers have followed this interpretative model and subsequently the history of the art of the 1920s is often recounted as an all-encompassing struggle of the New against the Old, and an unambiguous ‘rejection of academism, conservatism, and Diaspora melancholy’.2 Signs of this conflict were already present in some individual exhibitions. The first exhibition of Yisrael Paldi (Feldman) in April 1923 was received as a fresh novelty and an indication of a changing spirit, and Yosef Zaritsky’s first show in June 1924 was praised highly for its quality.3 A few month earlier Rubin’s successful exhibition helped to establish his position as a major opponent to Bezalel art. But it was mainly through the group exhibitions organised in Jerusalem by the Artists’ Association that the new artists have gained their leading status. The Jewish Artists’ Association (agudat ha-omanut haivrit) was set up in October 1920 and its founding committee consisted mainly of Bezalel teachers who aspired ‘to develop among the people art and crafts and instil the taste for beauty in the Jewish spirit’.4 Gradually however the position of Bezalel artists in the Association weakened and the third exhibition of the Association held at the Tower of David in April 1924, when the two groups exhibited in separate rooms, is considered a turning point. Afterwards the Modernists took the lead in organising and setting the tone

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of these exhibitions.5 In 1928, after the seventh exhibition, the Association’s committee moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in what has been accepted as the final ‘victory’ of the Modernists.6 By that time the vigorous cultural activity in Tel Aviv had determined the city’s leading position in the yishuv and art was part of it. In January 1926 eleven painters, among them Rubin, Paldi and Zaritsky, exhibited in the shack of the newly founded ohel theatre in Tel Aviv their first ‘Exhibition of Modern Artists’ (ta’aruchat omanim modernim). In this exhibition and those throughout the next two years these artists presented themselves as the carriers of a modern spirit in art, and in distinct opposition to Bezalel, claiming a higher status for their own work. In later years, from 1957 to 1991, no less than four historical exhibitions were dedicated to the period, focusing specifically on the Tower of David and the ohel exhibitions and thus helping to consolidate their mythical role in the history of Israeli art.7 Although there were other activities and exhibitions of modern art in Tel Aviv during the early 1920s8 it was the ohel exhibitions that were honoured early on as ‘the first art exhibitions professing modernism’ and that were seen ‘a turning point in Israel painting. Their participants were pioneers of a new vision’.9 However, the reception of the Modernists’ works at the time was not always so enthusiastic and there was criticism of each and every aspect of their art—style, subject matter and ideology. As will be described later the artists, too, were far from being unified in their approach. Nonetheless, in Israeli historiography these group exhibitions were credited with a single contribution—that of bringing modernism to Jewish Palestine. Consequently other facets of the art of the decade were neglected, most notably preferences in subject matter. The most prominent of these were landscapes and the country’s ‘types’, topics dealt with in the following chapters. While much of the existing writing on the art of the period focuses on stylistic matters, the ideological and cultural climate in which this art operated tended to be overlooked or described uncritically. A close examination of this discourse in chapter 10 will reveal the rather complex relationship between art and Zionist ideology.

8 A view from afar Landscapes of the homeland Landscape has been one of the major themes in Israeli art since the 1920s, going through various phases including abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s and minimalist and conceptual treatment in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its prominent role, affirmed by numerous exhibitions, the subject has been very little investigated. And in the few cases it has been discussed the emphasis is conveniently laid on elements of composition, colour, light and level of abstraction well within the modernist tradition of formalist analysis. An ideological inclination, if mentioned, would be summarised into a simple nationalist equation. Such is the claim that the concern of Israeli artists with landscape derives primarily from ‘the basic desire of the Israeli individual for rootedness’.1 The implication, according to this view, is straightforward: the Zionist aspiration for ‘belonging’ to the place brings about, in artists, emotional and aesthetic sensibilities towards the land and subsequently results in the production of landscape art. The assumption that there exists an obvious link between a national ideology and the production of a certain genre of art needs to be questioned. This becomes necessary in particular when considering the actual landscapes that were painted by Jewish artists in Palestine. Numerous studies concerning landscape have emerged in recent decades by scholars in various disciplines. Many of these share the idea that landscape is not merely a physical given or an aesthetic form but that it also conveys and corroborates ideologies.2 A relatively large number of these studies focus on landscape representations in art in relation to nationalism and national identity3 It is true that the terms ‘landscape’ and ‘ideology’ have been given a number of different definitions, as have the concepts of nationalism and national identity.4 Nonetheless, there are some key notions that link nationalism and landscape that are particularly useful for the current enquiry. One is the view that ‘landscape is best understood as a medium of cultural expression’ as Mitchell puts it, and its subject matter ‘is not simply raw material to be represented in paint but is always already a symbolic form in its own right’.5 That is to say, depictions of landscape, be it in different styles or mediums, cannot be separated from the set of ideas and beliefs regarding the land that is portrayed. Or, as Simon Schama phrased it: ‘before it can ever be repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’.6 On the other side there is the notion, as summarised by Smith, that ‘nationalism is about “land”, both in terms of possession…and of belonging where forefathers lived and where history demarcates a “homeland”’.7 Landscape art therefore is concerned with an object that is already imbued with visions and symbols, yearnings and memories often shared by a group or a nation. With these concepts in mind it would be almost inevitable to interpret landscape paintings as a tool in promoting national ideology. There are good reasons to suspect the seemingly straightforward relationship suggested here between ideology and painting. It

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is true, Janet Wolff argues, ‘that the artist is in some sense the agent of ideology, through whom the views and beliefs of a group find expression’. But ‘this does not take place in any simple fashion whereby…ideas are simply transposed into an aesthetic medium’.8 In other words, we still need to work out how an ideology is translated into visual images, into symbolic forms and shapes, composition or colour. This process is often taken for granted by writers assuming, perhaps, ‘the level of the aesthetic itself as unproblematic’.9 With the aim of resolving the problem, at least partially, Wolff proposes that ‘the work of art itself re-works that ideology in aesthetic form, in accordance with the rules and conventions of contemporary artistic production’.10 Interpreting and understanding works of art in nationalist terms will require then an examination of the wider picture—the repertoire of themes that were current at a given time against the backdrop of the historical conditions of their making—and a thorough investigation of individual examples, their subject matter and the aesthetic codes and stylistic conventions involved in their creation. During the 1920s landscape was a major theme for artists in the yishuv as evident from its high proportion in the surviving works from this period. In a survey of the art of the 1920s held at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1982 some 40 per cent of the exhibits may be regarded as landscape: outdoor scenes, people in the countryside, views of streets or parts of towns or views out of the window.11 This abundance certainly indicates a shift in direction compared to Bezalel where, especially in the early years, landscape was hardly an issue. The curriculum there showed no interest in landscape painting; instead the country was conveyed through Holy Places and important monuments, pictures of ethnic types (mainly Jewish) and details of archaeological and natural specimens collected by the Bezalel Museum. However, during the 1920s landscapes of Palestine started to appear in works of Bezalel teachers, often as a setting for biblical scenes. One of the most notable examples is the illustrated album of the Song of Songs by Ze’ev Raban that was published in 1923 (Pl. B).12 Raban’s style and manner in this work was fiercely criticised at the time as being out of date and following a lifeless trend that would appeal only to those who were not familiar with the vitality of contemporary artistic activity in Europe.13 Those who had sought a modern expression rejected not just the style but the whole romanticised sentimental picture of the country as the land of the Bible; an image associated with Orientalist painting, or, closer to the Hebrew reading public, with the imaginary description of the country in nineteenth-century biblical novels such as Mapu’s ahavat tziyon. The new artists of the 1920s refrained from biblical landscapes but they were no less responsive to the exotic scenery. Ancient, oriental and exotic Views of eretz yisrael were popular among artists of all groups and styles who participated in the major group exhibitions of the period as revealed by the catalogues— although these are no more than lists of titles.14 Views of the countryside or towns were numerous and constituted, on average, over a third of the exhibited paintings (see Appendix A). What is perhaps surprising and deserving of some explanation is the choice of views that the artists depicted. Many of these can be described in brief as ancient, oriental or exotic. In Jerusalem it was often a view inside the Old City that was depicted.

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Alternatively it was a panorama from a high distant perspective, looking towards the Old City and the Temple Mount. Seldom was a view in the Jewish neighbourhoods built since the 1860s outside the city walls the chosen subject, and views of the modern secular parts of Jerusalem were also rare.15 Other paintings depicted the surroundings of Jerusalem, and the hills around the city with or without Arab villages. Jewish artists in Palestine adhered, in motifs rather than in style, to some of the conventional images of Jerusalem as developed by Western artists since the nineteenth century.16 In the first instance it was the perception of Jerusalem as the Holy City, to which was added its oriental character and ‘exotic’ inhabitants—features that artists of the yishuv continued to include. In portraying other parts of the country they followed similar interests: the holiness or historic significance of the place primarily for Jews or its appeal as an oriental scene. Many paintings are dedicated to the Galilean towns of Safed and Tiberias, which apart from being picturesque were also two of the four holy cities for Jews in Palestine (the others are Jerusalem and Hebron) and where most Palestine Jews lived before the Zionist settlement. Safed, the centre of Jewish mysticism was particularly favoured and artists would travel there specifically to paint it. One such artist was the painter Yosef Zaritsky, a prominent artist in the yishuv since the 1920s.17 In 1924 he visited Safed at the recommendation of another artist, Menahem Shemi, who told him: ‘It is a fantastic town. You will bring extraordinary water-colours from there’. So he went, and after two days of travel ‘I arrived at Safed and could not detach myself from what I saw: I entered a house and the whole town was laid out in front of me’. Zaritsky stayed for four months and produced many watercolours (Fig. 8.1). But there was more in Safed than just a beauty spot, as Zaritsky emphasised when recounting this

Figure 8.1: Yosef Zaritsky, Safed, Jews Street, 1924; watercolour and pencil on paper, 51×57.5 cm. Private collection, Israel

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episode some forty years later. By chance he met in Safed acquaintances and showed them his paintings. They were astonished to see how, without any knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish history, he nonetheless had perceived that the Kabbalah was born there. ‘Kabbalah’, explains Zaritsky, ‘I did not know what it means’, and he adds: ‘I perceived the Kabbalah because I am a Jew, son of Jew. The catholic Matisse would not have perceived it’.18 It is implied then that there was something in the psyche of the Jew, no matter how remote from anything Jewish, that enabled him to grasp the unique ‘spirit’ of a place that holds a significant place in Jewish history. For Jewish artists in Palestine Safed was not just a beautiful place for the summer as was, say, Collioure on the French Mediterranean coast for Matisse.19 In reality, owing to its cool dry air Safed did attract visitors during the summer and gradually became a summer resort. The peculiar way in which the Jewish houses there were constructed—on terraces, one above the other—was considered visually attractive for tourists, and the Hasidic traditions and historic associations of Safed made it part of the typical itinerary in the Zionist tours of Palestine that were organised during the 1920s.20 The by-then established custom among modern artists in Europe to go and paint in remote picturesque villages during the summer (and sometimes for longer periods) no doubt had increased the appeal of Safed for the yishuv artists. Moreover, the fact that this mixed town of Jews and Arabs occupied a special place in Jewish religious tradition and had a Jewish population (and Jewish-owned hotels) made it more attractive to Jewish artists in Palestine, even to the most secular among them. Significantly, it was often the Jewish part of the town, its synagogues or the Orthodox Jewish inhabitants that were depicted in paintings.21 Tiberias, an ancient town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee was also popular among artists. It too had its Jewish element in the traditional tombs of important rabbis and its Jewish population. Other important towns without a Jewish connection, for example Nazareth or Acre, were rarely depicted. There are other less specific images of the Galilee showing roads, mountains, olive groves and the like (Fig. 8.2). Artists who lived in Haifa, most notably Menahem Shemi, depicted landscapes in this town on the slopes of mount Carmel. The old town of Jaffa with its port (Pl. J), its narrow tangled streets and the citrus groves around it were also very attractive for artists, as were Arab villages in the vicinity of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem (Pl. G).

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Figure 8.2: Reuven Rubin, The Road to Nazareth, 1925; 80.5×60 cm. Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation Absent views The nature of the landscapes mentioned here becomes even more intriguing in view of what is missing from this list, either partially or entirely. In focusing on scenery in Jerusalem and the Galilee most artists were far less interested in the southern part of the country, the desert, the Dead Sea or the Jordan valley.22 Turning their back on biblical themes, the artists of the 1920s also ignored areas traditionally associated with biblical sites in Judea or Samaria. The Mediterranean was seldom depicted and usually as part of a port view or a beach scene. Perhaps the most surprising absence of all is views of the

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Zionist enterprise. A handful of pictures that may be described as Zionist landscapes are the exception that verifies the rule: the numerous Jewish colonies and settlements that were founded by waves of Zionist immigrations since the late nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century made hardly any impression on artists.23 In particular, records of the large-scale and rapid settlement of the Valley of Jezreel that took place during the 1920s are few in number.24 This lack of interest was by no means an indication of lack of knowledge. The settlement in the Valley of Jezreel was a highly publicised enterprise described in many articles, stories and songs. The major public body that purchased land for Zionist settlement in Palestine was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the organisation operated in various channels to mobilise the yishuv for its cause. The 1926 Migdal David exhibition was jointly organised by the Artists’ Association and the JNF as part of the project of ‘the writer and the artist for the benefit of land redemption’, and the JNF received the proceeds of the sales. The exhibition was the largest in terms of number of participants (41) and included three architects. One of these was Richard Kauffman, who designed the town planning for Nahalal in the Valley of Jezreel and who exhibited plans for two other settlements in the Valley. It is pretty clear then that for artists supporting the national cause did not necessarily entail including the subject in their art. This fact was well observed at the time, and critics who appreciated the artists’ expression of the spirit of modern art were also disappointed by their indifference to national topics, particularly to ‘the life of new Hebrew labour’.25 In response to the first ohel exhibition in Tel Aviv held a short time earlier, another critic fiercely attacked artists for being ‘detached from life’. He was especially harsh towards Rubin, who has nothing to do with work and workers in this country. When observing his surroundings, almost a religious observation, everything in his art is recreation, or imagined visions of past and present. But we have not yet had a rest…we have not yet enjoyed our Sabbath! And who among us, the builders of Tiberias roads and the stonecutters of Jerusalem, would be persuaded by the landscapes of Tiberias or Jerusalem?26 Years later writers dismissed this criticism as absurd or as failing to grasp the artists’ ‘real’ intention that had to do with modernist language of art.27 They preferred instead to dwell on the role of these exhibitions in promoting modern art in the country and overlooked the dispute over content that this art generated at the time. The image of Tel Aviv A significant Zionist settlement and a source of continual pride was the newly founded Tel Aviv (1909) that has been dubbed the First Hebrew City. During the 1920s the fast developing Tel Aviv became centre of the economic and cultural life of the yishuv. Intense activity in the arts, including theatre and opera, music and modern dance, made the move of the visual art centre from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv rather predictable. As the residence of leading artists of the time and the site of several art exhibitions, especially the ohel exhibitions, Tel Aviv was soon identified with modernism in art. But the

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growing modern city, or indeed the city as an expression of modernity, is scarcely evident in the artistic repertoire of the 1920s.28 Among the few who depicted Tel Aviv was Rubin. His painting Houses in Tel Aviv (Pl. E) is often said to be the first painting of the city, owing no doubt to the ‘naïve’ look of a group of small new houses scattered on the dunes near the sea. It is an image that mirrors the myth of Tel Aviv as the city that had emerged from the sand, as the writer Shlomo Shva puts it: [Rubin] paints Tel Aviv thriftily: a settlement that defends itself facing the sand and the wide-open spaces. The painting strives to express the ‘spirit’ of the town that stands up confronting desert and sky, and to emphasize this quality Rubin uses non glossy paint of yellow and grey.29 Whatever one may find in this painting it is clearly not a depiction of the first houses of Tel Aviv. These had already been there for more than a decade with street pavements, trees and the monumental Herzliya school. When Rubin painted this picture, in 1923 or 1924, Tel Aviv and its adjacent neighbourhoods consisted of over a 1000 houses with a rapidly growing population that reached over 20,000.30 The subject of this painting was probably one of the new neighbourhoods that were built at the time to accommodate the influx of newcomers. One of these was called Nordia and consisted of 150 houses of one or two rooms that were built during a single session in 1922–23.3l Similar images of a few small houses scattered on the seashore are seen in the background of a few portraits that Rubin painted at the time, most notably his Self Portrait with Flower (Rubin Museum). Other portraits however show in the background a more accurate picture of the city with two- and three-storey houses as it was then.32 Rubin painted several more pictures of Tel Aviv during the 1920s and these share a composition with similar features: a view of a street that crosses the picture vertically in a sharp perspective with tiny passers-by on it. It is seen from a high angle, a window or a balcony, at times showing a bit of the inside, usually an arrangement of objects as still life.33 Some specific features such as the first water tower on Rothschild Boulevard (Fig. 8.3) or electricity pylons in another street demonstrate Rubin’s attention to details that symbolised the development of the city. The inclusion of such details led to Rubin being ascribed the status of ‘the painter of Tel Aviv and the documentator of the city in its formative years…from tents and few houses to buildings of two or three floors…the new city that had begun as a little neighbourhood and turned into a metropolis’.34 Once again this interpretation seems to reflect the well-established myth of Tel Aviv rather than a detailed study of Rubin’s paintings and their context. In

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Figure 8.3: Reuven Rubin, Rothschild Boulevard, 1924; 50×65 cm. Touro College collection, New York. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation his compositions of a street seen from above Rubin followed what was already a convention in portraying cities in modern art as seen in paintings by Impressionist painters such as Monet or Pissarro. Yet Rubin’s paintings of Tel Aviv were hardly an image of the fast growing modern city with its numerous building sites, a commercial centre, cinemas and cafés, schools, hospitals, gardens and factories as it was at the time. This aspect of Tel Aviv, it must be said, was considered fascinating from a Zionist perspective and even regarded as a tourist attraction. A Hebrew guidebook of 1925 suggests a day excursion in the town:

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In Tel Aviv you visit the experimental station, the Herzliya high school, the museum of country products. New industries in Tel Aviv: Delfiner’s silk industry, the factory of Levkovitz, the factory of silicate bricks, Ruthenberg’s electricity station.35 Tel Avivians, and Rubin among them, were often proud of their modern city’s growth and found it much more attractive than Jerusalem to the amazement of some tourists. In his memoirs of Palestine Edmond Fleg described his astonishment when Rubin proudly showed him the new construction, an entire quarter of modern architecture as well as the municipality, the abattoir and the telegraph posts. What Rubin was so exalted about, wrote Fleg, was ‘not their beauty but the fact that they were there’; he went on to explain: ‘I could not live in Jerusalem; Jerusalem is a museum; in order to live I need Tel Aviv. […] At Jerusalem I am in the home of the Arabs, the English, the non-Jews; At Tel Aviv I am in my own home’.36 In spite of these sentiments Rubin did not find Tel Aviv as interesting for his art as Jerusalem. In fact, his Tel Aviv paintings were a small minority in his output during the 1920s and later on disappeared altogether as a subject. Another of the prominent artists of the 1920s, Arieh Lubin, is credited with having depicted Tel Aviv, mainly in drawings and watercolours. His images often focus on individual houses or groups of houses, streets and new quarters as well as some of the new factories. But like many of his fellow artists he was attracted to Jaffa and to the Arab villages and fields in the environs of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, then, was not entirely ignored by artists of the 1920s but it was not a major subject either. With the exception of a few images of modern means of transportation the artists who called themselves Modernists were not concerned with images of modern life in the country. Their claim to the title was based primarily on stylistic inclinations towards certain modernist trends in Western art. Their subject matter, on the other hand, remained rather traditional.37 Exploring the landscape There have been only brief attempts to explain these preferences in subject matter while most writers have simply ignored the issue. Critic and curator Yigal Zalmona claimed that the need to express a primal experience ‘naturally led the artists of the 1920s to paint landscape rather than urban scenes’.38 Writer and chronicler of the period Shlomo Shva suggested that the artists experienced a certain emotional/aesthetic split: they embraced the new developments and building in the country but what attracted their eye was the old, the exotic and the oriental.39 From the paintings themselves it is hard to deduce that the artists sought to express a primary experience, especially when they ignored views that potentially could have conveyed such emotions, e.g. the wilderness or pioneers ‘making the desert bloom’. It is also not self-evident that urban and industrial developments would be considered aesthetically unattractive to the modern artist in Palestine. Modern and avant-garde movements in Europe and Russia embraced the machine aesthetic, from Cubism to Futurism and Constructivism. To understand modern

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art in Jewish Palestine we need to look beyond these assumptions. And in recognising that landscape is the work of the mind and its subject is already a symbolic form in its own right, the question posed by this thematic choice must go further than mere aesthetics. What is more, it would become rather impossible to deduce that ‘rootedness was both the motivation and the subject’ of these painters40 from images of pre-Zionist Palestine that were so distant, geographically and mentally, from where the artists really were. In facing these problems the role of the education system in shaping the attitude to the country’s landscape might be considered. The study of the geography of eretz yisrael in the yishuv, particularly during the Mandate period, was ideologically constructed towards the concept of the New Jew who is rooted in his land and country. Learning about nature, the settlement and the history of eretz yisrael under the subject moledet (lit. homeland or native land) in schools aimed at this goal, and the teaching material was often supplied by Zionist organisations such as the JNF.41 However, this education, which was significant for generations of native-born artists in later periods, was not relevant for the majority of artists discussed here who immigrated as adults during the 1920s. A parallel route of learning about the country which was open to them was the country walks and public lectures developed and organised by teachers and experts in eretz yisrael studies such as Ze’ev Vilnay.42 The idea behind these walks, like the formal education, was to promote emotional (but secular) attachment to the historic homeland ‘through the feet’ and to develop a shared knowledge of its geography and history, particularly biblical history.43 There is no evidence however that the artists of the 1920s took part in this activity. Their choice of landscapes indicates that they were not particularly attracted to many of the areas that were toured or studied in this way. Apparently there is no direct correlation between the artists’ personal identification with the Zionist ideal and their support and pride in its achievements, and the art they produced at the same time. It is thus necessary to look closely at some of the best examples of landscape paintings of the decade to appreciate the complex relations between ideas and pictures in this period. Oriental countryside One of the recurrent features in landscapes of the countryside of this period is represented in a painting by Yisrael Paldi titled Pastoral (Landscape at Ein Karem) and dated c.1928 (Pl. G). Paldi (Feldman) (1893–1979) was one of the prominent painters of the 1920s in Palestine since he settled there in 1921. Sadly many of his paintings were lost at the end of the decade.44 His role in the art of the 1920s was further marginalised due to the considerable change of direction in his art in later years. The title of this painting suggests that it depicts the Arab village near Jerusalem, Ein Karem, but this may be a later addition. In view of Paldi’s approach to the process of painting, this scenery is probably not a specific location. Paldi did not believe in ‘copying nature with photographic realism: to do so is to appeal too exclusively to the senses, to awaken no higher response than mere recognition’. Rather, his landscapes were meant to be ‘not impressions taken directly from nature, but the synthesis in the mind of the artist of many observations’.45 This picture, then, can be described as an image of a ‘generic’ Arab village and the term ‘pastoral’ should be understood as denoting rural tranquillity. A few typical features dominate the scene. The village is located in hilly landscape, either

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the surroundings of Jerusalem or the Galilee, far from the coastal plain where the Jewish settlement was concentrated at that time. The bare mountains may imply the notion of the country as an empty and desolate land common in Zionist rhetoric. This background also suggests that the small village is isolated and remote and that even the road which leads to the village ends there. The village itself consists of half a dozen stone buildings condensed, almost piled on each other with a minaret of the mosque seen in its midst. The houses are rich in round domes, a feature that Paldi particularly favoured (see Fig. 10.3). In Pastoral the domes also echo the roundness of the hills and mountains of the background, creating a pictorial harmony of forms. This aesthetic feature was particularly appreciated by architects such as Alexander Baerwald who aspired to create a genuine local Jewish style in architecture. In his view this could be achieved by learning from Arab buildings that ‘are in harmony with the land and the site…and are fully integrated with the landscape of the country’.46 Olive trees surround the village, another typical image of Mediterranean landscapes. Growing olives was indeed common in Arab agriculture but it was by no means the only product. Yet in this and in other paintings by Paldi the olive trees, like the particular architecture, stand as a sign for a rural oriental landscape specifically associated with local Arabs. To complement the set of attributes a bearded old Arab man is seen riding a donkey towards the village while a few loaded donkeys are heading there in front of him. An Arab man with a fleet of donkeys was an image repeated several times in Paldi’s paintings and it also appeared in other painters’ work of that period. The Arab rider clearly identifies the scene as ‘oriental’ and adds a human dimension and scale to the picture. Being seen moving towards the village, his presumed home, he leaves the viewer outside. The point of view chosen here is high, above the road and behind the Arab man. If the road suggests access to the charming village, the Jewish painter/viewer does not take it. He remains afar, in a safe distance, away from any particular detail of daily life inside the village that might spoil the idyllic setting. This position distinctly indicates the boundaries between the realm of the viewer, who remains outside, and that of the subject of his gaze. The high angle and the figure of the Arab who is riding away from the viewer add a sense of control and security: one may enjoy the picturesque scenery from a distance without seeing the reality of the people who actually live there or getting close to a possible confrontation. This formula is recurrent in many paintings of this period, by Paldi, Rubin, Gutman and others: the viewer is an outsider; the Arab is on the road; the Arab is seen from the back. A House in an Orange Grove of 1927 by Nahum Gutman (Pl. I) offers a different image of the oriental landscape. Gutman (1898–1980) grew up in Palestine, studied in Bezalel in his teens and became one of the prominent figures in the art of the 1920s. As a writer and illustrator, Gutman is famous for his depictions of the ‘little Tel Aviv’ of his childhood. These, however, were produced from memory in the 1930s onwards whereas during the 1920s, like his fellow artists, Gutman preferred the exotic Arab landscapes which surrounded Tel Aviv. After five years in Europe Gutman returned to Palestine in late 1925 and immediately joined the group exhibitions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, espousing in style, subject and spirit the current trends there. In 1926 and 1927 he produced the paintings that are regarded as his most significant contribution to the trend of the 1920s. Gutman painted numerous views of the orange groves of Jaffa, often occupied by women. Orange groves became a recurrent theme in Jewish Israeli culture

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and an Israeli emblem47 but long before that, in nineteenth-century Palestine, citriculture was already the most profitable and fastest growing activity, chiefly near the port town of Jaffa. Hundreds of gardens and groves, the majority of them owned by Arabs, were a common sight surrounding the town.48 The sight of groves, which was part of Gutman’s childhood environment, continued in the 1920s to be admired and even recommended to tourists as ‘by far the city’s most delightful attraction’.49 Unlike Paldi’s Pastoral (Pl. G) Gutman’s painting is full of vegetation and greenery, spreading from the foreground to the horizon, and from right to left as if continuing beyond the picture frame. The grove consists of a variety of trees, mainly citrus but also cypress, palm tree and others. The different hues of green that dominate the picture receive their counterpoint in the reds of the house and the yellowish road. The road suggests depth, motion and extension towards other places, running horizontally from the left corner of the picture before turning sharply to the left and then curving to the right towards the house and beyond. The road also defines the boundaries of the grove and the location of the viewer on its other side. The location of a wide road at the bottom of the picture creates the impression that the grove is very close, but the tiny figures of women in the middle and the men in the background suggest quite the opposite. Similarly, the high angle, which is noticed in the foreground and emphasises the spectator’s position above the scenery, changes in the middle so that the upper part of the painting is seen from a lower viewpoint. This double vision adds to the non-realistic, ‘naïve’ and dreamy effect of the painting. At the same time it suggests that while the spectator may feel close to the grove he/she is rather distant. The men at the house who stand as if on guard imply that this private paradise is not as accessible as one first thought. Gutman’s painting shows a plentiful and fertile image of the land, but as in Paldi the viewer is an outsider and the local Arabs are the inhabitants of this land. Such composition in which the spectator is usually an outsider was not uncommon in European landscape tradition. As Cosgrove observed: The experience of the insider, the landscape as subject, and the collective life within it are all implicitly denied’. Subsequently, ‘when humans are represented in landscape paintings they are …distant and scarcely noticeable figures’.50 The tiny figures in this and in many other paintings of the period (see Fig. 8.2) verify this formula, emphasising the position of the Palestinian Arab as part of the landscape, not unlike the vegetation, the animals and the buildings. Ancient cities At Jaffa Port, c.1926 (Pl. J), is a painting by native-born Sionah (Tziona) Tagger, one of the few women artists in the yishuv. Tagger (1900–88) was born in Jaffa to a Sephardi family who later were among the founders of Tel Aviv. She started her art education in Palestine, attending Bezalel in the early 1920s before going to Paris to study under the French painter André Lhote. Upon her return in 1925 Tagger joined the Modernist group and she is often cited among its prominent members. Her notable paintings of the mid 1920s include portraits and a number of landscapes. In the latter she depicts a particular site or detail, usually from a very high angle, in bold angular forms. Jaffa was frequently portrayed by artists from nearby Tel Aviv. The town’s small fishing port, which for many newcomers who arrived by sea was their first contact with Palestine, is the subject of this painting. It shows Jaffa as seen from the sea, paying homage perhaps to the first

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impression of the town one would have when arriving by boat. The newcomers would not, of course, have had such a high viewpoint, as they would be seated in the little boats that regularly carried to shore both people and goods from ships anchored outside the shallow harbour. The muscular boatmen whose job it was to ferry in such things were the subject of several paintings by Paldi. In the painting the port is empty, and except for miniature indistinct figures on a roof at the left-hand corner shows no human activity. All the hustle and noisy animation that one would expect in a Mediterranean port is gone, perhaps for the night, leaving the place vacant like a theatre setting. The empty boats sway on the wavy waters against the solid buildings that block horizontally the upper part of the picture. No road leads the eye into town, just an arched alley here and a side lane there. Unlike Paldi and Gutman, Tagger depicts the buildings with special attention to the particulars; the different balconies, the various shapes of windows and doors, the roof corner that needs repair: this is a real place. Yet, it conveys a mood of tranquillity and charm similar to that which is found in the paintings of Paldi and Gutman. A major interest for Tagger here was probably the configuration of forms and colour: the almond-shaped boats against the cubic-shaped houses; the patches of red against the dominant grey-blue; a sense of motion, even a potential storm in the water, against the stability of the buildings; a sense of order composed of rather chaotic details. As the site of her formal research Tagger has chosen Jaffa, rather than Tel Aviv, in accordance with the current tendency among her fellow artists. Jerusalem, 1925, by Reuven Rubin (Pl. F) is one of a number of panoramic views of old Jerusalem that he started to paint in the mid 1920s and continued to produce throughout his life. In some earlier examples Rubin painted a section of the city wall along with a winding road climbing up (with an Arab and a donkey!). But now he turned to the wide vista that shows Jerusalem’s most identifiable feature: the city walls and the Temple Mount. When comparing his Tel Aviv paintings (Fig. 8.3) with the Jerusalem landscapes Carmela Rubin, director of Rubin Museum, maintains that Rubin documents Tel Aviv from within, focusing on daily life in this secular city. On the other hand, Jerusalem is captured on his canvases from a distance…remote, elevated, enclosed within its walls. […] It is as though Rubin felt one could not break up the entirety of Jerusalem. Nothing less than a wide vista would do justice to what he felt when painting the eternal city.51 Rubin might have well had such deep sentiments towards Jerusalem. But as much as his Tel Aviv views corresponded to an existing model of city images, so were the Jerusalem landscapes rooted in established traditions. Jerusalem was the most recurrent theme of landscape paintings by artists of all groups and affiliations in the 1920s (see Appendix A). Many artists did choose to represent a street or a quarter of Jerusalem, and portraying daily life in the city was not unusual, especially among artists who lived there. For Rubin however, who lived in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem was ‘a museum’, as he himself put it. In other words Jerusalem was an object of the past, worthy of veneration and preservation rather than a lively contemporary place in which to live. It was thus entirely appropriate to depict the city in its paramount roles: as ancient and holy.

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Like many before him, Rubin found that one of the best angles to provide this image is from the Mount of Olives to the east. Alternatively, a view from the south allows the Temple Mount to be clearly visible while the rest of the city is pushed into the background or outside the picture frame. In Jerusalem the viewpoint is from the south, perhaps the slopes of Mount Zion or the Valley of Hinnom, capturing the Temple Mount on the left and the Mount of Olives in the foreground. The naïve, almost childlike manner that characterised Rubin’s painting at the time adds to the unreal metaphysical quality of the city. At the same time, based on sharp observation and a keen attention to details, the painting fairly accurately represents the city despite some deliberate distortions of the traditional perspective. This may be the fruits of Rubin’s stay in Jerusalem in the summer of 1925 at a hospice in the German Colony, not far from the point of view for this painting.52 On the left side of the picture, in the middle ground, we see the Temple Mount and its most important shrines: the big octagonal Dome of the Rock painted in tones of blue with its black lead-tiled dome (as it was then); the Al-Aqsa mosque with its black dome on the right; and between them, in front of two cypress trees, the Western Wall. The small houses to the left of the Wall belong to the Moghrabi quarter, from which a straight road leads to the city wall and Dung Gate, seen clearly in the picture. Few Arab figures are seen on the roads: one is leading a camel at the left corner, the second follows two donkeys up the white wide road; another, perhaps a woman, is riding a donkey inside the city walls. When compared to other visual evidence such as maps and photographs, the Temple Mount in the painting seems to be an accurate depiction of the area and its buildings. At the same time, the combination of the two mosques and the Wall at the centre follows a familiar formula in Jewish folk art. In itself this formula is based on an enduring visual tradition in Western art (Christian and Jewish) according to which the Dome of the Rock (Mosque of Omar, built 692 CE), one of the most important and holy sites of Islam, was identified with the biblical Temple. The centrality of the Temple Mount in Christian images of Jerusalem goes back to the period of the Crusades when the Mosque of Omar, now being converted, became one of the most important churches in Jerusalem and one of the symbols of the city.53 Being the emblem of the Order of the Templars the image of the Mosque as Temple was further spread in Europe and helped retain the significance of the Temple Mount in the Christian world even after the city reverted to Muslim rule. In Jewish art since the Renaissance the typical image of Jerusalem is of a walled city viewed from above and in its centre the Mosque of Omar as a dominant feature, at times specifically titled bet hamikdash (the Temple) (see Pl. A).54 Similarly, the Jewish tradition of naming Al-Aqsa midrash shlomo (Solomon’s house of study) is also related to Christian tradition from the time of the Crusades. In the nineteenth century the combined image of the two mosques and the Western Wall in the middle became the most common motif in representations of Jerusalem in Jewish popular art. These were usually based on the illustrated Hebrew map by Rabbi Joseph Schwarz, a lithograph printed in 1837 (Fig. 4.5). This picture was widely copied by artisans in Palestine and the Jewish world throughout the nineteenth century and was still known and used well into the twentieth century. Comparing Rubin’s painting to Schwarz’s image reveals some striking similarities, not only in the setting of the holy places on the Temple Mount but also in placing the Mount of Olives in the background, with the buildings on its central peak at the centre of the

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picture. The specific detail of the Western Wall, albeit small, points to the Jewish presence, of past and future, in this symbolic image of the city The large space devoted to the Mount of Olives at the centre of the picture underlines the Jewish point of view with reference to biblical messianic expectations in the vision of Zechariah (Zechariah 14:4), and later traditions saying that the prophet Elija will blow his horn there when the Messiah comes. Owing to the belief that the resurrection of the dead would begin there the Jews of Jerusalem for several hundred years preferred to be buried on the Mount of Olives.55 The white patches seen in the picture covering two hills of the Mount represent the tombstones in this large graveyard. By placing this burial ground at the centre of the picture Rubin suggests that even without having magnificent monuments in the city Jews have always focused their yearnings on Jerusalem as the locus of their glorious past in the days of the Temple and, most significantly, as the site of their future redemption. Rubin has also recorded some of the nineteenth-century churches and monasteries that were built on the Mount and the village of A-Tour with its minaret at the centre.56 This religious manifestation is balanced by the more mundane presence of the Arab village of Silwan (that also had a Yemenite Jewish population) on the other side of the valley of Kedron, seen partly on the right-hand side of the picture. The Arab figures walking across the scene add an aspect of a real-life daily routine to this otherwise symbolic image. At the same time they may be a representation of the ancient inhabitants of the city as Palestinian Arabs were often regarded as the unchanged descendants of the biblical residents of the Holy Land. In this painting Rubin follows existing traditions, both visual, written and oral, that have elevated Jerusalem to its mythical status and made it such an emblem for the three monotheistic religions. Jerusalem is indeed a kind of museum in this painting, not a contemporary living city. It retains its quality as an idea and a symbolic vision that has been the object of continuous longing. The city in his painting owes its appearance to the history of its representation no less than to Rubin’s meticulous observations. It is well understood, then, why Rubin’s ideal Jerusalem could not have appealed to those in his public who expected the new art to represent ‘real’ life in the country, as one of his critics complained. For others, the poet H.N.Bialik no doubt among them, Rubin successfully reclaimed the image of the city that for so long had belonged mainly to non-Jews and made it Jewish. The Zionist happy valley View of the Hills of Ramat Gan, 1924 by Arieh Lubin (Pl. H), is one of the iconic images in the art of the 1920s and in Israeli art in general. Somewhat paradoxically the painting has gained this status by being both uncommon—one of the few paintings depicting a Zionist landscape—and emblematical in its idyllic character. Lubin (1897–1980), who grew up in Chicago, USA where he also studied art, settled in Tel Aviv in 1923 and subsequently participated in the major group exhibitions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He experimented briefly with abstract painting and followed a moderate Cubist style in his still life paintings and in his drawings of buildings and streets of Tel Aviv. View of the Hills of Ramat Gan is his best-known painting. Today Ramat Gan is known as a city of high-rise office buildings bordering with Tel Aviv. It began in 1921 as an agricultural co-operative settlement, and it retained much of

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its agricultural character throughout the 1920s while gradually developing into an urban and industrial town.57 Lubin painted a small settlement, perhaps smaller than it really was, of little white houses with red roofs in a valley in front of a ridge of hills, surrounded by green groves and cultivated fields in vivid brown and green. It may not be a depiction of Ramat Gan at all and identification with the place is uncertain.58 Whatever its real location this is a landscape in a fertile, beautiful land; a stage set for the Zionist ideal of ‘conquering the wasteland’, a glimpse of which can be seen perhaps in the foreground, in the yellow dunes and the dead tree on the right surrounded by wild plants. Opposite the dead tree a living red-green tree stands on the left, its colours corresponding to the fields that spread out in front of it. Behind it, almost trapped between the two areas, are a few small olive trees, a sole indication of the region in which the scene is set. Unlike the paintings of Paldi and Gutman (Pls G and I) this is not particularly an oriental scenery and it can be located almost anywhere. In fact, similar idyllic features of the countryside can be found in French painting of the same period.59 Unlike works by Rubin and Tagger (Pls F and J) there is no impression of the painting being a depiction of a specific place; rather, it is an emblem of the perfect rural landscape rooted in the tradition of landscape imagery. One such image is an English emblem of 1612 described by Simon Schama as a ‘poetic arcadia’ and ‘an inventory of the standard features of the humanist happy valley’ which meant to demonstrate ‘that the rustic life was to be valued as a moral corrective to the ills of court and city’.60 One of the leading trends of Zionism, commonly known as Labour Zionism, promoted similar views, seeing the return to nature and to the soil as a cure for the ‘abnormality’ of urban life and a step towards the redemption of the nation. This direct reconnection with nature would be achieved through physical labour and, primarily, through agricultural work.61 Ideas that spread across Europe and Russia during the nineteenth century, usually in response to the Industrial Revolution, have merged with national sentiments into a high regard for what was seen as authenticity and the moral virtues of rural life and rural communities. Within the Jewish national movement the ‘return’ to the land marked an attempt to redeem Jews from their status as ‘a people without land’ in the diaspora and from being city dwellers living by commerce and ‘non-productive’ occupations. While Lubin’s painting does not show actual labour or any worker it idealises the new agricultural landscape of eretz yisrael to an extent that it almost looks like a propaganda poster. Indeed, such a picture was often used in publications of the JNF of the 1930s and 1940s. Like paintings by Paldi and Gutman this, too, is a kind of generic landscape, admired from afar and leaving the viewer, probably a city person, remote. It is this distance that helps define the objects we see as signs, as representing an idea rather than depicting a real place. Paraphrasing Schama, it may be regarded as an inventory of the standard features of the Zionist happy valley. If landscape usually offers the spectator a sense of owning the view, this particular landscape offered its viewers also the sense of owning the land, giving them ‘the illusion of affinity with the insider’s world’.62 This world of a Zionist agricultural settlement is depicted in its perfect splendour: a timeless rustic tranquillity combined with an orderly rational (geometrical) modern process of cultivating the soil.

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An ideal homeland Among the key features that the pictures discussed here have in common are those that assert the positioning of the spectator as an outsider, as an observer rather than a participant. The land is depicted as ‘a view’, often a ‘typical’ picturesque view that can be appreciated aesthetically from a distance by artists and public alike. While this approach is deeply rooted in Western traditions of landscape painting it is quite striking that no ‘representatives’ of the viewer—the Jewish Zionist settlers—can be seen in these paintings. Even Lubin’s Zionist pastoral is entirely vacant. As for their subject matter, the yishuv artists preferred a domesticated and cultivated landscape: nothing awesome, wild or threatening, nothing particularly primordial or biblical (except perhaps for Jerusalem, a trend that follows a well-established Judeo-Christian artistic tradition), and a very limited record of new developments brought about by Zionism. If we are to understand landscape as providing some visible shape to the nation, its myths and its homeland, then the art of the 1920s presents us with no easy solutions. It must be emphasised though that visual representations of Zionist work in Palestine were not absent from view. They were fairly abundant in photographic documentation that was often commissioned by, and representative of, the views of the Zionist settlement bodies.63 Given the strong ideological inclination that is so evident in the photographs, interpreting the landscape paintings of the 1920s in light of the Zionist enterprise becomes even more complicated. The generally established view that landscapes, through their symbolic content, have a role in the formation of national and cultural identity or are the direct result of nationalist feelings should be carefully considered. Furthermore, when linking landscape and the nation it is not entirely obvious, as Schama pointed out, that attitudes to nature are universal, or that landscape myths are equally embraced by all cultures.64 Following this line, the argument put forward by Gurevitch and Aran may offer insight into the matter and may help interpret the role of these paintings in the wider cultural context. They argue that in Judaism there is an aversion towards the sanctifying perception of place which is dealt with by turning the place into a site of revelation. Consequently eretz yisrael was perceived primarily as an idea rather than a real place. The idea always takes precedence over the place itself and thus can never be identified with the place. The Zionist revolution was an attempt to redefine in Jewish consciousness the meaning of ‘being in the place’ in contrast to the sense of displacement in the diaspora. All the same, Zionist immigrants of the Second and Third aliyot continued to refer to the country as an idea rather than as a reality. The pioneers elevated the country to which they ascended (= immigrated) to the degree of the idea.65 It is within this tradition that we can explain the repertoire of emblematic, idyllic and often non-specific images of the country as produced by Jewish artists in Palestine during the 1920s. There was also a specific artistic context in which these paintings were made: the well-established tradition of landscape in Western art. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially since the rise of French Impressionism and subsequent art movements, landscape was closely associated with modern art and new methods of painting. For artists who wanted to promote modern art, taking this route was an obvious choice. In itself, the import of European values, tastes and styles to be employed in

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depicting a very different terrain was not unique to artists in Palestine. In its early years landscape painting in North America, for instance, was deeply influenced by the artistic conventions of the Old World.66 Borrowing models for the representation of nature may have surprising results however when their reality-base is of an utterly different natural world and they are transported unchanged. Such is the case of the recurrent theme of autumn in modern Hebrew poetry. Based on a European repertory and models the theme consists of elements that are typical of European autumn but which hardly exist in the season as experienced in Israel. As Ziva Ben-Porat demonstrated, the superimposition of foreign experience on artistic representations was made possible by ignoring the dominant elements in the local reality and adopting the European concepts.67 Landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s may not have trodden this path quite so far but it was nonetheless engaged in stylistic borrowing from European models. This borrowing was influential in formal terms as well as in the choice of subject and the resulting meaning.68 In particular artists looked to French art, which was then considered almost synonymous with ‘modern art’ and which had had great impact throughout European and American art. However artists in Palestine did not just follow any trend in French art that they came across through books and art journals or during visits to Paris. Rather, they were selective and preferred certain French painting that thrived after the First World War. Landscapes were numerous in French art at that time in both the big public exhibitions (the Salons) and the Parisian established art galleries, and enjoyed critical claim and high prices.69 The success of this genre went hand in hand with the rejection of pre-war experimental art, attacking particularly Cubism, and the rise in cultural and political conservatism. In a climate in which French tradition was fiercely debated landscape painting was asserted as a manifestation of French rootedness and links to the soil.70 No doubt the moderate modern style of this trend appealed to artists in the yishuv because it allowed its followers to endow their painting with a modern ‘look’ without dramatically challenging the conventional relations between art and the outside reality. No less important, this conservative modernism in French art came with inherent national values, and whether knowingly or not this must have contributed to its potential influence. This French influence on the Modernists of the 1920s will be discussed in some detail later. But it is already apparent that through these preferred styles and iconography Jewish artists in Palestine were able to create a desired image of a fertile, beautiful and peaceful country, an idyllic ancient Arcadia that was easily declared as their old/new homeland. Their paintings convey a sense of tranquil pastoral bliss in a thinly inhabited land where no conflicts or changes brought about by external events would disrupt the simple harmony of existence.71 The first viewers of these paintings must have been aware of the gap between the rosy picture they offered and the reality of life in Palestine; some reservations certainly are reflected in contemporary reviews, as quoted earlier. For many however, and certainly for future generations, these idealised landscapes presented a country seen as it was then, or as it must have been at some unidentified time in the past. This imagined new homeland was much easier to love than the real one. The writer, Zionist leader and third president of Israel Zalman Shazar expressed this sentiment when he said (referring to Gutman’s paintings):

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His love to the landscape of eretz yisrael helped us, who came from different parts of Russia, fall in love once more with the homeland and its landscape. He helped making the landscape of eretz yisrael likeable, this discouraging baking hot landscape and its white glaring heat.72 Gutman, Rubin, Paldi and other Jewish artists who settled in Palestine and worked there during the 1920s were committed personally and culturally to the Zionist idea.73 But in their art they were not tuned to futuristic visions or to present-day reality. They preferred instead to evoke the past, through Arcadian landscapes of the pre-Zionist, pre-modern era. They portrayed Palestine as a kind of memory, a place to long for and to love from a distance. The physical distance of the viewer from the observed landscapes and the conceptual distance of the idea of the place from its reality converged in the painting of the 1920s. It was precisely these qualities that helped this art to retain its special place in the history of Israeli art as epitomising the ‘good old days’ of the Zionist settlement in Palestine.

9 Orientalism, Primitivism and folklore Looking at the country’s ‘types’ The aura of rebels, innovators and the standard-bearers of modern art in Palestine that has accompanied the history of the Modernists has been often linked to an idealised image of the yishuv and its pioneer ethos: ‘It was…a community that had a pioneering spirit, the naïveté of youth, and a flair of renewal—traits that would soon permeate its newly emergent art’.1 Following this description one would have expected to see art that was concerned with pioneers, youth and processes of renewal and construction. But as became clear in the previous chapter, this was not the case, and the majority of artists of the 1920s paid little attention to the newly founded Kibbutzim or to the fast-growing town of Tel Aviv. They preferred instead to paint ancient towns such as Jaffa, Safed and Old Jerusalem or Arab villages and their surroundings. Likewise, in portraying people they often chose the ‘old’ inhabitants of the country, namely the Arabs, and almost ignored the Jewish pioneers—a fact that did not escape some of the critics. Moreover, in their attraction to oriental figures the Modernists were not as far from the approach of Bezalel. The portrayal of the country’s ethnic ‘types’ in Bezalel paralleled attempts to create an art that would emanate from the place itself and would be inspired by the surrounding views and the local inhabitants. In reality, these inhabitants were almost exclusively Jewish, mainly Yemenites, Persian, Bucharan and other ‘exotic’ Jews of Jerusalem (Figs 4.13 and 4.14). This attitude towards oriental Jews had much in common with the then fairly established Westerner view of the Orient as manifested throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in numerous paintings, photographs and texts. The received notion of the Orient as ancient and primitive, and of its people as preserving the biblical way of life, also conformed in some respects to the Zionist aspiration of returning to the land of the Bible and claiming the right to that land on the basis of the ancient past. The fascination with oriental Jews has continued among artists who came to Palestine during the 1920s and Rubin in particular painted several images of Bucharan and Yemenite figures. Unlike the Bezalel model that focused on facial features, other attributes were added to the oriental types: architectural elements in the background, fruits, plants or animals. They were depicted in a family setting or engaged in some humble occupation (see below Fig. 9.8, also Pls N and P). The major departure from the Bezalel tradition was in the depiction of Arabs who were shown individually (see below, Figs 9.3, 9.4 and 9.7) or in groups (Fig. 10.1, Pl. L), or integrated in the scenery (Fig. 8.2, Pls F, G, I). This was a popular theme and visitors to major group exhibitions of the period in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv could have seen numerous examples of Arab figures depicted alongside pictures of Yemenites and other oriental Jews. When put together these images could have constituted up to a quarter of the paintings in a single exhibition (see Appendix B).2 The prominent role of these ‘types’ in the art of the 1920s requires a closer look at the

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function and meaning of these figures within the cultural discourse in the yishuv. In view of the aspiration to create art that was authentic, indigenous and Jewish, the role of these ‘types’ should be looked at also from a wider perspective of attitudes to the ‘other’ in Western culture. Orientalism The common explanation for the popularity of the ‘oriental’ theme during this period is explained in terms of Orientalism. Such was the premise of a large-scale exhibition entitled To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel held in 1998 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and covering the period from the founding of Bezalel to the 1990s. The introduction to the catalogue clearly states that ‘the Israeli conception of the East is a particular instance of the ideology known as Orientalism, i.e., the Western description of the East as “other”, as a world…against which the West’s own identity is defined’.3 Given that the majority of the artists discussed in the present study came from Europe their encounter with the East was indeed often accompanied by the enchanting vision of the exotic ‘other’. For some artists the Arab was a role model for the New Jew—an idealised image of belonging—similar to numerous works of Hebrew fiction where the Arab represented in his rootedness and strong physique a kind of antithesis to the image of the feeble Jew of the diaspora. But the way in which the Palestinian Arab functioned as a model for the New Jew ‘was not a case of non-mediated contacts with a neighbouring culture’, argues Itamar Even-Zohar, but rather ‘a case of reality being filtered through a familiar model’.4 While certain romantic norms and well-known ‘oriental’ stereotypes were part of this model, what actually happened was an act of translating the new reality—of Jews encountering the Arabs in Palestine—back into an old cultural model, one which was familiar in the diaspora among the gentiles. The Bedouin and fellahin represented ‘everything alien to the Jew: courage, natural nobility, loyalty, roots’ and at the same time ‘primitiveness and cultural backwardness’. This was a rather familiar Eastern European model of the Ukrainian farmer and the Cossack that had been ‘transferred to new carriers’.5 This model can be identified in the art of the 1920s. Paintings by Gutman, Paldi, Shemi and others show the Arab as a ‘Noble Savage’—a simple, strong and sensual individual who is attached to the soil and is truly integrated with his environment. Another image which was also current in Orientalist representations appears in paintings by Litvinovsky, Rubin and others: the Arab sitting indolently in a cafe, smoking and playing backgammon or dominos and doing nothing constructive to lift himself from his backward situation. Other images show Arabs in the distance, travelling on the road on the back of a donkey or leading a camel. In these pictures the Arab is represented in a conventional role of a peasant or shepherd, while women are shown veiled or carrying jars on their heads. Explaining this repertoire of images solely in terms of the artist coming to Palestine from Europe and encountering a new environment is problematic.6 After all, immigration has been a constant feature in the making of Israeli society and culture. It was not until the 1960s that a few native-born artists started to leave their mark on the Israeli art scene. Until then artists who came from Eastern or central Europe dominated all artistic activity. But it was primarily in the 1920s that the oriental people of

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Palestine, the Jews and Arabs, were such a prevailing theme. Furthermore, artists who were born in Palestine to Sephardi families did not differ from the newcomers in depicting the Orient during that period, most notably Moshe Castel.7 The recurrence of oriental figures in the art of the 1920s should be viewed through another perspective, as another case of ‘reality being filtered through a familiar model’. This model was to be found in visual art. If nineteenth-century Orientalist painting had influenced to some extent the art of Bezalel, this was not the case of the Modernists of the 1920s even though Orientalism might have been their wider mode of perception. In their case the influence came from a similar trend, generally referred to as ‘primitivism’, which has been associated with developments in twentieth-century art in the West. Primitivism In the context of modern art, Primitivism is explained as ‘the attraction to groups of people who were outside Western society, as seen through the distorting lens of Western construction of “the primitive”’. As a set of ideas that were generated in the later part of the nineteenth century, Primitivism, it must be noted, ‘describes a Western event and does not imply any direct dialogue between the West and its “Others”’.8 The notion of the primitive ‘other’ is embedded in the Romantic assumption that there was once an integrated, cohesive social totality which can be located historically and is defined as a critical opposite to the present.9 There are obvious similarities between Primitivism and Orientalism: both were closely connected to colonialism and to the categorisation of nonEuropeans as exotic and inferior, living in societies that have been isolated and unchanged. In both cases the ‘other’ has been allowed to speak only through the voice of Western inter-preters. Orientalist art has thus been discussed in the context of Primitivism and modern art.10 As far as visual art is concerned there is however a fundamental difference: unlike Primitivism, Orientalist painting did not challenge any artistic convention. Quite the reverse, it was a prevailing academic Western style, and its illusionist representation of human ‘racial’ and social types conformed to nineteenthcentury interests in scientific classification. Primitivism, on the other hand, as a means by which artists could present a mirror to modernity, allowed them to challenge and reinvigorate Western society ‘by confronting it with its deepest memories’. A work of art could be defined as Primitivist, and thus modern, not necessarily through subject matter and images of ‘primitive’ types but rather through the dynamic relation between subject and style.11 In applying these definitions to the art produced in Jewish Palestine we see a clear stylistic attempt by the Modernists to challenge traditional conventions of representation. It was especially evident in Rubin’s early works in Palestine, in the flatness of form and space and the non-realistic proportions between figures or between figures and background. The positions of figures and body parts are awkward and a bold outline determines the forms in some of the paintings. In addition, the paint itself is roughly handled, at times leaving areas of the canvas exposed as if unfinished. The overall ‘look’ of Rubin’s painting was of primitiveness and innocence. Gradually, around the mid 1920s, his style changed and the paintings became more detailed and colourful, probably under the influence of the French painter Henri Rousseau.12 The so-called ‘primitive

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within’ Rousseau was ‘discovered’ by modern artists in Paris in the early twentieth century in the same way that tribal art from Africa was ‘discovered’. The converging of a new style in art with the discovery of a ‘new’ and primitive territory was an idea that had already been aspired to by Rubin who by the end of the 1920s was being called the ‘Palestine’s Gauguin’. If by depicting exotic local ‘types’ the artists of the 1920s resembled the Orientalism of Bezalel, then their primitivist style was an altogether different statement. The rejection of the visual experience of the outside world as a guide for artistic representation was a clear demonstration of the artists’ modernism. Paldi emphasised this point in his public address at the opening of the first ohel exhibition, declaring that ‘observation and art are two separate things’. Moreover, ‘the creator who frees himself from nature is purer’. Since art for Paldi was no longer obliged to copy nature, its aim should be simplicity, and therefore the ‘modern picture must be simple’. Achieving this quality was possible only by focusing on the essence. ‘Primitivism’ he said, ‘is the ability to express a powerful impression in the shortest of ways’.13 The focus on simplicity and primitivism as the target of modern art was an idea shared by Paldi’s fellow artists. The choice of a primitivist style also helped to accentuate the ‘simple people’ who were often the subject of these paintings. The close link of subject and style underpinned the ideals that artists have sought through those ‘types’: the return to the roots, to a long lost past, and to the truth of ancient existence which was once their own. By adopting the primitivist styles artists of the 1920s could pronounce simultaneously two important goals: claiming to be modern and at the same time primitive; new as well as primordial. This dual trait paved the way to the widely accepted interpretation of their art as successful in being derived from the local scene while belonging at the same time to Western culture at large. Inspiration of folk culture The appearance of oriental figures was considered during the 1920s almost a precondition to fulfil the demand for a genuine Hebrew creative art in eretz yisrael. The poet Yehuda Karni unequivocally expressed this idea in 1922 in an essay-manifesto entitled ‘The Artists in the Homeland’. Calling on Jewish artists who had recently immigrated to Palestine to get rid of their European culture Karni urged them to draw on their new surroundings for their subjects. Pointing first to the theatre Karni fiercely objects to having a theatre that performs essentially a European repertoire but which played in Hebrew. This will result in having art in Hebrew but not Hebrew art. He then advises ‘the talented artist—painter, musician or writer who came to this country out of the desire to help in its building’ to free themselves of all those impressions and sounds in which they were submerged during the diaspora and to direct their body and soul towards the new world that is being formed in Palestine. He then adds specific suggestions: For the future Hebrew art, the wild cry that you hear in an Arab wedding is more important than a proper European melody, and the dances of our road workers [are more important] than the most modern dances borrowed from other sources. And among the Sephardim one can learn something and also from the Yemenites one can learn something. And the Hasidim

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of Lubavitch and Stolin and the like in Jerusalem—their hymns and dances have changed from those in the diaspora and they too have some novelty in them.14 Karni makes clear that to create a new Hebrew culture the artist should first empty himself of his European heritage in order to start afresh in the East. For inspiration he may rely on folk culture of the local and traditional people: the Arab, the Yemenites and oriental Jews and even the Ashkenazi Jews of the Old yishuv. In literary circles Karni’s proposal was met with criticism.15 But in the artistic circles of the 1920s there was a resonance to these ideas, most notably in the work of Baruch Agadati (1895–1976). A dancer and choreographer who in later years became filmmaker and painter, Agadati’s work of the 1920s is known today through photographs, paintings and essays written about his performances (Figs 9.1 and 9.2). From these documents one can recognise the main folklore sources for his dances: the East European Jewish dance and Palestinian oriental dances. In his solo dances Agadati performed the movements and expressions of these ‘types’ mentioned by Karni: the Arab, the Yemenite and the Hasidic Jew. According to a critic of the time Agadati never lowered his dance ‘to the level of mere illustration’. As a mature artist Agadati never seeks to depict or portray an event or ‘type’ taken from reality…. Rather he wishes to give expression to his own feelings, his ‘idea’ of the Hasidic soul, or the Yemenite, or Arabic, as he observed it…. The Hasidic experience in Russia or the Yemenite in Eretz Yisrael always serve as material for his own inner processes….16 The critic’s emphasis on ‘high’ individual art of self expression as distinct from the raw folklore material originated perhaps from the fact that Agadati’s dances seem to have remained rather close to his sources, at least in their titles—Hasidic Ecstasy, Yemenite Ecstasy, Arab Jaffa, Shepherd’s Dance—and the costumes he used.

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Figure 9.1: Pinhas Litvinovsky, Yemenite Ecstasy, early 1920s; watercolour on paper, 52×28.5 cm. Private collection, Israel

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Figure 9.2: Pinhas Litvinovsky, Agadati performing a Hassidic Dance, early 1920s; charcoal on paper. Private collection, Israel Borrowing from folk art was a known practice among modernist art movements in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Being part of a wider movement of

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cultural primitivism it was a search for what was believed to be an authentic ‘unspoiled’ expression.17 At the same time, and as mentioned earlier in this book, the interest in folk culture was closely related to Romantic nationalism and to the idea, promoted by the German philosopher Herder, that the national soul, or the cultural pattern, of a people expresses itself best in that people’s folk poetry. Subsequently, the collection and study of folklore items was an attempt ‘not only to reconstruct the past, but also to revive it—to make it the model for the development of…nations’.18 This tendency was strongly developed in Russia and was apparent in the search for national art there.19 This was also an influential trend in Jewish circles in Russia and a typical example was the foundation in St Petersburg in 1908 of the society of Jewish folk music, the major members of which later immigrated to Palestine.20 Agadati was a solo ballet dancer in Odessa when he started searching for the origins of Jewish dance, no doubt under the influence of this movement. After immigrating to Palestine in 1919 he became fascinated by the Yemenite dance. Through it, and alongside Arab dance, he aspired to create an ‘original Hebrew dance’.21 During his European tours he befriended the Russian-Parisian avant-garde artists and designers Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov who were associated with folk-art influences. They prepared drawings for his costumes and dances.22 Agadati’s attraction to folklore led to wider projects beyond his solo performances. He planned to mount a full narrative ballet, which was based on a Yemenite tale about demons abducting a bride on her wedding day. Collaboration with the painter Paldi resulted in sketches for the set and costumes but the project failed to materialise.23 Another narrative ballet on the biblical theme of Abraham and the three Angels, for which Rubin designed the costumes, was staged in 1925. A different aspect of Agadati’s involvement in popular culture was his attempts to create folk dances. As principal organiser of the Purim celebrations that took place in Tel Aviv during the 1920s and early 1930s he created dances for mass street dancing based on the already popular hora dance (originally a Romanian folk dance).24 Agadati’s ambition to create ‘Hebrew dance’ and his stage performances were highly regarded by writers, critics and artists of the time. He was mentioned alongside painters and poets at the vanguard of the new art that presented a clear opposition to Bezalel.25 Articles were written about his performances and a book dedicated entirely to his work was published in 1925. This was a lavish illustrated book published by the literary journal hedim in a limited edition with contributions by critics and artists.26 Such an elegant volume dedicated to a single artist was a very unusual publishing event in the yishuv not only then but for many years to come. The only comparable publication was Boris Schatz’s autobiography that was published in Jerusalem the same year. Agadati was closely involved with painters, among them Rubin and Litvinovsky, who contributed designs for his projects and also painted him in his dancing roles. Representing Agadati performing a Yemenite or Hasidic dance (Figs 9.1 and 9.2) was one of several Jewish themes that Pinhas Litvinovsky (1894–1985) painted during the 1920s. These included various images of the Orthodox Jewish family, an interior of a synagogue, Jews in Safed and the like in water-colour and oil. The paintings vary stylistically but some echo the paintings of Marc Chagall in their fantasy atmosphere, the humour and the naïve-like depiction of figures and space. During the 1920s and early 1930s Litvinovsky also painted numerous images of Arabs—holding a flower, with a

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donkey, at a café or even dancing. On stylistic grounds it seems that Litvinovsky painted both Jewish and Arab themes concurrently although he exhibited during the 1920s mostly the Jewish figures and portraits.27 Rubin, too, painted Agadati in a Hasidic dance in a manner reminiscent of Chagall (Fig. 9.5). Rubin’s paintings of Hasidic Jews had a particular significance within his own art but other artists also shared in the appeal of the subject. We have seen already that views of Safed were a favoured theme in the watercolours of Yosef Zaritsky in the 1920s (Fig. 8.1). Nahum Gutman, too, painted the Orthodox Jews in Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem.28 Along with the Arab figures, the Sephardim and the Yemenite Jews, who due to their traditional lifestyles were considered part of the Old yishuv, represented the people of the country who were considered to have continued the biblical tradition either through origin or faith. These types were also found in Hebrew fiction by writers who were born in Palestine, most notably Yehuda Burla and Yitzhak Shami of Sephardi origin and Yaakov Hurgin of the Ashkenazi Old yishuv. Being deeply rooted in the country and having a direct relationship with Middle Eastern culture they described the familiar world of Arabs and Sephardi Jews. Consequently, the native-born writers perceived eretz yisrael not as ‘the beloved promised land’, argues Gershon Shaked, but rather simply as the country of their birth and thus they have not exoticised the inhabitants as have the immigrant writers.29 For the modern painters the local inhabitants—Arabs, oriental Jews and the Ashkenazi religious Jews—were a legitimate subject matter in the spirit of Karni’s manifesto. The canonical status of these artists for Israeli art ensured the acceptance of these ‘exotic’ figures without too many problems. One question mark that may still remain however lies with the artists’ claim for ‘newness’ that was based, in fact, on pictures of the old—both inhabitants and landscapes—while rejecting any manifestations of the new. This seeming contradiction is resolved through the perspective of Primitivism and folk culture inspiration. This paradigm provided the Modernists of the 1920s with particular artistic models that have shaped some of the best-known images made during this period. The ideal Arab It was with the representation of the Palestinian Arabs that the artists of the 1920s took a different path from the Orientalist attitude current in Bezalel.

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Pl. A Bezalel carpet depicting the Menorah on a background of the Jerusalem skyline, c. 1908; 84×230 cm.

Pl. B Ze’ev Raban, a page from The Song of Solomon (shir ha-shirim), 1923; 13.5×19.6 cm.

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Pl. C Reuven Rubin, Jesus and the Jew (The Encounter), 1919–21; 70×95 cm.

Pl. D Reuven Rubin, First Fruits, 1923; 188×408 cm.

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Pl. E Reuven Rubin, Houses in Tel Aviv, c. 1923; 55×75.5 cm.

Pl. F Reuven Rubin, Jerusalem, 1925; 80×99 cm.

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Pl. G Yisrael Paldi, Pastoral (Landscape at Ein Karem), c. 1928; 66.5×81 cm.

Pl. H Arieh Lubin, View of the Hills of Ramat Gan, 1924; 61×79 cm.

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Pl. I Nahum Gutman, A House in an Orange Grove, 1927; 36×58 cm.

Pl. J Sionah Tagger, At Jaffa Port, c. 1926; 52×56 cm.

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Pl. K Reuven Rubin, Sabbath in Safed, 1923–24; 73.5×91.5 cm.

Pl. L Nahum Gutman, Siesta, 1926; 93.5×107.5 cm.

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Pl. M Reuven Rubin, Dancers of Meron, 1926; 160×128 cm.

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Pl. N Reuven Rubin, Girl with Pomegranates, 1923–24; 84×74 cm.

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Pl. O Nahum Gutman, Woman in a Pool, 1930; 67×54.5 cm.

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Pl. P Reuven Rubin, Family of Safed, 1928–29; 90×72 cm. Among the best-known pictures of Arabs during the period are those by Nahum Gutman, who related his interest in the local Arabs to his days in Bezalel. Gutman studied in Bezalel from 1913 to 1917, where he was deeply impressed by his teacher Abel Pann. According to his memoirs, Pann’s lively and colourful depictions of Bucharan Jews and other Jerusalem ‘types’ called for liberation from ‘the conventions of Jewish painting’, which he summed up as pictures of ‘ruins of ancient buildings, dark alleys and blind Jewish beggars’. Pann broadened his students’ horizons and introduced them to modern French art and also imparted to them his particular vision of the Bible which, according to Gutman, was neither sentimental nor exotic.30 The majority of the biblical themes in Bezalel art were based on conventional treatment of the Orient and the use of classicist figures deriving from Western models, but Gutman prefers to emphasise that it was the local Arabs, their movements and clothing that embodied for him and his fellow students the biblical figures.31 Little has remained of Gutman’s Bezalel works but his paintings of the 1920s, like those of other Modernists, do not portray the Arabs in biblical roles, or not

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explicitly anyway. Arab figures were represented as they were, so to speak, i.e. as local characters within their environment, albeit in an idealised manner. One of the most established views concerning the image of the Arab, as summarised by Yigal Zalmona, is that he was ‘the epitome of a way of life rooted in the local soil and its past… a source of inspiration for the national and existential renewal, and antidote of instinct and physicality to the alienated detached diaspora Jew’.32 The monumental young Arab man in Gutman’s painting The Goatherd (Fig. 9.3) is deemed the supreme embodiment of these characteristics, described as ‘a visual metaphor for corporeality, earthiness, stability and permanence’, whose world is far afield from ‘the flying figures of Chagall’, and his ‘long utterly un-Jewish step’ is ‘a monument to non-spirituality!’.33 This is a rather clear example of how some of the simple Zionist dichotomies—eretz yisrael and the diaspora, Jews and non-Jews, spirituality and corporeality—have been retained and applied in interpreting works of art. It is, however, not at all obvious that this version reflects Gutman’s views at the time of painting or those of his milieu. Not only does this interpretation assume that artists subscribed to this line of Zionist ideology, but also that their work was a straightforward depiction of it. The concept of ideology transformed into visual art is by itself problematic, as pointed out earlier. What is more, although the notion of cultural opposition is a powerful explicatory hypothesis there are many phenomena in the process of the emergence of Hebrew culture in Palestine, as Even-Zohar noted, which cannot be explained by it.34 Interpreting the paintings of the 1920s solely by applying these binary concepts certainly proves wanting. That the Jewish world was far from being rejected and that Chagall influenced many works is clear from the pictorial evidence, an idea which will be developed further later in this chapter. Analysis of images of Arab men and women in Gutman’s paintings may reveal further meanings beyond the mere contrast of the stereotypical exilic Jew. Two of Gutman’s best-known paintings The Goatherd (Fig. 9.3) and Bearer of Sheaves (Fig. 9.4) were painted during the first fifteen months following his return to Palestine. After his studies in Bezalel and his voluntary service as a soldier in the Jewish Battalion of the British Army in Palestine Gutman went to Europe in 1920.35 For over five years he stayed in Europe, first in Vienna, then Berlin and finally in Paris studying and working as an illustrator. He joined the art scene of the yishuv when as a participant in the first ohel exhibition held in January 1926 he showed engraved illustrations for the Book of Job that he had made in Berlin in 1923. Three months later, at the fifth annual exhibition of the Artists’ Association in Jerusalem, he exhibited the same prints and added a few paintings and sculptures. In April of the following year (1927), at the sixth annual exhibition, he exhibited The Goatherd (with a different title) and Bearer of Sheaves alongside other paintings. In May of that year he showed them again at the second ohel exhibition in Tel Aviv. That the paintings were exhibited together from the outset, and were of almost exactly the same size, suggests that they may have also

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Figure 9.3: Nahum Gutman, The Goatherd, 1926; 72×54 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photograph: David Harris

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Figure 9.4: Nahum Gutman, Bearer of Sheaves, 1926; 72×53.5 cm. Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photograph: David Harris been conceived together and might have been painted within a short space of time of each other. The pictures also share a similar composition: each shows a monumental figure in profile stepping forward and dressed in blue, white and red. The two pictures were most likely created as a pair (pendants) in a manner familiar in European art for allegories, paintings of the seasons or landscapes. The position of the man in a right profile and that of the woman in a left profile, as if turning towards each other, also echoes a traditional format in portraiture of couples known since the Renaissance. The choice of the agricultural work depicted in the pictures—pasture and wheat growing—cannot be incidental either. They allude to the two major groups of Palestinian Arabs, the fellahin whose livelihood was based mainly on crops, and the Bedouin whose main occupation was pasturing. The traditional rivalry between them was a common theme in the ‘Arab tales’ of the First aliya writer Moshe Smilansky (pseudonym, hawaja Musa). This was of

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course an ancient rivalry that goes back to biblical stories, most notably that of Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a shepherd). Gutman’s paintings of a man and woman facing each other imply not the rivalry but rather a possible union of the two ancient rural occupations. Like an ancient caryatid or the Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility Demeter, the Bearer of Sheaves is upright, taking a small step forward, holding the sheaf on her head with her hands. Behind her stands a large elongated water jar, alluding to a traditional role of women in Arab villages but also evoking all those biblical romances that occur at the well. In his memoirs Gutman tells how seeing Arab women carry various loads on their heads or draw water from the well had strengthened his association of the Arabs with biblical figures.36 This experience was later translated through filters of artistic models that Gutman came to know during his European years. Visiting museums in Paris as he did, Gutman must have seen paintings of women with jars or otherwise associated with water. Naked bathers and personifications of the spring as the ‘source of life’ conveying the notion of woman as a ‘universal mother’ were popular themes in nineteenth-century French art.37 The subject of women at the spring or as personifying the spring re-emerged in the 1920s with some notable examples by Picasso in the neoclassical style. Images of women with jars or sheaves were also popular in Orientalist paintings.38 In this painting Gutman combined the wheat and the jar, two symbols that associate woman with nature—soil and water—and with food and fertility. The Arab peasant woman was the ideal personification of this archetypal figure, since she was already perceived as ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’ and thus was close to the primordial way of life that artists had venerated. Here a stereotypical image of the Orient is merged with a stereotypical image of woman as perpetuated in Western art. The jar also makes an effective link to the companion picture of The Goatherd who holds a small empty jar, perhaps for milk, in his right hand. In his left hand he holds a wooden club with a knob-shaped end—a typical shepherd’s weapon.39 A few Arab buildings on the seashore are seen in the background, perhaps indicating a part of Jaffa or the village Sumail north of Jaffa that was often painted by artists during the 1920s. But it was not documentary precision that was important to Gutman. This is particularly evident from the shepherd’s vivid costume. The typical outfit of Palestinian shepherds was a simple knee-length tunic tied with a leather belt. In contrast, wide trousers that narrow at the bottom (as in this painting) were characteristic of city dwellers and were a sign of wealth; they were not known in villages before the end of the 1920s.40 Gutman, who was also a writer and who wrote stories about the early days of Tel Aviv, ascribes similar clothing of wide blue trousers, red belt and silk top to various town people, among them construction workers and an elegant barber.41 Gutman paid little attention to the social and economic differences between Palestinian Arabs as reflected in their clothing. Male Arabs in most of his paintings are similarly dressed in wide blue trousers, a red girdle and a white or yellow waistcoat (Pl. L), being primarily a ‘sign’: an Arab is an Arab whatever his occupation or class or any other identity. As an archetype of an Arab the Goatherd epitomises at the same time a model Hebrew man. It is not only because of his heroic physique but also, no less significantly, because he is a shepherd. After all, the principal image of the Israelites, and above all the Patriarchs and the important leaders, was that of shepherds. Invented in biblical stories this image became established in Western culture, especially in the nineteenth-century

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Romantic views that linked the origin of Israel and monotheism with the simple and ‘pure’ life of the Bedouin.42 Undoubtedly, the shepherd as a signifier of independence, austerity and loyalty was an attractive model for Jewish settlers in Palestine. Some, like the Second aliya members of the watchmen association hashomer, not only adopted a Bedouin outfit but also aspired to become ‘light and swift as the Bedouin, and like them to dwell in tents and to live on pasturing’.43 The Arab/Hebrew/biblical shepherd in Gutman’s painting is the expression of an ideal model that was familiar in the yishuv and was rooted in a long-established cultural tradition. Similarly, his female companion echoes the biblical figure of Ruth the Moabite who was gleaning after the harvest. Ruth was popular in nineteenth-century biblical art and was often depicted as an oriental woman.44 She was also popular in Bezalel and in other Zionist imagery. Equally, ethnographic accounts of the life of Palestinian fellahin were often accompanied by biblical references. Whether written by Christian or Jewish writers this practice adhered to the received idea that the Arabs of Palestine were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or at least an authentic continuation of the biblical ancestors’ way of life. For instance, as a way of describing the gleaning Arab women at the harvest writers could simply mention the story of Ruth and Boaz.45 In this pair of emblematic paintings Gutman’s ambition to make serious art with an ideological mission is evident. Newly arrived on an art scene of the yishuv that had changed dramatically since he left the country, Gutman aspired to art that would surpass any anecdotal or illustrative treatment of his environment. He wanted images that would align with the monumental style he had found in the works of Rubin, Paldi and others. To do so he had to draw not only on basic Zionist ideals but also on other cultural and artistic models. One such source is noticeable in another Gutman painting entitled Siesta (Pl. L). The painting shows an Arab couple resting in the field during the harvest. The woman, who wears a blue dress with a red kerchief on her head, is sitting on the ground and the man, dressed in blue trousers, white shirt, red belt and yellow jacket, lies on the ground in front of her. Both have full and round bodies that echo the hilly landscape and the heaps of straw in the background. In its subject, composition and figures the painting is very close to Picasso’s Sleeping Peasants of 1919, formerly also known as La Sieste and Moissoneurs (harvesters).46 It shows a couple sleeping amid yellow heaps of hay. The man dressed in blue trousers and white shirt is sitting facing the viewer, his head resting on his arm. The woman reclines on her back, one leg lifted, her breast bared, with her arm under her head, which is dropped backwards on a red kerchief, her mouth open. This is a parallel ‘mirror’ arrangement to the figures in Gutman’s painting where the man is sleeping on his back with his mouth open and the woman sits straight, her back to the viewer. Picasso also made drawings of a reverse composition showing the woman sitting and the man lying on his back. In this painting, one of the earliest of Picasso’s ‘colossal’ style, the figures are modelled in large heavy volumes with special emphasis on giant limbs. This style had influenced several artists in Palestine of the 1920s, most notably Gutman and Menahem Shemi (Fig. 10.1).47 Here, however, we see not only a stylistic influence but the borrowing of theme and content as well. Picasso’s peasants look very much as if they have fallen asleep after lovemaking. He thus associates (and Gutman after him) the physical work of tilling the soil with sexual activity in a romanticised equation of country life with happiness and healthy sexuality. Although the erotic motif of Picasso is far less explicit in Gutman’s painting the overall similarity between the two

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cannot be coincidental. Gutman probably knew the painting and drawings from reproductions that were published during the 1920s in Europe and some had probably arrived in Palestine.48 Gutman’s Arabs are not merely the embodiment of a nativist ideal in contrast to the stereotypical Jewish rootlessness. They reflect the admiration for country life—not as it really was for Jews or for Arabs in Palestine at the time but rather as life in an imagined pre-modern oriental Arcadia where the inhabitants lived peacefully alongside each other and in harmony with their natural environment. By portraying these ideal Arabs, Gutman could offer his town-dweller Jewish public a picture of eretz yisrael that could look authentic enough without losing its dreamy image of the country of yore as they knew it through numerous literary and artistic representations. The dancing Jew Among the artists who painted Agadati in his character dances was Reuven Rubin—see for example his painting Hasidic Ecstasy of 1924, known also as Agadati Dancing (Fig. 9.5). It shows a man from the back hovering over the landscape in the manner of a Chagall work. Despite the Agadati reference the painting can hardly be regarded as a portrait of the dancer. It does not show him on an empty stage, on which he usually performed, but against a background of mountains and an oriental town, probably Safed. The dancer’s features, costume and gestures, in particular his upside-down head, closely resemble an earlier image of the same theme shown in the woodcut entitled The Dancers of Meron (the Hebrew title reads: lag ba-omer be-Meron), part of The God Seekers series that Rubin published in late 1923 (Fig. 7.4). It is quite possible that Agadati’s dance performances had given Rubin the incentive and inspiration for this painting but Rubin’s interest in the Orthodox Jews of Safed and Jerusalem was already manifest in several paintings he made during his first year in Palestine.49 After his settlement there in 1923 Rubin gradually abandoned the Christian themes that had occupied him in previous years and in his quest for a spiritual model he exchanged the figure of Jesus with those of Hasidic Jews, while images of sorrow and suffering were replaced by depictions of joy and piety.

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Figure 9.5: Reuven Rubin, Agadati Dancing (Hasidic Ecstasy), 1924; 78.5×73 cm. Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation The dancer in Agadati Dancing occupies the full length of the picture and his arms and legs are spread to the sides. This young bearded man with ear-locks wears a fur hat and a dark, long coat over a white tunic; his talit (praying shawl) is flying on both sides of his body. His footwear, a kind of slipper, has flown from his feet as he dances. This outfit is closer to pictures of Hasidim in other paintings by Rubin than to most of Agadati’s costumes. The background also marks a departure from Agadati who had based his dances on explorations of Jewish folk dance in the diaspora. The dancing Hasid in Rubin’s painting, and indeed all other Hasidim in his paintings, is explicitly associated with eretz yisrael and its landscape, whether Safed or Jerusalem. The dance itself, with the head and hands raised upwards, together with the background of Safed suggest that this is a dance of a mystical and ecstatic nature; not an art form but a dance that is part of a spiritual and devout experience. Like the woodcut The Dancers of Meron and other paintings showing Hasidim holding the Torah scroll or ritual objects, this painting

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concentrates on an expression of joyful religious feelings. Coupling Judaism with exaltation rather than with agony is a significant shift from Rubin’s pre-Palestine paintings that represented Jews often as old, hunched and tired. At the same time Rubin’s pictures also challenge the negative image of the Old yishuv that recurs in Zionist rhetoric and portrays the Orthodox Jews of Palestine as passive, backward, unproductive and living on charity. Although Rubin’s Hasidic Jews are not seen in any productive occupation their religious devotion and mystic spirituality is presented as beautiful and valuable. This is apparent in his most famous painting of the subject, Dancers of Meron (Pl. M). This large painting was among the centrepieces in Rubin’s 1927 one-man exhibition and it was mentioned as the most important exhibit.50 Its subject deserves some consideration. Rubin, like other painters in the yishuv, was attracted to the ancient picturesque town of Safed and had frequently visited there. An important centre of Kabbalah and the second of the four holy cities for Jews in eretz yisrael, Safed had been since the eighteenth century the chosen destination of immigration by East-European Hasidic Jews. Prior to the First World War Jews constituted half of the town’s population.51 The mystics of Safed developed specific local rituals for celebrating Jewish festivals. A particular custom was Welcoming the Sabbath as a Bride, enacted by men dressed in white who would go out before sunset on Friday evenings.52 That Rubin must have been aware of this ceremony is seen in his painting Sabbath in Safed (Pl. K) showing a Hasid dressed in whitish robe standing in the landscape facing the mountain. The festivity that takes place at the nearby mount Meron has also traditionally been associated with the Jews of Safed. Local customs that go back to the Middle Ages involved pilgrimage on various festivals to the sites at mount Meron believed to be the graves of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai and his son. A popular celebration has developed there on the festival of lag ba-omer during which prayers, entreaties and wailing are mixed with ecstatic devotional dances.53 Rubin’s painting of men embraced in a dance with a Torah scroll set against a hilly landscape may be related to this festival.54 It is not known whether Rubin actually attended the festival during his visits to Safed but he was unlikely to have done so in 1926 prior to painting this picture since he was still in Paris at the time of the festival.55 The popular festivity of lag ba-omer in Meron not only attracted many religious Jews from all around the country but also fascinated the secular public on the yishuv. Articles describing the celebrations or analysing their origins and meaning were published regularly in the press and dignitaries paid visits to the place.56 One of these articles describes the festivity as a ‘holy bacchanal’. It also recounts how the Ashkenazi Hasidim and the Sephardim practised their entreaties and dances in separate groups. Eventually after a long ecstatic dance the groups united and danced together.57 This moment is echoed in Rubin’s painting that shows oriental and Ashkenazi Jews embraced in their dance. This idealised image of unity was far apart from the reality of division and animosity which existed in reality between the Jewish ethnic communities in Safed.58 Other details in the picture suggest that there is more to it than a depiction of the lag ba-omer celebration. On the road in the distance we see another Hasid riding a donkey and reading a book. Perhaps he is about to join the nine dancing men and complete the minyan (quorum of ten adult male Jews) or he alludes to the popular belief that the Messiah will come riding on a donkey.59 On the right, in the middle ground of the

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painting, a group of women are sitting down and in their midst a woman is nursing a baby. The analogy in the shape of the two groups on the canvas also highlights their fundamental differences, reflecting deeply rooted conventions as to the role of man and woman in Jewish society: the men are engaged with learning and with spiritual contact with the Divine by being close in body and mind to the Torah; the women’s responsibility is to feed and nurture their offspring. The men are monumental and upright and are individualised by their features and skin colour; the women are small, identical and condensed, seated on the ground, among flowers and trees, united with nature. The goat seen on the left-hand side with her udders full offers a further analogy between woman, food and the natural world. The goat is a recurrent motif in Rubin’s work usually in relation to Arabs, Yemenite Jews or women. An overt connection between the nourishing function of the animal and the human female is seen in such paintings as Family of Safed of 1928–29 (Pl. P; discussed further below). It has been suggested that in Dancers of Meron and in some other paintings of that time Rubin was influenced by the Moldavian neo-Byzantine art he had seen during his youth in his native Romania.60 Several compositional and stylistic similarities to the Moldavian murals can support such interpretation. However, a convincing link between Rubin’s painting in Palestine as a mature artist and his presumed experience of Christian art in his late childhood in Romania has yet to be established. What needs to be looked at, beyond the stylistic resemblance, is the choice of subject matter and the meaning of this painting to both the artist and his public at the time of its making in Palestine of the mid 1920s. It has been common to discuss the cultural life of the pre-state period by focusing on the one hand on the endeavour to establish a new national culture, or ‘Hebrew culture’ as it was called, as part of the pioneering ethos, and on the other hand on the conflicts between different groups over the issue of modernism in artistic expression.61 In this paradigm the inclination is to present the cultural debates in clear-cut oppositions between homogeneous camps. Even-Zohar describes it as ‘a pseudo-historical idealization’ that confers on the Zionist immigration ‘a homogeneity capable of creating “a new Hebrew people” according to the tenets of a specific ideology’. Whereas in reality, he claims, ‘side by side with the penetration of new constituents, there remained a remarkable mass of “old culture”’.62 This ‘old culture’ had a continuous presence in the yishuv, not only in the private memories of its members’ own past but also as a current material of various public artistic productions. When looking at a wider spectrum of the cultural life of the yishuv it becomes fairly clear that representations of Orthodox Jews and Hasidic culture were not as exceptional as one would imagine given the accepted Zionist historiography. There are some interesting cases of this in the field of Hebrew theatre. The play hadibuk, the famous tale of Jewish exorcism in a diaspora shtetl, was produced in Palestine several times during the 1920s and even caused a public controversy with its highly popular production of 1926.63 Written by the playwright and folklorist S.An-Sky (S.A.Rapoport) and translated from Yiddish into Hebrew by H.N.Bialik, the play is particularly famous for the production by ha-bima, the Russian-Hebrew theatre that first visited Palestine in 1928 (and which would later become Israel’s national theatre). Six years earlier the play had been performed in Palestine in two separate versions, one of them by a group of pioneers, members of ha-shomer ha-tzair movement and founders of a Kibbutz.64 Artists regularly contributed to theatre productions as set and costume

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designers—Litvinovsky was commissioned to design the ha-dibuk production of 1926. Another source of Hasidic and Jewish folk tales as material for theatrical productions were the stories of Y.L.Peretz. The first production of the ohel workers’ theatre in Tel Aviv in 1926 was based on his stories and had the title nishfei Peretz (Peretz soirées). The production later travelled throughout the country. Earlier, in 1920, one of Peretz’s stories, The Kabbalists, had been performed as the first production of the first professional Hebrew theatre in Palestine.65 Another of his stories had been performed by the Kibbutz pioneers’ group.66 Hebrew fiction of the time was not deficient in stories about traditional Jewish life; most prominently were the writings of S.Y.Agnon. In 1925, after his return to Palestine, Agnon’s stories were much in demand and were published in various journals and newspapers, among them the first issue of the workers’ newspaper davar.61 Agnon’s collection of stories drawn from Jewish life in the Polish diaspora in the form of folk tales (polin—sipurei agadot) was published in Tel Aviv in 1925 and received much praise. It was received with the acknowledgement that a national revival requires first of all a return to itself to find ‘the forgotten paths to its sources. The folk tale is one of those ancient springs of the national soul’.68 The role of the folk tale in the national revival was more overtly proclaimed in sefer ha-agada, a compilation of legends and tales from various rabbinic sources edited and published by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua H.Rawnitzky in 1908–11. This three-volume collection was intended to be not only the classic folk literature in Hebrew but also the source for a renewed folk inspiration.69 It is not surprising that Bialik who had written a few stories himself in the genre of legend had chosen to interpret Rubin’s paintings along these lines. In his introduction to Rubin’s exhibition of 1927, Bialik compares Rubin to both Chagall and Agnon, and associates his paintings with the long literary tradition of legends and midrash about eretz yisrael. It is in this tradition of the past, Bialik stated, that the key to future creative art in Jewish Palestine would be found. The rele-vance of past folk culture to future artistic creativity is underscored by Rubin’s style with its primitivistic overtones that help to interpret his non-realistic representations as an authentic primeval expression: This is how things are seen by a child, the folk tale, and the artist’ stated Bialik.70 In painting Dancers of Meron (Pl. M) Rubin’s intentions were probably in tune with Bialik’s interpretation: a conscious attempt to create art that was modern and authentic, and at the same time that would evoke tradition of a popular spiritual experience such as the Hasidic dance. Interest in Hasidism and other trends of Jewish mysticism was fairly widespread in the Zionist yishuv at least among the cultural elite. The weekly literary journal ketuvim regularly published sayings by Hasidic rabbis. These texts were usually printed in Rashi script giving them a distinct appearance and an aura of ancient sources, which the readers of this secular cultural organ were still capable of reading.71 The editor Eliezer Steinman published there a series of articles on messianism.72 Books on Hasidism and messianism were published in Hebrew during the 1920s, and already in the first decade of the twentieth century series of studies and debates about Hasidism were published in the Zionist Hebrew press in the diaspora reflecting a growing interest by secular Jewish writers, poets and scholars in this religious social phenomenon.73 The idea that Jewish folk culture was a valid source for modern Hebrew culture in Palestine, as proposed by Karni and Bialik, could also function in the opposite direction: interpreting Hasidic folk culture as being directly linked to the national movement and to its ideological tenets. For

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instance it was claimed that the Hasidic nigun (tune) had at its inception an oriental influence of eretz yisrael and that it is ‘carried with exultation by the youngsters of Israel who immigrate to eretz yisrael to eradicate its barrenness and to build it up’. Likewise the Hasidic dance was proudly credited as the continuation of the ancient dance in the Bible.74 Presenting Hasidic music and dance not as a product of a religious movement that had emerged in Eastern Europe but as a tradition that is rooted in the ancient, prediaspora origin of the nation marks another attempt to harness Jewish religious practices and folklore to Zionist ideals. As a modern national movement Zionism has challenged the authority of religion and the traditional way of life resulting in clashes and conflicts with Orthodox leadership and tradition on questions of culture and education.75 Highly problematic was the relation of Zionism to the messianic idea. Opposite views were expressed by leaders, thinkers and writers on this matter, some claiming that Zionism was, and others that it was not, a messianic movement.76 In the yishuv the appetite for religious traditions and symbolism, as we have seen, was far from being marginal among the intelligentsia and the general public alike. Even the forefront of Socialist Zionism, the pioneers of the Second and Third aliyot and their political and cultural leadership, expressed a distinct sense of religiosity frequently using messianic and mystical terms.77 In Hebrew poetry in Palestine of the 1920s the presence of messianic themes was so strong that, as literary critic Hannan Hever puts it, no one could totally escape ‘the messianic obsession’.78 It is hard to judge to what extent Rubin was aware of or involved with these ideas. Neither his private correspondence nor his later memoirs reveal his thoughts on the subject. However, we know that he knew the leading poet of this trend, Uri Zvi Greenberg, as he painted his portrait and thus might have absorbed some of his views.79 Greenberg, who was very interested in art and made drawings himself also, expressed firm views on art and aesthetics.80 His belief that the artistic expression of the time must be rough and primordial was surely shared by Rubin who adopted a rough ‘primitive’ style during his first period in Palestine. Rubin must have had some interest in messianism and particularly in the seventeenth-century ‘false Messiah’ Shabbetai Zvi when he prepared in 1926 the costumes and set for the theatre production Shabbetai Zvi. This was a twentieth-century work by the Polish playwright Jerzy Zulawski, translated into Hebrew in 1924 and a year later was planned for performance by The eretz yisraeli Theatre. Following the crisis and split in the group, Shabbetai Zvi was eventually performed in the autumn of 1926 by the short-lived group The Artistic Theatre. ‘It is no coincidence that Jewish art in recent years is attracted to the problems of messianism and redemption’ wrote a reviewer of the play, declaring that ‘the figure of the Messiah is a heroic figure in Jewish history.’ Although critical of the playwright’s interpretation of Shabbetai Zvi the reviewer nonetheless states that any judgement of the staging of this story would naturally be viewed ‘through the perspective of our own messianic project in this country’, and that the historic personality of Shabbetai Zvi ‘would be dear to us in each step of fulfilling our project in the country’.81 Another play on Shabbetai Zvi was written in Hebrew for the ohel theatre by Natan Bistritzky, a former member of the hashomer ha-tzair kibbutz that first performed ha-dibuk.82 Rubin painted his Hasidic dancers against a backdrop of a fairly extensive intellectual and artistic interest in the yishuv in Jewish religious heritage in the diaspora, from historic messianism to popular mysticism and various manifestations of folklore. Apparently the

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Zionist concept of ‘negation of exile’ (shlilat ha-galut), its negative attitude towards Jewish existence in the diaspora as an abnormality to be cured by the ‘return’ of the Jews to their ancient homeland, and its subsequent repertoire of symbols concerning the creation of a new national culture, was not fully accepted by the Zionist immigrants who kept an open relationship with their ‘old culture’. Undoubtedly some of the appeal of these Jewish traditions was imbued with nostalgia. But more importantly they have been regarded, if in a selective manner, as a valuable source of cultural renewal and a possible link with the past. Rubin’s Hasidic dancers may represent such a notion of continuity through time and space. In his picture Dancers of Meron (Pl. M) there is no rupture between the generations, and the young and old are united in their faith. The embrace of oriental and Ashkenazi Jews evokes the idea of the Ingathering of the Exiles, a messianic concept that had been adopted by Zionism. The ancient holy town of Safed in the background and the allusion

Figure 9.6: Reuven Rubin, Succoth in Jerusalem, 1926; 162×114 cm. Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

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to a centuries-old tradition of a local festival further emphasises the idea that the return to the land of the forefathers is not exactly a new beginning. Along with the Arab peasants that featured frequently in the art of the 1920s these Jews of the Old yishuv also represented the country’s authentic population (Fig. 9.6). In these pictures the Jews, like the Arabs, have no contact with the Zionist settlers and present no threat—physical or ideological—to the Zionist enterprise. And like the country’s landscape they belong to the idyllic even mythical realm that the artists of the 1920s so carefully staged. Their rootedness in the place is exemplary. But unlike the Arabs these Jews represent the spiritual rather than the physical dimension in their contact with the Land of Israel. Thus the notion of eretz yisrael as essentially Jewish may be the subtext of pictures of Hasidic Jews practising their religious rituals. The natural woman Like the Arabs and the Jews women were also represented as ‘types’ in the art of the 1920s. Apart from several portraits women appear in the painting of this period mostly in two categories: as exotic and erotic beauty and as mother. In both categories these women are often oriental. Woman and nature During his first two years in Palestine Rubin painted a number of pictures of oriental women, Jewish and Arab. They are usually shown individually at half-length or seated on the ground often holding a plant or fruits. Among the best known is Girl with Pomegranates (Pl. N) that shows a dark-skinned young woman in a pinkish-orange tight dress holding in front of her a bowl of pomegranates against a background of oriental architecture. Two more pomegranates seen on a tree behind her unmistakably echo in form and colour her round breasts. The apparent sense of exotic eroticism in this painting is made explicit in the portrait of the Bucharan Jewess Sophie of 1924 (Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv): the woman presents her body to the viewer, her breasts clearly seen under the light-green transparent dress, and she holds a plant pot with flowers. The plant, like the pomegranates in Girl with Pomegranates and the oranges offered by the kneeling barebreasted woman in Rubin’s triptych First Fruits (Pl. D), not only symbolise growth and fertility; they also suggest an immediate analogy between Woman and Nature and an erotic association—long established in the history of art—between the inviting fruit and a succulent, inviting area of the female body.83 The identification of woman with nature (and man with culture) is one of the most abiding cultural and social stereotypes on which numerous myths and works of literature and art are based. Naked woman in nature is a potent image that highlights this equivalence. In nineteenth-century European art this motif was often represented by the female bather. Although no longer interpreted as a nymph or a goddess the bather still upheld the myth of the pure, innocent and instinctive creature.84 Nahum Gutman was one of the few artists in the yishuv who was particularly attracted to this theme and he produced a number of paintings and drawings showing naked women bathing in a pool, usually on their own (Fig. 9.7, Pl. O). Several features of the women and their

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surroundings suggest that they are Arab women. Gutman painted a number of pictures of Arab peasant women and also showed them as part of grove scenery or other landscapes. His female bathers are related to a series of erotic drawings and brothel scenes that he drew in the 1920s.85 Arab women bathing in the sea (with their clothes on) are also incorporated in his painting of an Arab brothel, innocently entitled Jaffa Coast (1926; Tel Aviv Museum of Art), a unique appearance of the subject of prostitutes in Israeli art.86 It is not known if Gutman exhibited any of these works in Palestine at the time of

Figure 9.7: Nahum Gutman, Woman in a Pool, 1920s; ink on paper, 34×21 cm. Gutman Family collection, Tel Aviv

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their making or even made all of them there.87 However we can be fairly certain that his images of the Arab nude bather were not drawn from experience but rather from a model familiar to him in art and literature.88 In Paris of the 1920s Gutman could have noticed the rising popularity of the female nude in art as present in exhibitions and books.89 He was particularly influenced by Renoir, whose late nudes became very popular in 1920s France. That his nude bathers possess the identity of oriental women is not entirely surprising, and as he later attested, during his stay in Paris he had been impressed by the French artists ‘who showed a penchant for painting the Orient’ and who somehow reminded him of his latent aspirations of the Bezalel years.90 French art had offered Gutman both the affirmation of his Orientalist views and the appropriate themes through which to depict the land and population of Palestine. The nude bather, the epitome of the ‘natural woman’, is a perfectly ‘suitable’ image for the Arab woman who already was characterised as a kind of fertility goddess in Gutman’s painting Bearer of Sheaves (Fig. 9.4). Being naked or clothed, in a field or in the water, these settings essentially represent one and the same type: that of a corporeal sensual, primitive woman whose integration in her surroundings is purely natural. The nature of woman Being integrated in the environment, either at home or in the landscape, also characterises the oriental women painted by Rubin. As already mentioned, these women are shown with fruits or plants, seated on the ground and frequently in the company of animals. As with Gauguin, whose influence was significant for Rubin’s early work in Palestine, Rubin’s women symbolise a primordial, simple world of charming primitiveness and life close to nature. And what can represent woman’s nature more than her role as mother, a recurrent theme in Rubin’s work. Carrying a toddler on the shoulder as seen in First Fruits (Fig. 7.1), holding in her lap a baby (who candidly thrusts a hand to her breast), or sitting on the ground and breast-feeding (Figs 7.5 and 9.8), all are frequent images in Rubin’s depiction of women. A woman nursing her baby appears in various examples, usually in a Yemenite family consisting of a man, a woman, a baby and a goat. The couple is sitting on the ground, and while the woman is nursing the baby, the man is feeding the goat with a branch. In one of the versions of this theme, entitled Family of Safed (Pl. P), the goat too is feeding her kid. The artist is thus making an overt connection between the nurturing function of animal and woman. Such an analogy, argues art historian Linda Nochlin, not only follows and perpetuates the ideology ‘which supports motherhood as woman’s “naturally” ordained work’, but it also demonstrates ‘that the peasant woman, as an elemental, untutored—hence eminently “natural”—female is the ideal signifier for the notion of the beneficent maternity’.91 The concept of a woman’s social role as identical with her biological function has a long history. During the eighteenth century, new ideals about childhood and child rearing developed by philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment period vested moral responsibilities in breast-feeding and in women’s fulfilment of their ‘natural’ destiny. Furthermore, the laws of nature, including the nature of woman, they claimed, were preserved in rural and exotic societies.92 A great number of works by male artists, writers and thinkers perpetuated and reinforced this ideology of ‘natural womanhood’ during the

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nineteenth century in the face of a growing challenge to this notion and the few gains made by women in the arenas of work and education.93 Rubin’s oriental mothers assert this notion of the ‘natural’ woman in her classic role. To be sure, these pictures do not represent any real Yemenite family, which would normally have more than one child. Rather they represent a typical or ideal family—the nuclear family of man, woman and child, often a male child—echoing historical overtones of the Christian Madonna and Child or the Holy Family. Rubin made these allusions explicit when his Family of Safed of 1923 (Fig. 9.8) was titled La Sainte Famille de Safed when exhibited in Paris in 1926. The image of the ideal motherhood is thus permeated with notions of universal truth deeply rooted in the ancient history of the country. The religious identity of these Jewish Yemenite families, their oriental identity and their association with the ancient town of Safed all point to an appreciation of traditions that has been transferred to the newly reclaimed land as part of a natural continuity with the past.

Figure 9.8: Reuven Rubin, Family of Safed, 1923; 81×65 cm, Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Courtesy of Rubin Museum Foundation

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Viewing these traditional aspirations against the backdrop of the social and ideological climate of the yishuv at the time is revealing. At the outset, they seem the opposite of the rebellious and revolutionary attitude that characterised the Zionist immigration from Eastern Europe of which Rubin was a part. Many of the immigrants were young and single; they left their families and often the religious tradition too, in order to settle in Palestine, to start a new life and create a new culture. In Zionist thinking the transformation of the Jew from the exilic despondent character to the proud, rooted, nationalist ‘real man’ always involves distinctively masculine features commonly described as ‘muscular Jewry’.94 At the same time, the Zionist revolution did not assign any new role for women, and the majority of trends in Zionist thought, even the most radical ones, demanded that women retain their traditional roles in the family. The idealisation of masculinity as the foundation of the nation, while assigning to women passive roles, was typical of nationalism in Europe.95 Zionism was no different and women could claim no equal place in this historical process; they were expected to accept their secondary position and fulfil the supreme value of their sex by giving birth. This attitude was particularly difficult for women pioneers who saw themselves as equal partners in building the country and the new society. The dominant view in the yishuv among both men and women was that woman’s principal role is as wife and mother. At best she could pride herself on being ‘a worker’s wife’ or mother who raises the ‘children of the workers’ movement’.96 In the labour market, too, Jewish women were directed away from the prestigious work of building and agriculture and compelled instead to take on traditional women’s work, mainly in domestic services. In this field Yemenite and oriental women especially could be found in high proportion.97 Rubin’s image of the family cannot be regarded as representing anything but an idealised picture based on historical models and artistic conventions. At the same time it undoubtedly reflected and supported the prevailing ideology regarding women’s work and social status in Jewish Palestine. Rubin was not alone among artists in the yishuv in portraying woman in her nourishing role in the family. The painting Family (now lost) by Paldi shows a woman serving drinks to five people, including an old woman and a young child, who are sitting around a table. While doing so she is holding a baby who feeds at her bare breast. The Diners, a drawing by Lubin (private collection, Tel Aviv), shows two men and two women around a table: one woman (identified mainly by her breasts) is standing and serving a plate; the other woman is sitting and breast-feeding a baby.98 As shown throughout this chapter, Jewish artists in Palestine depicted the country’s population by way of specific ‘types’ that were based on existing categories and formulas borrowed from European artistic traditions. One prevalent type was that of the native exotic woman, the peasant woman who is physically located in nature while her own nature, that is her sexual nature, is manifested in representation of her body. Often two sets of conventions converged into one—‘woman’ and the ‘Orient’—since both were perceived in similar terms: as sensual, irrational and primitive and at the same time essentially passive and submissive to the creative forces of the masculine West. If the Arab stands for the ideal historical native who leads a simple and natural life on his land, the woman could personify the land itself, the motherland (in Hebrew moledet from root yld=give birth), the Land of Milk and Honey, the land that suckles and nurtures. References to the country as the mother or the lover were frequent in Hebrew poetry of the 1920s99 while the view of woman as a national symbol, as guardian of the continuity

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and immutability or as allegory of the nation itself, is well rooted in the cultures of other nations.100 In this context the ‘type’ of the Jewish male is rather surprising. One would expect to see him as the embodiment of the New Jew, the active, masculine pioneer of the Zionist ideal who fertilises the land with his physical labour. Instead we see Orthodox Jews engrossed in their rituals and devotion. It is perhaps this discrepancy between the ideal as manifested visually mainly in photographs and in propaganda posters and the images in the paintings that caused writers to overlook this phenomenon. What is more, some even proclaim that artists of the 1920s ‘settled accounts’ with Jewish history in the diaspora and with ‘the closed Jewish religion’ by way of rejecting ‘Old world Jewry’ in order to blend into the new oriental environment.101 This interpretation does not reflect the actual practice of artists during the 1920s however. Although oriental people, Arabs and Jews featured frequently in the art of the period, there was also room for favourable images of pious Jews. The presence of these images in other art forms and the debates in literary circles in the yishuv on the role of Jewish religious heritage indicates that for many the desired route to genuine Hebrew culture did not mean a blind ‘negation of exile’ but a need to acknowledge the culture of the Jews as created in the different diasporas.102 The image of Hasidic Jews in the paintings of Rubin and his fellow artists presented a spiritual attitude to the country in contrast to the earthy physical aspect embodied in the figure of the local Arab. In a single painting, Sabbath in Safed (Pl. K) Rubin lucidly demonstrates the role of each of the types. It is also one of the rare occasions when a Jew and an Arab are seen together on the same canvas. On the right-hand side a Hasid is seen from the back, upright and tall, his head touches the top of the painting. He is wearing a long light-coloured robe, his hands are tied behind his back and he is immersed in the mystical ceremony of Welcoming the Sabbath. While the Jew represents a total spirituality the Arab, in contrast, on the left-hand side, is a lowly peasant; he is barefoot and crouching to perform a mundane task of milking his goat. Behind the Hasid, in the lower right corner there is a domed traditional oriental house from which a pink blossoming tree is growing. At the opposite corner, behind the Arab, is a group of houses with red roofs, indicating perhaps a Jewish settlement. Against this division of body and soul, old and new, the middle of the picture is dominated by a large Madonna-like woman. She is a Jewish woman, her head is chastely covered and she holds two plaited loaves of challah for the Sabbath signifying the domestic realm and woman’s role in preparing and serving food. A plot with newly planted trees seen on her right further links her to symbols of fertility and growth. The division of labour between the three cannot be clearer: the Arab is absorbed in his simple agricultural work of food production, the Jew in his religious quest and the woman in her domestic chores. The composition further emphasises the separate spheres in which each type resides and, presumably, in which they are content to remain. The non-naturalistic style, especially the scale of the figures and their relations to their surroundings, supports a symbolic interpretation of the image. And once again this painting seems to underline the Jewish claim to the country, which is no less emotional or historically justified than that of the Arab inhabitant, merely more spiritual; a side of Judaism that Rubin tried to

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convey in several works. Rubin and other artists of the 1920s did not need to reject the Jewish world as has been suggested by some historians. The Jewish tradition that attracted them was not pictures of misery and displacement of diaspora Jews. Rather, in the Modernists’ search for a genuine national art they sought in their subjects a combination of old traditions and new aspirations, representative of what they had ‘found’ in their new locale of Palestine and its proud and happy inhabitants.

10 Art and ideas Artists, critics and the role of art Artists and critics Over the years the art of the 1920s became shrouded in the myth of the Modernists— pioneers who first brought the new art to the country and laid the foundation of modern Israeli art. But how was this art received in the yishuv at the time it was made and first exhibited? To understand this we must rely mainly on views and opinions published in the press at that time. Writers and critics often claimed to present national ideals or to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ or the workers in Jewish Palestine. In reality their views reflected ideas that were current among those in the intelligentsia who had responded to art. As such they shed light on the wider cultural discourse in the yishuv, and on the specific ideological aspects involved in artist-critic relations. A major cause of friction was the expectations of each group regarding the other’s commitment and professional integrity. Artists’ expectations Within the cultural activity of the yishuv the role of visual art was fairly marginal, especially when compared to Hebrew literature, which traditionally occupied centre stage. Even when compared to other artistic fields such as theatre and music, art exhibitions were seldom discussed. Naturally, artists were sensitive to this lack of interest in their work and tended to complain about it. At a time when the majority of the yishuv had neither the means nor the desire to purchase paintings artists in Palestine could hardly expect to sell their pictures. Rubin’s commercial success is the exception that proves the rule.1 The artists’ expectation of recognition therefore focused on reviews of their exhibitions in the press, the number of visitors and general public awareness of their endeavours. But on this point the press let them down. What is more, it had even failed in its public duty, at least in their view; as chairman of the Artists’ Association Yosef Zaritsky complained in 1927 in an article in the daily ha-aretz: Every artist who organises an exhibition in eretz yisrael has to take care at the same time to find himself a new critic among his acquaintances to write the evaluation…otherwise one suspects that no newspaper would publish anything about the exhibition. […] Of all the writers who have previously written reviews on art exhibitions no one came to see the general exhibition…and there was no one to write about it. […] Because our press in this country pays no regular attention to art it does not

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educate the public to the appreciation of art. […] It is…the artistic education of the public that is damaged.2 Zaritsky not only blamed the press for ignoring artistic activity, especially group shows, but he also reproached newspapers for being undiscriminating in what they published whenever a ready-to-print review was submitted to them. This, he argued, was usually no more than a series of compliments for the artist by a well-intending friend; it was not a serious art critique. Moreover, he considered the indifference on the part of the press harmful to both artists and the public, a view shared by other artists at the time.3 Given the scarcity of art reviews in the press in Palestine during the 1920s, a proportion of which were actually dedicated to famous modern artists or to Jewish artists abroad, and the absence of permanent or professional art critics, the complaints seem justified. Furthermore, the limited scope of art reviews divulged, according to the artists, a great deal of incompetence. They thus set out to criticise their critics, and in several articles written by artists we find claims that those who took upon themselves to write about painting had, in fact, very little knowledge of this field. Even worse, they wrote worthless things, made wrong comparisons and expressed no more than personal impressions; their reviews merely awarded marks or compliments to artists.4 This objection of artists to critics should be evaluated carefully to exclude personal motivations and rivalries among the local art scene. Nonetheless the identity of the critics, such as they can be established from the acronyms or pseudonyms which were often used, consisted of a few poets as well as architects, journalists, political activists and men of letters who infrequently wrote on literary and artistic matters. Several artists also contributed occasional reviews. Connoisseurs who had a specific interest in visual art, the likes of Yitzhak Katz, were rare.5 As well as complaints about the critics artists had broader expectations of the press. The two major roles of the press, as they saw it, were to educate the public to art appreciation, and to support the artists’ work. The first role implies that the public who visited art exhibitions were incapable of experiencing ‘correctly’ what was on display and needed guidance to understand it. But what troubled the artists most was the lack of interest in art at all! ‘It is well known’, wrote Gutman, ‘that the general public in eretz yisrael does not look up to the art of painting which to this day is like a stepdaughter.’6 Sionah Tagger added that ‘there are no people for whom an exhibition or a picture add vigour to their work and poetry to their soul’, and in spite of the intensive construction of houses at the time, all fitted with conveniences and modern furniture, ‘only for pictures they find no place’.7 The press was expected to help increase the awareness of the public of art alongside the Artists’ Association and national institutions. By ignoring art exhibitions the press was considered not only to have failed in educating the public but also to have degraded artistic expression and thus ‘erroneously and carelessly destroy[ed] what we the painters aspire[d] to create’.8 For the artists the single important mission of the press was to stand by their artistic efforts. This was not merely in expectation of good reviews—of which the artists were suspicious anyway—but rather in the hope of a thoughtful sincere attention to their work that would generate a similar attitude in the public at large. At the heart of this expectation was the belief that both art and the press had important national roles: visual art was part of the cultural revival and thus part of the national regeneration of the Jews

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in Palestine; the task of the press was to observe this cultural activity and to inform the public about its achievements. Curiously, the Hebrew press, in spite of the irregular attention paid to art and artists in Palestine, shared the same beliefs. These were revealed in the issues raised by the critics and by their expectations of the artists themselves. Critics’ expectations One of the recurring issues in art reviews of the period concerned novelty and progress, or the lack of them. Artists were expected to manifest, from one exhibition to the next, something new and to show how they had improved and developed. If the overall result was unsatisfactory, it was still possible to praise the process and struggle with hopeful thoughts for the future. Writing on the second exhibition of the Artists’ Association in 1922 the weekly ha-poel ha-tza’ir maintained that while the exhibition showed no artistic consolidation it did show ‘exploration’ and a quest for a route.9 By the end of the decade this approach was noticeably changed. When a newly formed group called eged consisting of established artists, mostly those of the ohel exhibitions, put a new exhibition, the critics were disappointed: the participants were the same familiar artists of previous exhibitions who seemed to have remained on the same spot. Worse than that, they gave the impression of uniformity, ‘as if all the paintings were painted by a single artist’.10 In contrast, another new group, masad, that showed at the same time and comprised mainly younger artists, was appreciated as more dynamic and promising.11 During the early 1920s art exhibitions were still a rare event in the yishuv and attracted special attention. Group shows in particular were appreciated as a demonstration of a collective creative effort towards a national cultural goal. A few years on group shows were no longer a novelty, and for some there were even too many exhibitions for the local public.12 Several artists exhibited individually, often with great success. Unfortunately, when shown again in a group show they were then too well known to excite reviewers.13 One reviewer even admitted that it was perhaps the public’s appetite for novelty which gave the impression that the third ohel exhibition looked much weaker and certainly less ‘sensational’ than its precursors.14 Similar problems characterised other activities in the cultural field. Usually it was a result of overproduction in the small Jewish community, and the tension between artists’ expectation for ‘high’ art and popular demand. The Hebrew theatre in Palestine suffered during the 1920s from small audiences. The remedy was frequent new productions but certain actors also demanded that they perform comedies that would attract audiences and improve the financial situation of the theatre.15 The problem of small audiences was also felt in performances of classical music, and critics and musicians expressed concerns about the public taste for light musical entertainment instead of high-quality ‘art’ music.16 Even in the realm of Hebrew publishing the reading public in the yishuv was too small to sustain the sector financially.17 Thus the problem that painters and sculptors faced in respect of a lack of public interest was not exceptional for the time. However, artists had hoped at least for the support of the press. Their critics, on the other hand, expected artists to justify their copious production by displaying works of higher quality and demonstrating new developments. In effect, the expectations directed at the artists in the yishuv were much greater because art was viewed and appreciated essentially through an ideological perspective.

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Ideas and ideals A major topic that was raised in art reviews was the idea of art as a reflection and expression of the developing national culture in the yishuv. This concept was usually intertwined with other viewpoints on the nature of art itself and the role of art in society, on the urge for an authentic local style and the problem of foreign influences. On the nature of art Reviewers often presented their creed on the nature of art as part of the overall discussion and in support of their argument. Writing extensively on the first Tower of David exhibition in 1921 and the exhibitions in the following year, Van Vriezland put forward the aesthetic value of art and suggested that art should be ‘a tool for a close and direct connection between beauty and the human soul’.18 Beauty, he later explained, is not in nature but in the artist who creates it by expressing his aesthetic emotion that is ‘set free in the piece of art, which has henceforth the power of freeing others. In silent confidence the picture expresses the personality of the artist’.19 Van Vriezland’s emphasis on beauty stems from his high regard for crafts and applied arts. In his view the emotion expressed in art had also a wider mission beyond the pure aesthetic experience and selfexpression—that of ‘freeing others’. The significance of beauty in art was not an idea taken up by other writers in the following years, whereas the idea that art reveals the inner self of the artists was more accepted. Several writers shared the view that the true value of art is found ‘in deep, fundamental, and decisive strata of the spirit where consciousness and will have no foothold’.20 This rather Romantic concept of art as a process that is instigated by a personal irrational experience of the individual was at odds with the preferred tendency among cultural activists to elevate the notion of the collective experience. To resolve this discrepancy art could be defined on the one hand as ‘a confession of the creative individual’ and on the other hand as a confession that eventually ‘will speak about the general, about the generation, about the people and the race of which the individual is an organic part’.21 Artists also held the view of art as a self-expression, albeit for diverse reasons. In defending the artists’ right to be appreciated independently Nahum Gutman wrote that ‘essentially we are seeking a truthful expression …. Each one of us has a different truth and each truth has its unique expression’.22 Menahem Shemi claimed simply that a picture ‘must attest to the painter’s talent and satisfy the demands of the painterly culture of our time’.23 Zaritsky had the view of the truth that should progress beyond the subjective towards what he called ‘objective greatness’.24 These vague definitions attest to some of the contradictory ideas among the intelligentsia about artistic creation: on the one hand there was the belief that the modern artist is primarily a free individual who strives to expresses the truth, either his or her own or an objective one; on the other hand was the idea that the artist, as a member of a community or a nation, was expected to represent the cultural values and aspirations of his or her group on behalf of and for the benefit of its members.

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The artist and the public The key concepts in discussing relations between the artist and the public were those of duty and right. Artists were considered to have a duty to fulfil within society while the public had the right to art. Van Vriezland expressed it bluntly in his 1922 review: The Jewish Artists’ Society should realise that it has to fulfil a task in [the] upbuilding of this country by showing the way to beauty in everyday life. The artists should find for themselves a programme, adapted to the needs of present Jewish society, and turn to crafts, the production of practical beautiful objects. […] There is more need of a simple chair, beautiful in its proportions, than of pictures, those toys of the rich.25 Van Vriezland’s views on the value of crafts for society certainly echoed some of the ideas that developed in England around the Arts and Crafts movement.26 He later changed his mind about painting and warmly supported the newly arrived artists of the 1920s. However he continued to claim a place for art in the public domain, and was involved in the proposal to purchase Rubin’s triptych for the national library as well as in attempts to rearrange Bezalel Museum. Various artists and writers supported the idea that art should be for the many rather than for the privileged few. The sculptor Avraham Melnikov argued that European art was in decline due to the artists’ compliance with the tastes of rich collectors who depend on the ‘parasite’ critics, and thus all of them ‘constitute a world of their own unconnected to the masses’. Melnikov was worried that this might also happen in the yishuv. He complained that although the vast majority of exhibition goers were workers and pioneers they could not afford to purchase the expensive art works. The artist, who must earn a living, is consequently forced to enslave himself to the wealthy. And if his works remained in storage he would fail to fulfil his task to inspire the populace. Melnikov thus proposed that artists should lower the prices of their works to allow the masses to buy art. He also admonished public and private institutions for not acquiring paintings and sculpture because they, too, ‘perceive art as a luxury rather than a cultural educational tool”.27 Likewise, the will to protect artists from a dependency on dealers and at the same time preserve national art from being lost either by going abroad or disappearing into private collections was behind the proposal to establish a national gallery so that ‘every member of the public, poor or rich, will be able…to see the national art, and the pictures…will remain forever the property of the people as its cultural heritage’.28 In the same spirit Rubin, in his address at the opening of the ohel exhibition, urged Tel Aviv’s mayor to found a museum for exhibitions and to house works by Palestine painters.29 Tel Aviv Museum was duly founded by mayor Meir Dizengoff in 1932, its aim that ‘of searching for Jewish art, of assembling its scattered genius into one place and of welding it into one national whole’.30 For many years artists in the yishuv and Israel have continued to demand a special public status for the art produced by Jews in Palestine for the benefit of makers and viewers alike. This shared interest of artists and public was not free of conflict. The emergence of non-naturalistic painting in Palestine was accompanied by numerous apologetic texts on

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the merits of modern art in comparison with the art of the past.31 In contrast, the traditionalist Boris Schatz was defended by the idea that ‘good art…is that which speaks to the heart of the people and barely needs explanations’.32 When modern art went as far as being abstract however, as was the case at the ohel exhibition of paintings by Yitzhak Frenkel,33 it was rejected on the basis of this same argument—painting a composition without objects was regarded as being alien to ‘the common perception of art by the general public’ and as disconnecting ‘the link between the creators of art and those who enjoy it…almost beyond repair’. Whereas if the painting’s subject were recognisable however, even if geometrically stylised, it was commended as art that was ‘popular in the positive sense’.34 Artists were also accused of disappointing their public by failing to reflect the ethos of pioneering labour which existed in the yishuv. The 1926 Artists’ Association exhibition was criticised as lacking reference to ‘Hebrew labour in eretz yisrael, and the pioneering ambition so full of yearning, suffering and spiritual anguish’.35 Likewise, the first ohel exhibition of the same year was fiercely criticised, particularly in view of its initial claim to be ‘a platform upon which [artists] will speak in the language of colours to the masses rather than to the elect connoisseurs’.36 With these ideas in mind the critic attacked almost all the participants, and especially Rubin ‘who has nothing to do with work and workers in this country’ and ‘who does not belong here in the same way that a book of lyric poetry is out of place where work in cement is done’. Litvinovsky was indeed praised for his technique but his showing at the ohel was considered utterly wrong, with paintings ‘that have nothing to do whatsoever with the public that was invited to come and look and purchase something from the exhibition!’37 This harsh denunciation can be ascribed in part to the newspaper that published it—the left-wing davar, which was modelled on the Soviet official socialist press and was similarly ideological in its attitudes to art and literature.38 But it was not exclusively the leftist press who demanded that art be accessible to the wider public and reflect the life of the new yishuv. The primary expectation of artists at the time was to achieve authenticity through a distinct national style, a local subject matter or through the rather vague concept of ‘selfhood’. In search of genuine art The idea of creating a Jewish national style in Palestine was an important mission of the Bezalel Institute as discussed in Part I of this book. The opening of the first Tower of David exhibition of which the Jewish part was dominated by Bezalel artists stirred national sentiments and was welcomed as a symbol of national and cultural revival and as a display of the Hebrew spirit and Hebrew art.39 However, even a keen supporter of Bezalel had to admit that ‘the Hebrew style, as it is called, has not yet been found and not yet been defined’.40 But there was no lack of optimism concerning what eventually ought to develop: Obviously, there is no tradition of life here…but…there is a desire and ambition to apprehend our ancient forms of life…to grasp the line of division and unity of disintegrated Judaism, to understand its psychological nature, to perceive the flora and fauna of the country

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nowadays and to pursue sparks of that longed-for genuine entity and original style.41 Looking back to a recent and ancient past, together with the use of elements from the natural life of Palestine, was indeed the Bezalel formula for creating genuine Hebrew art. Other elements would be added later in the attempts to define or ‘find’ what makes indigenous Jewish art in Palestine. But already at this early stage an objection to the aim itself was pronounced. ‘Art cannot be nourished by a community that does not yet exist in reality’, Van Vriezland claimed, and ‘a style cannot be created by force but it will grow by itself’.42 Other writers, too, shared this view that a style cannot be made to order but should develop gradually within a specific environment. This opinion was usually accompanied by a fierce condemnation of certain motifs regarded as superficial and ‘touristy’: biblical themes, oriental types, Jewish symbols or the ‘banal orient’ of a palm tree, a camel and a donkey.43 This discussion was often complemented by propositions of what does constitute national art. Some laid weight on the artist’s identity as a Jew, claiming that national art should be manifested through the Jewish artist’s sincere expression of his visual perception and his spiritual experience rather than via an extrinsic item so easy to learn and copy.44 Another supposition was that the authentic national artist would evolve gradually through the formation of a national way of life influenced by the landscape and day-to-day conditions.45 It was not simply by ‘working as a Jew’ or expressing one’s Jewish self that a national art can grow. It was rather the environment of Jewish Palestine that was supposed to create the background for the evolution of a true Jewish national art. The critic Avi-Shaul argued that what was involved in the making of art was a psychological process and self-expression, but he also claimed that what appealed to the creative spirit was the essence of the subject matter. It is therefore justifiable to discuss this aspect of art ‘in the midst of the new life that is formed in front of our eyes’, and to ask ‘to what extent does the new work in the country…influence the art of our new Hebrew artists?’46 In another attempt to unite the opposites the critic Koplevitz emphasised freedom of art while disapproving of the artists’ preference to deal with the material and formal aspects of painting rather than its subject matter. In reaction to the growing tendency among artists to focus on qualities of colour and handling of paint, Koplevitz proposed a significant environmental condition for achieving authenticity: the unique colour that every country possesses, which depends on its particular light. The light here is different’ he claimed, ‘the light of eretz yisrael fuses the colours into a unified tone, and this tone is more “serious”—spiritual!—than the Italian tone. It was not for nothing that monotheism was born here’.47 Pointing to natural light as a source of a unique identity of painting while assigning to it some historic religious symbolism seemed an interesting solution in the search for genuine art. It endorsed the importance of the country’s natural environment without the anecdotal elements (a palm tree, a camel) while responding to the interest among artists in colour and the concern of modern painting beginning with Impressionism with the effects of natural light. From the 1940s onwards the so-called ‘eretz yisrael light’ became a major argument in discussing the unique qualities of Israeli painting and a common justification for its pale colouring. In the late 1920s Koplevitz’s

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criticism was directed primarily towards the signs of foreign influence that he had identified in the dark tones of paintings. Influences and originality Foreign influence was at the heart of any debate concerning the emergence of authentic Jewish art in Palestine, embodying as it did the antithesis of what was being sought: originality and specificity. The problem of ‘foreign spirit’ and ‘foreign subjects’ was a primary argument in Boris Schatz’s belief of what should be the suitable environment for the Jewish artist to develop his or her true identity in art. This view was shared by other leaders and activists of Cultural Zionism. The idea that a ‘foreign’ influence was an obstacle to the rediscovery of the nation’s ‘inner self’ and ‘national genius’ was inherent in many ideologies of nationalism, particularly ethnic nationalism.48 In nineteenthcentury Russia and in France of the post First World War period the urge to define art in national terms also meant a rejection of certain art forms as foreign.49 Within this ideological framework the demand that art reflect a unique cultural identity of Zionism was understandable, as was the requirement to draw this uniqueness from the territorial goal of Zionism, the Land of Israel. In reality Bezalel art relied considerably on European models, and living and working in Palestine did not prove a remedy for well-established preconceptions of the ‘Orient’. Similar concerns faced those painters who stood in opposition to Bezalel during the 1920s. As shown in the previous chapters they, too, aspired to a ‘true’ eretz yisraeli painting based on the country’s landscapes and inhabitants, but at the same time they did not want to sever ties with modern Western art. Many of these painters came to Palestine after a period studying art abroad and their wish to be nourished by the richness of Western art continued. Rubin for example always wanted to go to Paris, although for him it was not so much to see other works but rather to show and gain recognition in this capital of art. Other artists were eager to experience first hand the art and life of Paris while some were anxious about possible influences on their work. Menahem Shemi (Schmidt) (1898–1951) had an ambivalent attitude to the question of influences. Russian-born Shemi, who was mainly self-taught, came to Palestine in 1913 and studied in Bezalel for about a year. He moved between several towns until he settled in Haifa in 1922. During the 1920s his ambition was to go to Paris and the difficulty in fulfilling this dream featured frequently in the letters he wrote to his brother.50 Early on he was not so keen on going abroad and preferred to stay and improve himself in Palestine. What was important to him in art, he stressed, was not the technical aspect but the eretz yisraeli one: ‘Eretz yisrael and above all Jerusalem and its environs are an endless sea of material for the painter, a gold mine of deep original beauty’.51 But working in isolation, far apart from influences, proved to be problematic. Proud of being ‘totally truthful to myself and expressing, less or more, my own thoughts and emotions’, Shemi also felt the lack of quality standards. This caused him self-doubt and he hoped that by visiting Paris he could measure his personal prospects.52 After 1924 Shemi participated in group exhibitions in Jerusalem and later in Tel Aviv. His work garnered the appreciation of artists and critics alike, providing the much-needed self-confidence and helping to establish Shemi’s status on the local art scene. But as he immersed himself

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in issues of art his need to see for himself what was happening in the ‘big world’ became urgent: ‘what I know is from books and reproductions…one must consume this culture of hell in order to eradicate it later’.53 Paris continued to obsess him and finally he went there for a few months in 1928. Four days into his visit he could already conclude: ‘Although it is so good to live in Paris it is no worse living in Palestine where it is certainly better in the artistic sense. […] City life that is devoid of content also drains the painters from any substance in painting’.54 And yet he continued in the following years to long for Paris, the cradle of artistic excellence: It is clear to me that art requires not only talent but also culture. One has to slowly grasp and absorb the Louvre, the Luxembourg [museum] etc., and it can be done only in Paris. One should stay there for years, perhaps forever.55 Even without going to Paris French art had a strong influence on artists in Palestine by means of reproductions and art journals. Shemi urged his brother to send him reproductions of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and he was particularly interested in Cézanne,56 a fact clearly apparent in his paintings of the 1920s. Rubin also asked his friend in Paris to send him art journals to keep him informed. And Lubin, who is regarded as the closest among his fellow artists to Cubism, admitted to having been attracted to this trend through journals and especially L’Esprit nouveau that he found at Paldi’s in Tel Aviv.57 The scarcity of this material in the yishuv made the arrival of any new print a special event.58 Another influence came through Frenkel, who in 1925, after five years in Paris, opened a studio in Tel Aviv that attracted young art students including those who were disillusioned with Bezalel. His students were among the members of masad, a group of younger artists founded in late 1929 that rejected the narrative approach of the veterans of the 1920s in favour of colour sensibilities.59 Between East and West As painters looked to Western art for inspiration and instruction their critics found it a sign of weakness and dependency, evidencing a lack of originality and individuality. No wonder that artists occasionally set out to fight back. In a furious attack on critics and their false idea of ‘the traditional artistic character of the People of Israel’, Paldi proudly admitted being influenced by and ‘taking from the gentiles’ but he also pointed to the critics’ hypocrisy in doing the same thing in their own writings.60 In another counterattack Shemi rejected the whole premise of ‘originality’ as a goal. He particularly responded to Koplevitz’s review, mentioned above, which had accused the artists of aping their French masters. It was this, the critic wrote, that prevented the artists from having a personal vision and a new perception that the country and their selfhood could and should have given them.61 Shemi not only ridiculed the demand for a unique national idiom as absurd but he also pointed out the relevance of modernity to art and life in Palestine and emphasised the importance of formal qualities in art:

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Should we not be amazed…if we were told that one morning Rembrandt or Dürer got up and made up their mind: let us create original Dutch or German art. Should we not ridicule that person; and would not such a demand from our painters be loathsome! Bring us original eretz yisraeli art! Bring us originality! Bring us eretz yisraeliness! And not only this but also mysticism, orientalism, exoticism, proletarianism, etc. No wonder that many of our best painters erred in an illustrative perception of the landscape…by impressions and visions that are exotic for the European eye. […] There is only one appreciation of a picture: it must attest to the painter’s talent and satisfy the demands of the painterly culture of our time. We shall not run away from this culture in the same way that we have not run away from the tractor or the car. Not a camel, nor a donkey, not an olive tree or an Arab dressed in abbaya [cloak], and not even the brightness of the eretz yisraeli light, can become the contents of a picture without having a particular plastic role in the picture space. Originality, therefore, should be looked for in the original plastic expression…the inner relations of colour, form and sense of space…. Only through a sincere striving to a pure plastic expression will painters, collectively, attain in due time an original eretz yisraeli plastic expression.62 Even though he rejected most of the demands put to artists during the 1920s, Shemi believed that a certain unique collective character could be achieved over time, more as a quality to be sensed than something to be planned. His criticism of other painters also shows the level of dispute among the artists. The sculptor Avraham Melnikov was one who demonstrated forthright opposition to Shemi’s view. In his comments on the third ohel exhibition in 1928 published just a few days before Shemi’s article, Melnikov argued that leaning on Western art was a mistake and that true inspiration should be pursued elsewhere: Half of the victory of modern art in Palestine is nothing but that of Paris, Berlin and Moscow…. Did we not listen carefully to every single sound coming from there, from Europe? After all we ardently looked forward to any European art journal and lived according to it. Were there no sea between us we would go on a pilgrimage to Paris….63 It is absurd, Melnikov continued, that while artists in Palestine turned westwards the trend in Europe turned eastwards and modern artists such as Picasso and Matisse borrowed from Egypt and Persia. Consequently, he claimed, ‘here we are dwelling on a spring of fresh water but are craving for brackish water’. It was time, he urged his colleagues, to search for a direction. This was by no means an easy task, because We the artists of Israel, painters and sculptors, are put in the open space without a point of support. Our artistic past is a barren desert…. We have to create from our own self and body ex nihilo. Since we are Hebrews, we are Semites; we must rely on the racial truth.64

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Clearly, both Shemi’s ‘original plastic expression’ and Melnikov’s ‘racial truth’ should be understood in ideological terms rather than as any practical instruction. The former emphasised the artistic process itself, regardless of its subject matter, as the route to authenticity while the latter relied on ethnic pride as a source of revelation. While Shemi affirmed the validity of Western civilisation for the artist in Palestine and rejected any exotic primitivist pursuit, Melnikov pointed out the influence of the Near East on modern art in Europe and its potential as a guide for modern art in Palestine. In an earlier article Melnikov had already mentioned the value of the ancient art of the East, Assyria, Egypt, India or China, and their eternal ‘expressionistic’ qualities.65 His own art revealed links with Assyrian art as perceived at the time.66 In 1928, at the time of his attack on Western influences, Melnikov was negotiating his most important commission and most memorable work: the Roaring Lion monument in Tel Hai in the Galilee in commemoration of Yosef Trumpeldor and his fellow settlers who were killed there in battle in 1920.67 At the time of its inauguration in 1934 the style of the stone lion that sits facing East was perceived as resembling the Assyrian style.68 Ever since it has been acclaimed as one of the most significant (and presumably successful) attempts to appropriate ancient Mesopotamian tradition in order to create original-local modern Jewish art. Moreover, it was regarded as the first manifestation of an artistic tendency that aspired to return to ancient roots in the region while turning away from European culture and from the values of the Jewish diaspora.69 Nonetheless, this trend was not as widely embraced as suggested by Israeli historiography and was only taken up by a small number of artists, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s and especially in sculpture.70 Beyond the question of ‘foreign’ influence or personal choice of model the dispute between Shemi and Melnikov reflects a wider issue. The problem of East and West, as the poet Ya’akov Fichman defined it, was the crucial question ‘of our life and of our future’: The Hebrew community in eretz yisrael stands at a crossroad, between East and West. The revival of original Hebrew culture undoubtedly needs to give up many of the Western triumphs. […] The Western mould, as such, cannot be an exemplary model for the Hebrew culture that is created now. […] But we are now a European people more than we are an Eastern people. We have absorbed the spirit of Europe and by turning our back on this culture we would deny ourselves…. [Yet] we are different! We are not completely European. The original energies of the race still dominate us vigorously. […] A people should listen to the voice of the living…and of its ancient culture accept only what is required for life. […] A true revival does not re-establish the ancient but rather builds on its strong foundation.71 Fichman touches on the main dilemmas confronting almost all artists, writers and cultural commentators in the yishuv. The first was identifying the cultural identity of the Jews at the point of embarking on their national revival: Europeans, but not quite, who come to settle in the East (the part played by Middle Eastern Jewry in this project was not even mentioned). The second was defining the desired cultural identity of the newly revived nation by drawing on the distant past in the East or, conversely, on the present in the

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West. Trying to bridge this chasm Fichman eventually concludes: ‘we shall not betray the West, we are part of it’.72 This was also the prevalent view among most artists in Palestine. For Shemi, as for other artists, turning westwards was equal to retaining modern culture. A similar debate surfaced during the 1920s in the literary circles of the yishuv. One of the primary problems, as Sadan-Loebenstein summarised it, was defining the country’s culture ‘within the aspiration for contemporary modern art that responds to the challenge of the European centres, while at the same time promoting particular values associated with the ethnic, local and national aspects of the people’.73 Issues of the new versus the old in Hebrew literature were often discussed by critics in parallel terms to questions of originality, foreignness and imitation.74 That the expectations and arguments were similar to the dispute in the art circles was not a coincidence. After all it was often writers and literary critics who also wrote on visual art. Consequently, the art historical discourse of the period followed the outlines set by the literary critics and only marginally addressed issues that were specific to visual art and artists. Selective influences: more than a style One of the issues that is rarely discussed concerning the art of this period (or other periods in Israeli art) is the selective nature of absorbing influences. Artists indeed turned to Western modern art but a closer look reveals that only a limited range of this art was taken in to be translated into the desired model. Above all it was Paris that was the coveted destination for artists, whether in pursuit of instruction, cultural experience or recognition. Art in Paris was synonymous with modern art and thus with a standard according to which artists in Palestine measured themselves and to which they felt they belonged. Developments in modern art outside Paris were far less significant for them. And even though most artists, poets, actors and men of letters who settled in Palestine in the early 1920s came from Russia and Eastern Europe, the trends in Russian avant-garde art before and after the Russian Revolution made hardly any impact on art in Jewish Palestine.75 An exception was the Jewish-Russian-Parisian painter Marc Chagall who in the early 1920s appealed to Rubin, Litvinovsky and a few others in his use of Jewish folklore. Critics at the time often used terms such as Futurism or Constructivism in art reviews, not necessarily in relation to their original meaning but rather as substitutes for ‘modern art’.76 As for the artists, it is hard to judge to what extent they were familiar with the avant-garde movements of Italian Futurism or Russian Constructivism. Judging from their work, they show no slavish following of the ideological premises of these movements, their urban and industrial orientation and their artistic language that preferred geometric and mechanical forms and eventually abstraction. The brief appearance of geometrical abstract painting in Palestine in the 1920s indicates that artists were not prepared to take a route that not only alienated their public but also seemed foreign to the rest of their objectives. The term Expressionism was also used frequently in describing the art of some painters; however German Expressionism, another avant-garde art movement, was ignored for the most part. This was not due to any lack of knowledge of the movement. Through art magazines and by travelling abroad artists were able to learn about the various trends in modern art. However, many of these were weeded out.

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Shemi, for instance, was quite firm when he dismissed both Russian and German art, claiming that ‘Russia has never given rise to any painter of European stature’ while ‘even the greatest German artists never fully achieved universal values’.77 The bias towards French modern art was in itself quite selective. One of the most prominent influences on painters in Palestine in the 1920s was the French André Derain (1880–1954) (Fig. 10.2). Why was this particular artist so important to the painters in Palestine? The answer, according to Ballas, lies in his ‘moderate modernism’, which suited the requirements of the young, tradition-free art of eretz yisrael. Derain’s example ‘legitimised a painting of outward appearances of modernism (or Cubism), which does

Figure 10.1: Menahem Shemi, Fishermen, 1928, 85×65 cm. Collection: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Gift of Ayala and Sam Zacks, TorontoTel Aviv, 1957

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not abandon motif and realistic depiction, and which eschews a consistent use of modernist methods’.78 The question remains though whether his style alone was the reason for Derain’s appeal at this particular time. In the canonical history of modern art Derain receives much acclaim for his role in the creation of Fauvism in 1905. But within a few years he had abandoned stylistic experimentation in favour of a more conservative style of landscapes and still-lifes with Cézanne influences. In the 1920s other artists abandoned abstraction and stylistic innovations in favour of more traditional themes and methods. This tendency was critically praised and Derain in particular was hailed as ‘the ideal model for the younger generation of French painters’ and as ‘the greatest living French artist’.79 The artists in Palestine who followed ‘what’s on’ through French art journals and other reports could not fail to notice Derain’s elevated status. It is not surprising therefore that he was mentioned as a source of influence on several artists,

Figure 10.2: André Derain, Cadaqués, 1910; 60.5×73 cm. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004. Photograph: © 2003 National Gallery in Prague among them Tagger and Paldi (Fig. 10.3), and borrowings from his work can be identified in the work of several others.80 Was there anything beyond fame and style that made Derain so important in Palestine? Romy Golan has shown that Derain’s success in France was in accordance with a widespread anti-modernist and conservative tendency in French culture and politics after the war known as rappel à l’ordre (call to order). The critical reception of Derain, she argues, ‘clearly demonstrates that artists were not alone in their return to the traditional

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landscape—to the soil, so to speak—but rather were part of a far larger enthusiasm that gripped all of France’.81 This was not merely a question of style but rather one of national ideology. By the mid 1920s this critical consensus indicated that ‘the resurgence of landscape painting signalled a deliberate realignment with a particularly French tradition’ and ‘linked France’s cultural vitality to the strength of its rootedness in the soil’.82 Painters in the yishuv were probably attracted to this art not solely because it was a style easy to follow but because it reflected national sentiments similar to their own, and a perception of attachment to the soil that they too aspired to evoke in their art. Other French artists of the same tendency who influenced artists in Palestine were André Lhote (particularly influential for Tagger, who studied in his studio) and the so-called ‘minor Cubists’ Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.83

Figure 10.3: Yisrael Paldi, Landscape, c. 1923; 39×50 cm. Private collection, Tel Aviv In France of the 1920s a sudden infatuation with the naïve painters was noted. ‘With humble and rural family background’, argues Golan, these painters ‘stood as the ultimate encapsulation of the untrained “primitive”’.84 The most famous of them was Henri (Le Douanier) Rousseau whose reputation peaked around 1925. Rousseau’s influence in Palestine was also noticed around that time in some of Gutman’s paintings, but mainly in Rubin’s paintings, and it was well observed by critics.85 It is unlikely that Rubin came to know Rousseau during his first stay in Paris in 1914, when he was rather oblivious to contemporary art, but he must have learnt of Rousseau’s art in 1921 in New York through his contacts with Alfred Stieglitz. In 1910 Stieglitz had exhibited Rousseau’s painting in his gallery and published a catalogue essay about them. He also gave Rubin a book

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written by the American artist Marsden Hartley which includes a chapter on Rousseau.86 All the same the influence on Rubin’s paintings was manifest only later, particularly in 1925–26. It was then that Rubin described in an article for the American Jewish journal Menorah a rosy picture of his life in Palestine full of admiration for the naïveté of ‘simple people’: I live with simple people; I walk…with milkmen and farmers. […] The men here are simple dreamers…everything is new and their wide open eyes regard the world with wonderment. I have pitched my tent on these ancient hills, and my desire is to tie together the ends of the thread that history has broken.87 Rubin’s notion of the simplicity of life of both farmers and dreamers echoes the virtues of the Zionist vision in which the return to the land is intertwined with the return to history. By declaring himself as belonging to these ‘simple’ people Rubin claims for his art the same authentic ‘primitive’ quality we associate with folk or ‘naïve’ art. This quality came to be appreciated as a natural link between past and present, which was Rubin’s declared mission. It was this quality and this link to the past that H.N.Bialik had found so significant in Rubin’s art. Rubin had previously shown a tendency towards the ‘primitive’ through the paintings of Gauguin and it is most probable that he was affected by the popularity of Rousseau and other naïve painters in France that at the time was impacting on contemporary French artists.88 Like his former inclination towards the exotic primitivism of Gauguin, this adoption of a naïve-like style—linear, flat and decorative, with meticulously detailed backgrounds, as in his figure painting Dancers of Meron (Pl. M) or landscape Jerusalem (Pl. F)—enhanced the sense of innocent beauty of the land and its people. Now more delicate and elegant without the rough ‘unfinished’ quality of paint and odd distortions of space of his earlier paintings, this style lent itself more easily to ideological interpretation; as the New York newspaper The Jewish Standard wrote, ‘His works invest the resurrection of the Jewish Homeland with the ethereal beauty of a dream world’.89 Neo-classicism was another strand of the ‘call to order’ in European art of the 1920s that had influenced artists in Palestine. The turn by French, Italian and Spanish artists during and immediately after the First World War towards the classical tradition and its supposed eternal unchanged values was also a claim to their native Latin heritage. At the heart of this shared heritage was the ‘potent myth…of the Mediterranean world as Arcadia—an earthly paradise protected from the sordid materialism of the modern industrialised world, free from strife and tension…a place where a dreamed-of harmony is still attainable’.90 It was probably these features that appealed to the yishuv artists when similarly depicting Palestine as a calm and pastoral Arcadia with no conflicts or changes brought by modernity, a land where the inhabitants lived outside history in simple harmony with their surroundings. Such images were often of the Arab population of Palestine and were close in style and form to the neo-classicism of Picasso and his monumental, muscular, rounded figures. Gutman’s paintings of Arab peasants in 1926 (Pl. L) and some of his portraits, Rubin’s paintings of Arab fishermen such as The Goldfish Vendor (1928, The Jewish Museum, New York), and especially Shemi’s

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Fishermen of 1928 (Fig. 10.1) are prime examples of the adoption of this classicism and its adaptation to the already mythical and romanticised image of Palestine. The styles chosen by painters in Palestine during the 1920s varied slightly among artists and, in the course of the decade, within the work of individual artists. But they all shared similar sources that were considered modern enough for their followers to feel ‘up-to-date’; and they were tradi-tional enough to convey values associated with the past. The choice of the styles was not incidental but rather part of a process of ‘cultural selection’ involved in the establishment of the new Jewish community in Palestine. In his analysis of this process Even-Zohar argues that the motivation for adopting particular components was not their origin, nor solely their availability, but rather ‘their ability to fulfil a function in accordance with the new ideology of national revival’.91 By adopting the French model of conservative modernism of the 1920s artists in the yishuv could resolve conflicting demands in the cultural arena in which they operated: they could respond to the challenges of contemporary modern art, and thus become part of it, and at the same time emphasise timeless values of belonging and an admiration for an ancient un-modernised country as a way of building a new cultural identity. It has been customary to regard influences on art in Palestine as being delayed due to the distance of the periphery from the centre. In fact, there was no significant delay during the 1920s. The French discourse concerning the definition of what was unique to French art and the rejection of any foreign influences had a parallel resonance in the yishuv. The embracing of French contemporary models was therefore justified not only stylistically but also ideologically. The paradox was that much of the nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments in France’s art circles at the time emerged in response to the considerable numbers, and the success, of Jewish artists in Paris during the 1920s.92 And it was often through contact with these Jewish artists that artists from Palestine had access to the art world in Paris.93 A chief spokesman for nationalism in French art was the critic Waldemar George. By the 1930s artists in Palestine had adopted his views of a particular Jewish character in art, which was published in Hebrew.94 The fact that George was of Jewish origin might have eased the reception of his views that Jewish art was essentially anti-classic and irrational and thus international and even supra-national. Eventually it was the idea that race rather than country is what defines art’s true identity which took root among artists in the yishuv.95 And as the Land of Israel ceased to be seen as the key factor in a unique identity of Jewish art in Palestine the art of the 1930s put further emphasis on self-expression and on the concept of universalism. The desire to create a genuine local Hebrew art in eretz yisrael was gradually pushed aside although it never quite disappeared. Instead, over the years it was mutated into a naïve and romantic hope that was in line with the spirit of those days of ‘innocent’ beginnings.

Conclusion

The genesis of modern Israeli art in the pre-state period can be traced to the first three decades of the twentieth century, when it had in fact two moments of birth in two different processes. One was an organised enterprise supported and funded by the Zionist Organisation: the foundation of a school of arts and crafts in Jerusalem in 1906. The other consisted of the activity of individual artists who settled in Palestine during the 1920s and then came together to exhibit their work. Despite obvious differences in the artistic products of these two phases, they were parallel in terms of ideological orientation and certain themes. The Bezalel Institute was based on various, sometimes conflicting, ideological foundations: some were rooted in the Jewish Enlightenment and others in Romantic nationalism as developed in Eastern Europe and Russia. From the point of view of Bezalel’s founder and director Boris Schatz, the aim of the institute was to create a distinctive Jewish art in eretz yisrael. Regardless of the fact that the Jewish population in the country was at the time only a small minority, Schatz believed that only there, among his people, would the Jewish artist be free from foreign influences and the genuine national art be able to emerge naturally out of the artist’s encounter with the old/new homeland. That Bezalel was unable to achieve this goal was almost inevitable. The artists who came to Palestine to start this national project were not tabula rasa, and they brought with them influences and preconceptions. While attempting to lay down roots in the East they produced art objects for consumers abroad, following patterns of traditional Jewish symbols or depicting the country according to established Western formulas. The prevalence of biblical themes in Bezalel was in tune with trends in Zionist thought that regarded the Hebrew Bible as a source for national revival. But the works themselves borrowed heavily from European Christian art in subject, composition and style. Even the attempt to represent the country through exotic ethnic types echoed a trend familiar in Orientalist art in Europe. If the art of Bezalel did not leave an enduring mark this is to a great extent due to the success of the next phase, which competed by proposing a contemporary, overtly Western idiom of art that looked fresher and appealed to the cultured audiences within the yishuv. Proclaiming themselves Modernist, these artists succeeded in ousting Bezalel from the scene and subsequently from the historical account of the period. A clash between tradition and the modern, the new versus the old, a revived Hebrew culture as opposed to the weary Jewish diaspora, were concepts that were used repeatedly in the cultural discourse in the yishuv at the time. Historians later reiterated these ideological models, at times even overstated them, in conveying the historical image of the period in

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Israeli art in terms of revolt and schism. But the lack of continuity in style and subject matter between the two phases was no indication of a divide in ideology. Both aspired to a genuine local art that would emanate from the experience of the country; hence the recurrence of landscapes and various ‘types’ in the art of the Modernists. Whereas the purpose and nature of art was in dispute among artists and critics, as were issues of influence and the means to achieve authenticity, there was no disagreement about the core principle: that visual art was a significant component in the building of the national culture. For artists who came to Palestine as part of the waves of Zionist immigrations, art was never simply a means of self-expression. More than anyone else this was evident in the work of Reuven Rubin who within a short time of his immigration in 1923 had become a leading and influential artist in the yishuv. The transformation in his style and subject matter and the views he expressed in private and in public imply that Rubin set himself a fairly clear mission: to express the spirit of the Zionist dream and to nourish among Jews emotional ties to the Land of Israel by depicting its beauty and charm. Other artists of the decade have shown a similar tendency in representing the country as an oriental Arcadia where people—Arabs and Jews—lived in natural harmony with their environment. Not only was this idealisation remote from the reality of Palestine, but it also echoed the Western attraction to what was seen as a simple and close-to-nature way of life of ‘the primitive’ in non-industrialised societies. Folklore themes and archaic or ‘naïve’ styles have enhanced this image of the country in the public’s mind. A notable inspiration was provided by 1920s art in France that was concerned with defining its own national identity through a return to classicism and to images of the land and countryside. By embracing this influence Jewish artists in Palestine pursued not just the style but also the nationalist sentiments inherent within it. Apparently the Jewish artists who settled in Palestine and worked there were committed both practically and culturally to the Zionist ideology. Practically, by their act of settlement and by contributing to national projects of building up the country; culturally, by being part of the collective creation in eretz yisrael of a new national culture—a Hebrew culture, as it was called. Through their individual art works, their collective exhibitions and by participating in public debates, artists of both groups affirmed their faith in the validity and future of the Zionist enterprise and in the value of their own role in it. The fact that so little of the actual implementation of Zionism in Palestine was represented in the art of the period calls for a rethinking of the relations between art and national ideology. Clearly, there is no necessarily direct correlation between art of a period and the big events that occur at the time. Nonetheless, art is always produced in specific historical circumstances, and by and for a particular society. If we witness such a gap between reality and artistic images in this society we should look perhaps for meanings beyond the familiar rhetoric of the ideologues. Art has the capacity to convey certain emotions and ideas that could serve the national cause in an indirect manner. The numerous pictures of ancient oriental villages and towns, humble Yemenite Jews, muscular Arab workers or Hasidic Jews celebrating religious festivals tell us very little about present-day reality or even about visions of the future. The Modernists, not unlike the Bezalel artists, preferred to evoke an imagined past in the country, a romanticised, pre-Zionist, pre-modern time. In this way the artists helped to endorse an image of the homeland as a kind of memory, a place to yearn for and to love from a distance, a

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mythical eretz yisrael rather than a real place. By applying respected modern styles they imbued the paintings with sufficient sense of credible ‘reality’ without abandoning the ideal. It was precisely this quality in the art of the 1920s that helped viewers at the time to fall in love with the Zion of their dreams when faced with the harsh reality involved in Zionist settlement in Palestine—be it the extreme heat, the economic crisis or the violent struggle with the Palestinian Arabs. Over the years this dreamy effect accumulated in the story of Israeli art, giving it a patina of authenticity—if not a true reflection of reality, at least a testimony to the spirit of the age, that of pioneers and of innocence. Future generations of artists had rejected both Bezalel art and that of the Modernists as a failed attempt to fulfil a wrong goal: that of creating ex nihilo national and local art instead of universal modern art, as later artists claim to have done. A strong and intrinsic sense of nostalgia for a pure and beautiful past was a vital feature of this art and one of the major reasons for its success both then and among later generations. No other period in Israeli art since has attracted a similar response. For the public at large in the Israel of today this art echoes the longing for ‘the good old days’, making it the most successful and admired period in the history of Israeli art. This book concentrates on a relatively short period of modern art in a small nation. Its implications therefore are mostly relevant to the specific culture that has been studied. As a final remark, note however that some of the results of this study may be valuable beyond the historical and geographical boundaries of the subject. In the first place, one may consider the influence of French art of the 1920s. This must have had an effect which spread further than the small community of artists in Palestine. Paris attracted artists from all over Europe, from America and Asia during the nineteenth century and continued to do so after the First World War. Many of these artists returned to their countries after several years, taking with them not only the modern styles they had learnt but also the spirit and ideologies that went along with these. The canonical history of modern art tends to look almost exclusively at the achievements of small groups of avantgarde artists. But the bulk of the activity in the French capital as represented in the art academies, in the Salon exhibitions and the art journals was concerned with more traditional values in art and in society. It was in this milieu that the majority of the artists in Paris came to know modern art. They were students in the various studios and academies, such as that of André Lhote who exercised an extensive influence on younger artists, many of whom were foreigners; they were visitors at the exhibitions where rustic landscapes and neo-classical themes were rife. There is no reason to believe that only artists from Palestine adopted this French conservative modernism as a model of national art. It could have proven valuable for artists from other countries who aspired to convey a similar sense of belonging to their own land and to their national tradition while continuing to be modern artists. Looking at modern art through the perspective of nationalism also offers some interesting insights that link the two spheres. Both modern art and nationalist ideologies share a similar inheritance from Romanticism and the Enlightenment and value concepts such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’. Certain developments in modern art, especially around the turn of the twentieth century, had particular resonance in national movements: Primitivism, folklore and the search for a genuine expression in remote underdeveloped societies where people presumably have continued to live outside history in a ‘pure’ state of existence in an unspecified past. This idealised image was used as a means of critique

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of the existing situation and a tool for its rejuvenation. The combination of folk elements with the modern language of ‘high art’ has been acknowledged in the work of renowned composers as well as a few painters, the Russian Jewish Marc Chagall and the Mexican Diego Rivera, to mention just a few notable examples. However, the long dominant theory of modern art as autonomous, claiming that art could be only judged from within in its own aesthetic terms, makes any attempt to interpret art in the context of other values or systems a difficult task. Yet against this notion of universalism in modern art it is also true that the study and display of modern art remains confined to national boundaries following the eighteenthcentury principles of art history. Museums that are dedicated to the art of their nation, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art or Tate Britain, to name the most famous, play a respectable part in the museum culture of today. Likewise, expertise that is developed in these museums and in academia is often defined along national lines (British sculpture, French painting). Contemporary artists constantly challenge national boundaries by travel and immigration. This however has had little effect so far on the ever-growing celebration of art in national terms, as exemplified by the continuing prestige of the Venice Biennale, a showcase which is international yet where artists represent their own country. All these facts cannot as yet provide a firm explanation or theory of national identity in modern art, but they certainly suggest further investigation is merited.

Appendix A Landscape as a theme in exhibitions of the 1920s: the Annual Exhibitions (AE) in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv ohel exhibitions Exhi Art Pai Land Jeru Sa Tib Haifa Jaffa3 Tel Co Ab Other7 2 3 & Aviv5 lony6/ road & non bition ists ntings scape salem fed erias4 & & env Ki (total) (total) Carmel envi & spe irons rons neig bbutz cific Hbour hoods 3rd AE 1924 5th AE8 1926 6th AE 1927

25

161

41 35

61 (38%)

17

–

3

1

4

3

5

11

17

181 67(37%)

24

6

5

1

4

3

2

–

22

123

31

3

2

2

7

3

4

–

14

6

10

2

1

–

11

71 (58%)

Galilee 5 7th AE 1928

26

131

52 (40%)

17

2 Galilee 3

ohel 1 1926 ohel 2 1927 ohel 3 1928 Sub total Total

11

75

15

52

11

50

–

– 773

20 (27%) 15 (29%) 13 (26%) – 299 (39%)

2

4

2

4

–

1

–

–

7

2

–

1

2

4

1

1

–

4

6

Galilee 1 15 Galilee 13 9 37

–

3

1

–

–

2

–

–

–

–

–

–

16

32

14

13

11

77

– 99

Notes 1 Number of artists includes sculptors and architects. 2 Total of paintings refers to all pictorial images, including prints and drawings. Some works may have been shown both at the Annual Exhibition and at the ohel exhibition. 3 Views in Jerusalem and Jaffa include views inside the city and particular sites, views from afar and views of villages and places in its environs.

Appendix A

189

4 Tiberias includes views of the Sea of Galilee. Images of Galilee include views of other towns and places. 5 Tel Aviv also includes the old Jewish neighbourhoods of Jaffa, annexed to Tel Aviv during the1920s. 6 Colonies are usually mentioned as an indication of a view in its surroundings. 7 ‘Other’ includes non-recurrent images and particularly non-specific titles, e.g. Olives, Mountains or just Landscape. 8 Catalogue of the 4th exhibition (1925), if printed, was not available during the course of this research.

Appendix B Ethnic types as a theme in exhibitions of the 1920s: the Annual Exhibitions (AE) in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv ohel exhibitions Exhi Artists Pain Types3 Yemen Persia Moro Seph Jerusal Relig Old/ Arab6 Pio Oth bition (total) tings2 cco ardi emites ious5 poor neer7 ers (total) & & Buc Ori hara ental4 3rd AE 1924 5th AE8 1926 6th AE 1927 7th AE 1928 ohel 1 1926 ohel 2 1927 ohel 3 1928 Subtotal Total

25

161 37(23%)

4

4

3+3

2+3

3

3

–

3

5

4

41

181 38(21%)

2

6

2+2

5

–

7

4

7

1

2

35

123 12 (10%)

1

1

–

–

–

1

2

4

–

3

26

131 32(24%)

6

1

–

1

2

–

6

13

3

–

11

75

4(5%)

1

–

–

–

–

–

1

1

–

1

15

52

7(13%)

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

5

1

1

11

50

13(26%)

–

–

–

–

1

–

1

10

–

1

– –

– 773

– 143(19%)

– 14

– 12

5+5 10

3+8 11

– 6

– 11

– 14

– 43

– 10

– 12

Notes 1 Number of artists includes sculptors and architects. 2 Total of paintings refers to all pictorial images, including prints and drawings. Sculpture was not included even though some of these types were represented in sculpture. 3 Portraits and unspecified figure representations, e.g. ‘a boy’, ‘young woman’ or biblical figures were not included. 4 The category ‘oriental’ refers to titles such as ‘oriental Jew’ and includes other oriental ethnic groups. 5 The category ‘Religious’ refer to Jewish religious students, rabbis or Hasids, often of Ashkenazi origin. 6 ‘Arab’ also includes Bedouin and images titled by occupation known to be of Arabs, e.g. fishermen. 7 ‘Pioneer’ also includes unspecified workers and people of the Kibbutz 8 Catalogue of the 4th exhibition (1925), if printed, was not available during the course of this research.

Notes

Introduction 1 For an overview of the debate see J.Gutmann, ‘Is There a Jewish Art?’, in C. Moore (ed.), The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993, pp. 1–19. For a critical review of early Jewish art histories see E. Frojmovic, ‘Buber in Basle, Schlosser in Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval Jewish Art’, in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other, Leiden, Boston and Köln: Brill, 2002, pp. 1–32; For nineteenth-century views by Jewish thinkers on the prohibition of images see K.P.Bland, ‘Anti-Semitism and Aniconism. The Germanophone Requiem for Jewish Visual Art’, in C.M.Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 41–66. See also A.Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, London: Lund Humphries and Barbican Art Gallery, 1990, pp. 15, 164 (n. 1). 2 G.Sed-Rajna (ed.), Jewish Art, New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1997, p. 9; M.Olin, ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann. Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art-Historical Texts’, in Soussloff, Jewish Identity, pp. 19–40; Frojmovic, ‘Buber in Basle’, pp. 1–4, 30–1. It was also argued that the emphasis on the prohibition on graven images in discussing Jewish art originates from misinterpretation of the biblical verses: E.Revel-Neher, ‘With Wisdom and Knowledge of Workmanship: Jewish Art Without a Question Mark’, in M.Baigell and M.Heyd (eds), Complex Identities. Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 12–33. 3 R.I.Cohen, Jewish Icons, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998, p. 198. 4 Gutmann, ‘Is There a Jewish Art?’, p. 5; Kampf, Jewish Experience, p. 15. 5 W.A.Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism’, in E.Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989, pp. 23–5; A.D.Smith, National Identity, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 75; J. Hutchinson, ‘Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration’, in J.Hutchinson and A.D.Smith (eds), Nationalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 122. 6 Olin, ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann’, pp. 20–2. 7 See S.L.Wolitz, ‘The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia’, in R.Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987, pp. 21–42; M. Rajner, ‘The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia’, Jewish Art, 1990–91, vol. 16–17, pp. 98–121; I.Bertz, ‘Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk’, in Die Jüdische Renaissance in Berlin 1900 bis 1924, Berlin: Jüdisches Museum, 1991; G.D.Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art”, in Ost und West, 1901–1908: A Study in the Nationalisation of Jewish Culture’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1994, vol. 39, pp. 83–110; M.Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.

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8 See Z.Amishai-Maisels, ‘Jewish Artists: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day’, in Sed-Rajna, Jewish Art, pp. 333–6; Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 213–18. 9 M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 129. Large-scale exhibitions of Jewish art (including contemporary Jewish painters) were later held in London (1906) and Berlin (1907). See R.I.Cohen, ‘Exhibiting Nineteenth-Century Artists of Jewish Origin in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Politics, and Culture’, in S.Tumarkin Goodman (ed.), The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York and London: Merrell, in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, 2001, pp. 153–63. The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897 and is commonly accepted as the birth of Political Zionism that led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Activities of other Jewish national organisations and Jewish settlement in Palestine predated the Zionist Congress. 10 Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des V Zionisten-Congresses in Basel, 26–30 Dezember 1901, Vienna, 1901, p. 155. Bland ascribes Buber’s views on ‘lack of creativity’ in Jews and its racial causes to anti-Semitic views current at the time: Bland, ‘Anti-Semitism and Aniconism’, p. 55. On Buber’s role in promoting Jewish national art see Frojmovic, ‘Buber in Basle’, pp. 4–7 and Cohen, ‘Exhibiting Nineteenth-Century Artists’, pp. 153–7. 11 Originally called ‘Bezalel beit midrash le-mlachot omanut’ (in German: Kunstgewerbeschule) it was later changed to ‘beit ha-sefer le-omanut u-le-mlechet omanut Bezalel’ (and in English ‘Bezalel Arts and Crafts School’). Bezalel also included workshops that produced handicrafts for sale, a society of distribution arts and crafts and later on the National Museum Bezalel. The school closed in 1929 and re-opened in 1935 as the New Bezalel. After several more changes and moves it is now called the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. The term used hereafter is Bezalel Institute or simply Bezalel. 12 B.Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980; A.Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986; D.Cosgrove and S.Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993; A.Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825– 1875, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993; M.Rosenthal, C.Payne and S.Wilcox (eds), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 13 There have been a few studies of American art and nationalism focusing mainly on the 1920s and 1930s. See J.Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; W.M.Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999; M.Baigell, Artists and Identity in Twentieth Century America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, chs 2, 4. One of the first attempts to examine early developments in modern art with a direct link to nationalism, often in new or ‘marginal’ nations, is offered by M.Facos and S.L.Hirsh (eds), Art, Culture and National Identity in fin-de-siècle Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 14 B.Fer, ‘What is modern?’, in F.Frascina et al. (eds), Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 9–10. 15 Smith, National Identity, pp. 19, 66; E.Hobsbawm and T.Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 6–14. There have been numerous definitions and theories concerning nationalism. A prominent one is the argument put forward by Ernest Gellner that nationalism is a modern phenomenon that had emerged within and as a result of industrialisation and modernisation: E.Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Regarding the Jewish national movement

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Gellner points out that the creation of farmers with collectivist ideology (the Kibbutzim) out of the bourgeois urban population of diaspora Jewry was an important factor in turning a culture/religion into a national society. This, he claims, was an exceptional case but still within the framework of his theory (an argument he emphasises in his preface to the Hebrew edition, Tel Aviv: Open University of Israel, 1994). While it is impossible to dispute here the limited perspective on Zionism offered by this argument, the present study inclines towards the theories of Anthony D.Smith that reflect on the pre-modern roots of nationalism. 16 See C.Harrison and P.Wood (eds), ‘The Idea of the Modern World’, and ‘Modernization and Modernism’, in Art in Theory 1900–1990, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 125–6, 683–6; E.Fernie (ed.), ‘Modernism’, in Art History and its Methods. A Critical Anthology, London: Phaidon, 1995, p. 349. 17 H.H.Arnason, History of Modern Art, 3rd edn, New York: Harry Abrams, 1986, pp. 9–10. 18 The major theories that are applied are feminism, Marxism, structuralism and psychoanalysis. See A.L.Rees and F.Borzello (eds), The New Art History, London: Camden Press, 1986; J.Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 19 D.Ades, T.Benton, D.Elliott and I.Boyd Whyte, Art and Power; Europe under the Dictators 1930–45, London: South Bank Centre, 1995, pp. 16–17. 20 See C.King (ed.), Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, esp. Introduction and ch. 8. 21 On the problematic equating of Zionism with colonialism, anti-colonialism or postcolonialism discourse and practice see: D.J.Penslar, ‘Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, in A.Shapira and D.J.Penslar (eds), Israeli Historical Revisionism From Left to Right, London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003, pp. 84–98. 22 See Z.Shavit (ed.), toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-eretz yisrael me-az ha-aliya ha-rishona: beniyata shel tarbut ivrit, I, Jerusalem: Israel National Academy for Science and Mossad Bialik, 1998. This volume consists of numerous essays on literature, theatre and music and only two that touch marginally on the plastic art: one on the history of the Artists’ Association and another on posters and commercial art. 23 The earliest examples are: M. Narkiss, ‘omanut be-eretz yisrael’, in P.Lahover (ed.), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael li-shnat 5694, Tel Aviv: Shem, 1933/4, pp. 324–35; E. Newman, Art in Palestine, New York: Siebel Company, 1939; K.Schwartz, ha-omanut ha-yehudit hahadasha be-eretz yisrael, Jerusalem: Mass, 1941. 24 G.Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, ch. 1. 25 Narkiss, ‘omanut be-eretz yisrael’, p. 324; Newman, Art in Palestine, p. 7; Schwartz, haomanut ha-yehudit, p. 10. 26 A.Barzel, Art in Israel, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1987, p. 5; Ofrat, One Hundred Years, p. 21; Y.Zalmona, Boris Schatz, Jerusalem: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad and Keter, 1985, pp. 25ff. See also M.Barasch, ‘The Quest for Roots’, in S.Tumarkin Goodman, Artists of Israel: 1920–1980, New York: Jewish Museum, 1981, p. 21. 27 E.Kolb, Modern Israel Art in its Beginnings, 1920–1930, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1957; Y.Fischer, Migdal David: The Beginning of Painting in Eretz-Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1968; Y.Zalmona, The Tower of David Days: First Cultural Strife in Israel Art, Jerusalem: Tower of David museum, 1991. 28 Y.Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, in Goodman, Artists of Israel, p. 30; Barzel, Art in Israel, pp. 18–19; Ofrat, One Hundred Years, pp. 35ff. Ofrat and Zalmona are the most prolific writers on Israeli art and therefore their views will be frequently used and scrutinised in this book. 29 Kolb, Modern Israel Art, n.p.; Fischer, Migdal David, n.p.; D.Levitte, ‘shnot haesrim— ekzotika shel holot u-gemalim’, in B.Tammuz (ed.), with D.Levitte, and G.Ofrat, sipura shel omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Masada, 1980, p. 33. 30 Levitte, ‘shnot ha-esrim’, pp. 47–9; Barzel, Art in Israel, p. 36.

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31 Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, p. 35. 32 See D.Lévy-Eisenberg, ‘A Sense of Place: The Mediation of Style in Eretz Israel Paintings of the 1920s’, Assaph: Studies in Art History, Section B:3, 1998, pp. 301–24. 33 C.Geertz, Art as a Cultural System’, in Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, 1983, pp. 108–9, 118. 34 P.Bourdieu, ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, in The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, p. 216 (original emphasis). 35 J.Wolff, The Social Production of Art, London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 27, 45. 36 Ibid., p. 63. 37 Ibid., p. 65 38 Ibid., p. 66.

Part I The Bezalel Institute and the myth of origin of Israeli art 1 A.Werner, Art—Israel’s New Frontier’ (1958), in R.Gordis and M.Davidowitz (eds), Art in Judaism, New York: National Council on Art in Jewish life, 1975, p. 98. 2 E.Kolb, Art in Israel’, in C.Roth (ed.), Jewish Art, Tel Aviv and London: Masada, 1961, p. 903. 3 M.Narkiss, ‘omanut be-eretz yisrael’, in P.Lahover (ed.), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael lishnat 5694, Tel Aviv: Shem, 1933/34, pp. 324–9; E.Newman, Art in Palestine, New York: Siebel Company, 1939, p. 7; K.Schwartz, ha-omanut ha-yehudit ha-hadasha be-eretz yisrael, Jerusalem: Mass, 1941, pp. 43–5; G.Talpir, ‘hayei ha-omanut be-eretz yisrael’, gazit, vol. 19/9–12, December 1961—March 1962, pp. 150ff; R. Shechori, Art in Israel, Tel Aviv: Sadan, 1974, pp. 6–9; B. Tammuz (ed.), with D.Levitte and G.Ofrat, sipura shel omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Masada, 1980, pp. 13–31; Y.Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, in S.T.Goodman, Artists of Israel: 1920–1980, New York: Jewish Museum, 1981, pp. 27–9; also M. Barasch, The Quest for Roots’, ibid, pp. 21–2; Y.Zalmona, Milestones in Israel Art, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1985, p. 35; A.Barzel, Art in Israel, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1988, pp. 5–17. 4 J.Klausner, ‘The National and Cultural Value of Bezalel’, The Palestine Weekly, 1 August 1930, vol. 19/530, p. 7. See also: M.Ussishkin, ‘The Pioneer’, ibid., p. 1. 5 Sarah Chinsky offers a criticism of the Zionist art historiography in her critique of Bezalel. However she too fails to acknowledge the pre-Bezalel activity in Jewish Palestine in the field of her main subject: handicraft and folk art. S.Chinsky, ‘rokmot ha-tahara mi-Bezalel’, te’oria u-vikoret, 1997, no. 11, esp. pp. 178–9. 6 R.Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch ha-ivri be-eretz yisrael, vol. I, Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1986, pp. 72–4, 82–6, 259, 261. Especially important was the school of crafts founded in 1882 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. 7 Y.Fischer, omanut ve-umanut be-eretz yisrael ba-meah ha-tesha-esreh, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1979, p. 109. In view of this reappraisal of Jewish folk art of Palestine Gideon Ofrat opens his book on Israeli art with the chapter ‘Prehistory: Jewish folk Art in Nineteenth-Century Palestine’. This chapter’s title, however, suggests that ‘history’ (of art in Israel) starts in the next chapter, which is dedicated to Bezalel. G.Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. 8 Tammuz, Levitte and Ofrat, omanut yisrael, pp. 29, 38; Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, pp. 29–30; Barzel, Art in Israel, pp. 18–20. 9 Arieh Aroch (1908–74), painter, studied in Bezalel 1924–25; Zeev Ben-Zvi (1904–52), sculptor, studied in 1923; Moshe Castel (1909–91), painter, studied 1922–25; Haim Gliksberg (1904–70), painter, studied in 1925; Nahum Gutman (1898–1980), painter,

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illustrator and writer, studied 1913–17; Pinhas Litvinovsky (1894–1985), painter, studied in 1912; Yisrael Paldi (1893–1979), painter, studied in 1909; Reuven Rubin (1893–1974), painter, studied in 1912; Menahem Shemi (1898–1951), painter, studied in 1913; Avigdor Stematzky (1908–89), painter, studied in 1924; Yehezkiel Streichman (1906–93), painter, studied 1924–26; Sionah Tagger (1900–88), painter, studied 1921–22. For many years the New Bezalel (from 1935) was the major art school in Jewish Palestine.

1 Ideological background 1 Y.H.Brenner, ‘me-hayei yerushalayim’ (1914), kol kitvei Y.H.Brenner, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1960, vol. 2, p. 116. 2 S.Almog, ‘produktivizatzia, proletarizatzia va-avoda ivrit’, in temurot ba-historia ha-yehudit ha-hadasha, Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1987, pp. 41–4; D.J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 15–16, 51–2, 151. 3 Penslar, ibid., p. 16; Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch ha-ivri, pp. 52–3. 4 M.Eliav, eretz yisrael ve-yishuva ba-meah ha-tesha-esreh, 1777–1917, Jerusalem: Keter, 1978, pp. 202–3; S. Avitsur, ‘tezuzot kalkaliyot u-ma’avarim le-hayei avoda ba-yishuv hayashan’, keshet, no. 51, spring 1971, pp. 103–4. 5 haluka (lit.: distribution), the charitable funds received from abroad by Jews in Palestine for distribution among the needy. In practice, most Orthodox Jews and mainly European (Ashkenazi) Jews were dependent on the haluka. In Zionist literature this was a derogatory term often used to describe the ‘illness’ of the Jewish people that would be cured by productive labour. 6 Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch ha-ivri, p. 71; M.Eliav, ahavat tziyon va-anshei hod, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz ha-meuhad, 1970, p. 304. 7 Avitsur, ‘tezuzot kalkaliyot’, p. 106; T.Parfitt, The Jews in Palestine 1800–1882, Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1987, p. 198. 8 K.Grunwald, ‘Jewish Schools under Foreign Flags in Ottoman Palestine’, in M. Ma’oz (ed.), Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi, 1975, p. 166; Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, pp. 1–3. 9 Eliav, eretz yisrael, pp. 198–9; S.Avitsur, ‘ha-melacha ve-ha-ta’asia ha-yehudit biyrushalaim lifnei kom ha-medina’, in Y.Ben-Porat et al. (eds), perakim be-toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi biyrushalaim, II, Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1976, p. 268; Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch haivri, pp. 78–86. 10 luah li-shnat 5653, Jerusalem: M.Adelman, 1893, pp. 26–7; Grunwald, ‘Jewish Schools’, p. 168; Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch ha-ivri, p. 99. 11 Elboim-Dror, ha-hinuch ha-ivri, p. 114. 12 ‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft zur Begründung jüdischer Hausindustrien und Kunstgewerbe in Palästina, Berlin, November 1904, pp. 1, 8. This manifesto was published in the Zionist organ Altneuland, January 1905, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 11–18. The slogan ‘No charity but work!’ dominated early articles on Bezalel. Cf. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, p. 74. 13 O.Warburg, ‘Bezalel the Palestine Polytechnic’, The Jewish Chronicle, 7 June 1907, p. 18. The story was first published by E.Ben-Yehuda, in his essay about the importance of trade education for Jews in Palestine; ‘amcha yisrael tzrichim parnasa’, hashkafa, 23 Iyar (May 1906). It was then repeated in articles by Bezalel supporters. See Y.Kantorowitz, ‘Bezalel: bet midrash li-melachot omanut bi-yrushalayim’, luah eretz yisrael, 12, 1906/7, Jerusalem: Ariel edition, 1980, vol. 2, p. 211; idem, ‘Von der kunstgewerbeschule Bezalel in Jerusalem’, Die Welt, vol. 10/24, 15 June 1906, p. 9.

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14 ‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft, pp. 2–3; Y.L (Y.Lurie), ‘Bezalel’, ha-olam, vol. 4/49, 10–29 December 1910, p. 6. 15 Reported in Avitsur, ‘tezuzot kalkaliyot’, p. 114; Eliav, eretz yisrael, p. 205. Lurie (ibid.) argued that since Christian craftsmen started to use machines in their olivewood works they dominated the market and thus it was one of the purposes of Bezalel to return this craft to Jewish hands. 16 Avitsur, ibid., p. 110. 17 Eliav, eretz yisrael, p. 207. 18 S.Ben-David, ‘ha-professor B.Schatz ve-esrim shana li-ysud Bezalel’, teatron ve-omanut, no. 9, Elul 5687 (1927), p. 7. Cf. G.Ofrat-Friedlander, The Periods of Bezalel’, in N.ShiloCohen (ed.), Bezalel 1906–1929, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983, p. 53. 19 S.Thon, ‘Women’s Work in Palestine’, in I.Cohen (ed.), Zionist Work in Palestine, London: Fisher Unwin, 1911, pp. 99–105. Sarah Thon founded the first embroidery workshop in Jaffa in 1908 followed by lace workshops in Tiberias and Safed (1912). In 1911 she founded the lace department in Bezalel but in 1912 the department moved to the Evelina de Rothchild School for girls where it was active until August 1914. The idea of establishing workshops for poor girls in Palestine was in fact developed by Thon as early as in 1904 and she soon started to study crafts in villages in Germany. See R.Thon, ha-ma’avak leshivyon zechuyot ha-isha: sipur hayeha shel Sarah Thon, Tel Aviv: the author, 1996, pp. 17, 30, 52–7; OfratFriedlander, ‘The Periods’, p. 59. 20 Y.Lang, itonut E.Ben- Yehuda ve-emdoteha be-inyenei ha-yishuv ha-yehudi ve-ha-tenua’a ha-leumit ba-shanim 1884–1914, unpublished PhD thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 1992, pp. 352–3. 21 Y.Zalmona, ‘Trends in Zionism and the Question of Art before the Establishment of Bezalel’, in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 30; G.Ofrat, ‘Bezalel bein ha-tzionismim’, in R.Cohen, am boneh eretz: historia yisraelit bi-re’i ha-omanut, Herzliya: Herzliya Museum, 1988, pp. 49–57. 22 M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. xiv; M.H.Gelber, Melancholy and Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000, pp. 9–14. 23 Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, p. 2. 24 Ibid., p. 130. 25 E.M.Lilien (1874–1925), artist, photographer and illustrator mostly identified with the Zionist movement; he contributed designs and illustrations to Zionist publications and created some of the most enduring images associated with Zionism. Alfred Nossig (1864– 1943), writer, editor and Zionist activist and artist. Around the turn of the twentieth century became known as a sculptor of Jewish themes and garnered some success (see R.Brainin, ‘ha-omanut ha-ivrit: Alfred Nossig’, ha-dor, vol. 1/7, 7 February 1901, pp. 9–11; vol. 1/8, 14 February 1901, pp. 8–10). 26 M.Nordau, ‘Der Zionismus der westlichen Juden’ (1901), in Zionistische Schriften, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1923, pp. 361–2. 27 M.Nordau, On Art and Artists, trans. W.F.Harvey, London: Fisher Unwin, 1907, ch. 1. Originally published in Leipzig, 1905. 28 Herman Struck (1876–1944), prolific and influential print artist. Some of his images were used in a Zionist context. In 1923 he settled in Palestine. Jozef Israëls (1824–1911), Dutch painter who gained success both in Jewish and non-Jewish circles. Lesser Ury (1861–1931), one of the most prominent German Impressionists. See also Gelber, Melancholy and Pride, p. 92. 29 Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des V Zionisten-Congresses in Basel, 26–30 Dezember 1901, Vienna, 1901, pp. 152–6. On Buber’s views and the exhibition see R.I.Cohen, ‘Exhibiting Nineteenth-Century Artists of Jewish Origin in the Twentieth

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Century: Identity, Politics, and Culture’, in S.Tumarkin Goodman (ed.), The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York and London: Merrell, in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, 2001, pp. 153–4; E.Frojmovic, ‘Buber in Basle, Schlosser in Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval Jewish Art’, in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other, Leiden, Boston and Köln: Brill, 2002, pp. 4–7. On the influence of Herder on Buber see A.Shapira, ‘li-mekorot tefisato haleumit shel Martin Buber ba-romantika ha-germanit’, ha-tziyonut, vol. 15, 1990, pp. 77–106. On other influences on Buber’s views on art see K.P.Bland, Anti-Semitism and Aniconism’, in C.M.Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 55–6. 30 Stenographisches Protokoll, ibid., p. 155; Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, p. 90; Gelber, Melancholy and Pride, pp. 45–6. 31 Berkowitz, ibid., pp. 65–6; Gelber, ibid., p. 92. 32 G.D.Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908: A Study in the Nationalisation of Jewish Culture’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 39, 1994, pp. 83– 110. Cf. D.A.Brenner, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 16–17. 33 Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, pp. 130–4. 34 English version entitled ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’ in the volume edited and translated by L.Simon, Essays, Letters, Memoirs, Oxford: East & West Library, 1946, pp. 83–101. Quotations below are from this version. 35 S.L.Wolitz, ‘The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia’, in R.Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987, p. 22. 36 A.Holtzman, melechet mahshevet—tehiyat ha-umah: ha-sifrut ha-ivrit le-nochah ha-omanut ha-plastit, Haifa: Haifa University and Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1999, p. 39. 37 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 38 Ahad Ha-Am, ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’, p. 87. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 88. 41 Most notably Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son, 1881–1885, 198×250 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Repin (1844–1930) was the most famous member in the influential artists group, Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) with which Antokolsky was associated. 42 R.Newmarch, The Russian Arts, London: Jenkins, 1916, p. 243. 43 M.Rajner, ‘The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia’, Jewish Art, 1990–91, vol. 16– 17, esp. pp. 99–106; H.Kazovsky, ‘Jewish Artists in Russia at the Turn of the Century: Issues of National Self-Identification in Art’, Jewish Art, 1995–96, vol. 21–22, esp. pp. 20– 5. 44 Ahad Ha-Am, ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’, p. 89. 45 E.K.Valkenier, ‘The Intelligentsia and Art’, in T.G.Stavrou (ed.), Art and Culture in Nineteenth Century Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 153. 46 Ibid., p. 156. 47 Ibid., p. 166. 48 A.Hilton, Russian Folk Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 220; Valkenier, ‘The Intelligentsia’, p. 166. 49 Hilton, ibid., p. 223. 50 Wolitz, ‘Jewish National Art’, pp. 24–5; Rajner, ‘The Awakening’, pp. 106–9. 51 Rajner, ibid., pp. 107–8. 52 The portfolio L’Ornement Hébreu was eventually published in Berlin in 1905. 53 P.Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978, pp. 3–4; W.A.Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism’, in E. Oring, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989, pp. 21–37;

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P.V.Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 54, 113. 54 Burke, ibid., p. 10. 55 Ibid., pp. 11–12, 14; Wilson, ‘Herder’, pp. 34–5. The notion of folk-spirit and folk-soul were crucial for the ideological base of German Cultural Zionism. See Gelber, Melancholy and Pride, p. 13. 56 The limited area in Tsarist Russia where Jews had the right of permanent settlement. 57 Wolitz, ‘Jewish National Art’, pp. 25–6. Cf. D.Noy, ‘mekomo shel S.An-Sky ba-folkloristika ha-yehudit’, mehkerei yerushalayim be-folklor yehudi, 1982, vol. 2, 94–107. 58 The museum was closed in 1918. It was later re-opened by An-Sky and the association of Jewish ethnography which was dismantled in 1928. 59 Rajner, ‘The Awakening’, pp. 119–20. 60 Hilton, Russian Folk Art, p. 225. These projects influenced Antokolsky: see Rajner, ‘The Awakening’, pp. 116–18. 61 J.Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914, London: Quartet Books, 1982, pp. 142–9. 62 Ibid., pp. 159–161; Hilton, Russian Folk Art, p. 238. Similar intention was behind the founding of workshops for girls in Jewish Palestine. 63 J.Hutchinson, ‘Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration’, in J.Hutchinson and A.D.Smith (eds), Nationalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 123. 64 Ibid., pp. 123–4. 65 Ahad Ha-Am, ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’, pp. 97–8. 66 See his letter to C.Weizmann of 1902 on the latter’s idea of establishing a Jewish university in Europe, and his dispute with S.Dubnov on national autonomy in his essay ‘Nationalists and the Diaspora’, in ibid., pp. 281, 213–21.

2 Boris Schatz, founder of Bezalel 1 M.Ehrenpreis, ‘Boris Schatz’, Ost und West, vol. 3/5, May 1903, pp. 305–18; The Jewish Encyclopaedia, New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1905, vol. 11, p. 93. 2 K.Schwartz, ha-omanut ha-yehudit ha-hadasha be-eretz yisrael, Jerusalem: Mass, 1941, pp. 44–5; A.Werner, Art—Israel’s New Frontier’ (1958), in R.Gordis and M.Davidowitz (eds), Art in Judaism, New York: National Council on Art in Jewish life, 1975, p. 99; idem, ‘Boris Schatz: Father of an Israeli Art’, Herzl Year Book, 1971, vol. 7, p. 396. 3 M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 114. 4 N.Turov, ‘le-zichro shel ha-professor Boris Schatz’, moznayim, vol. 4/37–8, March 1933, pp. 1–3, reprinted in Boris Schatz Memorial Exhibition, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1963. 5 He adopted the name Boris in Paris. 6 In some versions the year is 1867. According to the Hebrew calendar Schatz was born on the second day of the feast of Hanukkah (26 Kislev), 5627. This date corresponds to 22 November of the Julian calendar used then in Russia and 4 December of the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe, both in 1866. The major source of information about Schatz is the artist’s own writing. His autobiography, written in Sofia in 1905, was first published in Hebrew in 1906 as a serialised memoir in the Jerusalem newspaper hashkafa and in 1907 as a small book titled ehad me-rabim: mi-zichronot pasal In 1925 a new Hebrew version by Mordechai Narkiss was published in Jerusalem in a large, illustrated album format in a limited edition now titled monografia: Baruch Schatz, hayav vi-ytzirato, I (he

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might have thought of writing a second part). Another print of the autobiography with an English translation titled Boris Schatz, His Life and Work; Monography (sic) Part I bears the same date but may have been published sometime later. Sections from the book also appeared as an article ‘pesiot oman ivri’ in the cultural journal teatron ve-omanut, no. 6–7, 1926 pp. 4–8. Schatz wrote about his memoirs in other articles about Bezalel. More biographical information is offered in the obituary written by Narkiss, a former student and a close collaborator of Schatz at the Bezalel Museum: M.Narkiss, ‘Boris Schatz (1867–1932)’, moznayim, vol. 4/37–8, March 1933, pp. 3–6. Quotations hereafter are from the English version of the monograph. 7 Schatz, Monograph, p. 24. 8 Ibid., p. 25. 9 Z.Schatz, ‘melechet mahshevet’, ha-tzfira, [Hazefirah], Warsaw, no. 216, 16 December 1888, p. 3. 10 Ibid., no. 217, 18 December 1888, p. 3. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 12 E.K.Valkenier, ‘The Intelligentsia and Art’, in T.G.Stavrou (ed.), Art and Culture in Nineteenth Century Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, pp. 154, 162–6; A.Hilton, Russian Folk Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 215–16. 13 Narkiss argued that Schatz’s art was not rooted in the theories of the Wanderers ‘but rather in the ideal realism that saw in sculpture, as in art as a whole, a means to express ideas’. This ‘ideal realism’, Narkiss claimed, characterised Antokolsky, Schatz’s teacher. Whatever this may mean it is likely that Narkiss based this argument on Schatz’s own report. ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 4. 14 A leading Polish artist was Jan Matejko (1838–93) who depicted historical scenes of contemporary relevance. Among his pupils was the Jewish painter Maurycy Gottlieb. In Polish art of that time the national was often coupled with the term for spirit or soul (duch), a concept that may have appealed to Schatz. See S. Muthesius, Art, Architecture and Design in Poland: An Introduction, Königstein im Taunus: H.Köster Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1994, pp. 57–9. 15 See A.Holtzman, melechet mahshevet—tehiyat ha-umah: ha-sifrut ha-ivrit le-nochah haomanut ha-plastit, Haifa: Haifa University and Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1999, pp. 44–50. From the early 1880s onwards Sokolow was the de facto editor of ha-tzfira, a Hebrew weekly (daily since 1886) published in Warsaw. 16 R.I.Cohen, Jewish Icons, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 190–1. 17 Schatz, Monograph, p. 26. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 27. Schatz later developed these ideals in his utopian novel yerushalayim ha-benuya written in 1918 and published in 1923. In Banyuls he may have been inspired by the small tapestry manufacture established there in 1886 by the French artist Aristide Maillol. 20 According to one version it was the result of an invitation by a student delegation; according to another, an invite from King Ferdinand of Bulgaria after seeing his work in Paris: see Y.Zalmona, Boris Schatz, Jerusalem: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad and Keter, 1985, p. 19. Werner writes that the statue of Mattathias ‘so moved Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria that he invited its sculptor to come to Sofia to establish and head the Bulgarian Academy of art’: Werner, ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 401. In his own account Schatz attributed the decision ‘to leave my beloved Paris for a semi-barbarous country’ to his deteriorating relationship with his wife: Schatz, Monograph, p. 34. 21 M.Katzarova, ‘Bulgaria, Sculpture’, The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol. 5, p. 156. 22 The Czechs were dominant in the ‘cultural group’ of foreign residents in Bulgaria after the liberation including the director of the Museum of Archaeology and the first director of the

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Academy of Fine Arts. See M.V.Pundeff, ‘Bulgarian Cultural Reorientation after 1878’, in Bulgaria in American Perspective: Political and Cultural Issues, Boulder; New York: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 315. Schatz’s biographers often claimed that he was the Academy director: Werner, ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 401; or that he was the director together with the artist Ivan Markvicka: Narkiss, ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 5; Zalmona, Boris Schatz, p. 20. Whatever Schatz’s actual status at the Bulgarian art school was, it is his reputation as Professor and director at the Academy that gave him credit in the founding of Bezalel and during his time as its director. 23 Pundeff, ibid., pp. 314–15. 24 S.Ben-David, ‘ha-professor B.Schatz ve-esrim shana li-ysud Bezalel’, teatron ve-omanut, Elul 5687 (1927), vol. 9, p. 7. For Schatz’s Bulgarian commissions and works see Ehrenpreis, ‘Boris Schatz’, pp. 307–16; Zalmona, Boris Schatz, pls. 14,20,21. 25 Zalmona, ibid., p. 24. 26 Ben-David claims that the cause of shock that led to changes in Schatz’s subjects was the ‘catastrophe’, as Schatz used to refer to it, namely that his wife left him and went with another artist: ‘ha-professor Schatz’. In the autobiography (written in 1905) Schatz describes at length his turbulent relationship with his unfaithful wife, and his deep agony when (probably in 1903) she left, taking their daughter with her. His visit to America for the St Louis World Exhibition (1904) brought him self-understanding and hope as well as the renewal of his ‘old dream of working for the freedom of my people’ and the ambition to portray ‘in the universal language of art…the great suffering of my people’. Schatz, Monograph, p. 35. 27 In 1901 Schatz’s sculpture Mattathias was displayed at the exhibition organised by Martin Buber for the Fifth Zionist Congress. An illustrated article on Schatz by Ehrenpreis was published in 1903 (see note 1 above p. 199). 28 Ben-David, ‘ha-professor Schatz’, p. 7. 29 In nineteenth-century Bulgaria the crafts and particularly ceramics were very popular and of high quality. In 1888 a pottery department was opened in the State Educational Workshop for Crafts in a village near Sofia and in 1904 a pottery department was founded in the State Painting School. See T.Yankova, ‘Bulgaria, Ceramics’, The Dictionary of Art, vol. 5, London: Macmillan, 1996, p. 158. 30 According to Zalmona, based on Schatz’s hand-written document, they met in 1904 when Schatz was invited to Vienna to present his proposal in detail: Zalmona, Boris Schatz, p. 25. Narkiss, ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 5, writes that Schatz went to Herzl in 1903 and also sculpted his portrait; Werner, ‘Boris Schatz’, p. 404, suggests that the two met in 1903 in Basel at the Sixth Zionist Congress. Talpir claims that Schatz met Herzl at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 and that J.Klausner was present at the meeting: G.Talpir, ‘hayei ha-omanut beeretz yisrael’, gazit, vol. 19/9–12, December 1961—March 1962, p. 153. 31 B.Schatz, ‘The Bezalel Institute’, in I.Cohen (ed.), Zionist Work in Palestine, London: Fisher Unwin, 1911, p. 64. 32 Otto Warburg (1859–1938), the third President of the Zionist Organisation (1911–20) was Professor of Botany at Berlin University and an expert on colonisation matters. See D.J.Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, ch. 3. 33 Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943), a German Zionist and ideologue of co-operative settlement. See Penslar, ibid., pp. 55–9. Hirsch Hildesheimer (1855–1910), a scholar and activist in hovevei tziyon in Germany and one of the founders of the German Jewish philanthropist organisation Hilsferein in 1901, which supported Bezalel. 34 ‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft zur Begründung jüdischer Hausindustrien und Kunstgewerbe in Palästina, Berlin, November 1904, reprinted in the Berlin monthly Altneuland, vol. 2/1, January 1905, pp. 11–18. Formerly called Palästina, this was the organ of the Zionist commission for the exploration of Palestine published by Oppenheimer and Warburg (together with S.Soskin). Quotations hereafter from the 1904 booklet (copy at the GSIC,

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Bezalel file). Lilien, in a letter dated 10 August 1905, writes that the decision to found Bezalel was made at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basel (which took place the previous week) and that he was ordered to go to Palestine and establish it, a mission he happily accepted (also a letter dated 29 August 1905): R.Ofek (ed.), E.M.Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Tefen, Israel: Open Museum, 1997, pp. 111, 115. 35‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft, p. 3. 36 See Y.Ben-Arieh, ‘Holy Land Views in Nineteenth-Century Western Travel Literature’, in M.Davis and Y.Ben-Arieh (eds), With Eyes Toward Zion, III, New York and London: Praeger, 1991, pp. 10–29; T.Parfitt, The Jews in Palestine 1800–1882, Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1987, pp. 175–9. 37‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft, p. 3. 38 B.Schatz, Bezalel, tochnito u-matrato, Jerusalem, 1908 (1906), p. 12. The booklet includes a German part, Bezalel, Programm und Zweck (dated August 1906). All references hereafter are translated from the Hebrew version. 39 Zalmona, Boris Schatz, p. 14, suggests that Schatz’s series of works on the life of Moses (1890–92) was inspired by Ahad Ha-Am’s views. However, Ahad Ha-Am’s famous essay on Moses was published only in 1903. Zalmona also mentions the fraternity bnei-moshe (sons of Moses) founded by Ahad Ha-Am in 1889 and consisting of young Jewish intellectuals who challenged hovevei tziyon and called for a spiritual revival of the national movement. A ‘chamber’ of the fraternity was founded in Vilna and a conference of the hibat-tziyon movement was held there in August 1889 when bnei-moshe challenged the old leadership. See E.Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the early Zionist movement (1882– 1904), Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988, pp. 78–84; Y.Goldstein, Ahad HaAm: biyografia, Jerusalem: Maxwell-Macmillan-Keter, 1992, pp. 100–6, 116–17. However, there is no evidence that Boris Schatz had any contact with them or showed any interest in their ideas. During his Vilna period Schatz turned to a free and openly un-Jewish life style and held such ideas as the need for the Jews to get closer to the other nations (Monograph, pp. 27–8). Before leaving for Paris Schatz returned to Vilna in 1889 and got married but it is difficult to assess his interest in or awareness of these debates at that time. 40 Goldstein, ibid., p. 237. 41 Achad Haam [Ahad Ha-Am], ‘Ueber die Kultur’, Ost und West, vol. 2/10, October 1902, pp. 655–60; vol. 2/11, November 1902, pp. 721–8. The English version is titled ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’, in L.Simon (ed. and trans.), Essays, Letters, Memoirs, Oxford: East and West Library, 1946, pp. 83–101. 42 ‘Studienkopf’, Ost und West, vol. 2/10, October 1902, p. 714. This was the first time an example of his art was published in this journal. A few more pictures were printed there in July 1903. 43 Baron David von Günzburg, ‘Der grösste jüdische Bildhauer’, Ost und West, vol. 2/11, November 1902, pp. 729–40; Elias Günzburg, ‘M.Antokolski’, ibid., pp. 739–50, including a text by Antokolsky on the handicraft as a solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. See also M.Rajner, The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia’, Jewish Art, vol. 16–17, 1990– 91, p. 116. 44 Ahad Ha-Am, ‘Zionism and Jewish Culture’, p. 97. On Ahad Ha-Am’s concept of Hebrew culture and the ‘spirit of the nation’ see Luz, Parallels Meet, pp. 160–3. 45 See letter to A.Gutman (the writer S.Ben-Tziyon), 28 March 1906, igrot Ahad Ha-Am, ed. A.Simon, vol. 4, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1958, p. 14. Ahad Ha-Am must have read about the plans to open Bezalel in the Zionist press, which he regularly followed. 46 Letter to S.Ben-Tziyon, 18 September 1906, ibid., pp. 56–7. 47 Letter to Boris Schatz dated 16 February 1911, in response to Schatz’s application for funding from the estate of Wissotsky, of which Ahad Ha-Am was one of the trustees. Ibid., pp. 354–5.

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48 Goldstein, Ahad Ha-Am, p. 351. Ahad Ha-Am was photographed with Schatz in places usually favoured for such purposes: in the museum, in front of Hirszenberg’s painting The Eternal Jew and in front of the Bezalel gates, with students. 49 Ahad Ha-Am, ‘sach ha-kol’, ha-shiloah, vol. 26/3, April 1912, reprinted in kol kitvei Ahad Ha-Am, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953, p. 428. Original emphasis and quotation marks. 50 Ibid.

3 The Bezalel Institute 1 K.L.Silman, ‘al “Bezalel” ve-al yotzro’, ha-poel ha-tzair, vol. 3/18, 6 July 1910, p. 7. 2 Now at the Central Zionist Archive (CZA), L42/287 and L42/81. 3 The analysis of Bezalel in Israeli historiography relies mainly on these sources. See Bibliography in N.Shilo-Cohen (ed.), Bezalel 1906–1929, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983, pp. 390–1. 4 G.Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods of Bezalel’, in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 51 and passim. Cf. Silman, ‘al “Bezalel”’, p. 7; B.Schatz, ‘hevlei Bezalel’, ha-ezrah, vol. 1/1, 1919, pp. 3, 4; idem, An Open Letter to the 15th Zionist Congress, Jerusalem: Eretz-Israel Press, 1927. 5‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft zur Begründung jüdischer Hausindustrien und Kunstgewerbe in Palästina, Berlin, November 1904, p. 4. Cf. D.J.Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 73. 6 B.Schatz, Bezalel, tochnito u-matrato, Jerusalem, 1906, p. 4. 7 Z.Smilansky, ‘ha-industria ha-beitit: goral haroshet ha-kvirim’, ha-poel ha-tza’ir, no. 1, Heshvan 5668 (1907), p. 3. Smilansky was particularly disappointed by the economics experts heading up Bezalel projects and criticised Dr Oppenheimer for his superficial explanations and his approval of low wages and low standards of living for Jewish workers in Palestine as an advantage in conquering the world markets. The article continued in three more parts in Kislev, Tevet, second Adar, 5668 (1907–08) 8 Silman, ‘al “Bezalel”’, p. 8. Perhaps as a token to the host journal the writer mentions the possibility of exploitation of the workers in Bezalel but notes that ‘this cannot be recognised in the happy workers’. On the country of origin of Bezalel’s workers and students see Y.Lurie, ‘Bezale’ II, II, ha-olam, vol. 5/1, 10–19 January 1911, p. 6. On the Yemenites as ‘sober, thrifty and contented’ employees see also L.Grünhut, ‘The Jewish Population of Palestine’, in I.Cohen (ed.), Zionist Work in Palestine, London: Fisher Unwin, 1911, p. 33. 9 E.Ben-Yehuda, ‘benei teiman ve-harhavat ha-yishuv’, ha-tzevi, 2/42, 1886, reprinted in Y.Nini, teiman ve-tziyon, Jerusalem: Ha-sifriya ha-tzionit, 1982, p. 308. 10 G.Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 92–111; T.Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1996, pp. 51–60. 11 B.Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, mahuto va-atido, Jerusalem: Snunit, 1910, p. 10; Lurie, ‘Bezalel’ I, ha-olam, vol. 4/49, 10–29 December 1910, p. 6; Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, p. 49. 12 Z.Shilony, Ideology and Settlement: The Jewish National Fund, 1897–1914, Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1998, pp. 347–57. 13 Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, pp. 57, 63. 14 Schatz, An Open Letter, pp. 8–9. According to this report (p. 10), in the year preceding the First World War there were in Bezalel 483 pupils and workers, many had families, thus about a thousand people made a living on Bezalel. 15 Ibid., p. 13. Cf. Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, p. 103. 16 Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, pp. 27–31.

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17 G.Ofrat, ‘moshevet “Bezalel” be-Ben Shemen’, cathedra, no. 20, 1981, p. 129; Shilony, Ideology and Settlement, pp. 364–8. 18 Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, p. 17. 19 Shilony, Ideology and Settlement, pp. 264–7; Ofrat, ‘moshevet “Bezalel”’, pp. 144ff. 20 Ofrat, ibid., pp. 127, 137, 138 n. 34, 143, 152–6; Y.Zalmona, Boris Schatz, Jerusalem: Hakibbutz ha-meuhad and Keter 1985, p. 29. 21 Y.Lufban, ‘Bezalel’, ha-poel ha-tza’ir, vol. 7/6, 21 November 1913, pp. 4, 6. 22 Ibid., pp. 4–5; Y.H.Brenner, ‘me-hayei yerushalayim’ (1914), kol kitvei Y.H. Brenner, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1960, vol. 2, p. 116. 23 Y.Lufban, ‘Bezalel’ (end), vol. 7/7, 28 November 1913, pp. 8–10; Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, pp. 84–7. 24 Ofrat-Friedlander, ibid., pp. 63ff. 25 Lufban, ‘Bezalel’, no. 6, p. 5, vol. 7, p. 9; Silman, ‘al “Bezalel”’, p. 8. 26 Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, pp. 90–9. 27 Ibid., pp. 110ff. Idem, ‘Bezalel Sales and Promotion’, in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, pp. 327–35. 28 C.R.Ashbee (ed.), Jerusalem 1920–1922: Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the First Two Years of the Civil Administration, London: John Murray, 1924, pp. 29– 31; idem, A Palestine Notebook, 1918–1923, London: William Heinemann, 1923, pp. 247–8; R.Storrs, Orientations, London: I. Nicholson and Watson, 1937, p. 365; Y.Zalmona, The Tower of David Days: First Cultural Strife in Israel Art, Jerusalem: Tower of David museum, 1991, p. 74. 29 doar ha-yom, 7 April 1921, 10 April 1921, quoted in Zalmona, ibid., p. 74. 30 Z.Van-Vriezland, ‘Art in Jerusalem’, The Palestine Weekly, 5 May 1922, p. 312. Similarly, Ashbee referred to Bezalel art as ‘the sham product for dilettante, tout, and tourist’: A Palestine Notebook, p. 247, and Storrs, Orientations, p. 496, described Bezalel products as ‘the negation of art—often the death of craft’. 31 A.Mishori, shuru habitu u-re’u: ikonot u-smalim hazutiyim tziyoniyim ba-tarbut ha-yisraelit, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000, pp. 96ff; Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, p. 110. 32 Ofrat-Friedlander, ibid., p. 122. 33 Ze’ev Raban (1890–1970) came to Jerusalem in 1912, and was a leading figure in Bezalel as teacher, head of various departments and as a designer. Meir Gur-Arieh (1891–1951) joined Bezalel in 1909 as a student and from 1911 was a teacher. For a survey of Raban’s work see B.Goldman Ida, Ze’ev Raban: A Hebrew Symbolist, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Jerusalem: Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi, 2001; also Raban Remembered: Jerusalem’s Forgotten Master, New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 1982. 34 N.Shilo-Cohen, ‘The Problem of Identifying and Dating Bezalel Objects’, in idem, Bezalel, p. 281. 35 G.Ofrat, New Bezalel, Jerusalem: Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, 1987. 36 Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Periods’, pp. 37–40. According to Lilien’s letters to his fiancée at the time, he initially planned to stay in Palestine only six months. He reported his arrival in Jerusalem together with Boris Schatz on 17 January 1906, and later mentioned a few times that he was obliged to stay until the end of June. Bezalel is rarely mentioned in his letters from Palestine. See R.Ofek (ed.), E.M. Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Tefen, Israel: Open Museum, 1997, pp. 115, 125, 134, 138. 37 Aharon Shaul Schur (1864–1945) studied in Vilna, Vienna and Berlin before immigrating in 1913 to open in Bezalel, on Warburg’s request, a department of miniature painting, which he headed until 1929. See G.Ballas, ‘Aharon Shaul Schur tzayar eterz-yisraeli’, tziyur u-fisul, no. 18, 1979, pp. 4–10. 38 Shmuel Ben-David (1884–1927), who was Schatz’s student in Sofia, arrived in Jerusalem with Schatz and studied in the first class of 1906; he soon became head of the carpetweaving department. He also taught perspective, draughtsmanship and decorative art; Meir Gur-Arieh taught ivory carving and painting from 1911 to 1929; Reuven Leaf (Lifshitz),

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who studied from 1906, was head of the metal and wood batik department 1912–16; Shmuel Persoff (1885–1961) studied from 1906 and taught in the silver department 1908–17. Also, Ya’akov Kantorowitz (1890–1961) studied from 1906 and headed the carpet weaving department while Ya’akov Ben-Dov (1882–1968), who studied 1908–10, was head of the photography department 1911–13. 39 Schatz is recorded as the teacher of painting, modelling (sculpture) and drawing on a notice to the students dated 15 Av 5674 (1914), CZA L42/272 and in a teachers’ register from 1915–17, CZA L42/339. 40 N.Gutman and E.Ben-Ezer, bein holot u-kehol shamayim, Tel Aviv: Yavne, 1980, p. 111. Nahum Gutman (1898–1980), son of the Hebrew writer S.Ben-Zion, came to Palestine as a child with his family and studied in Bezalel from 1913 to 1917. Gutman’s paintings will be discussed in chapters 8 and 9. Abel Pann returned to Paris in 1914, then travelled to the USA and came back to Palestine and to Bezalel in 1920. 41 A student’s record book from c. 1913, GSIC, Bezalel file; a student’s record book of 1922/23, reproduced in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 363. 42 Matrikel der Bezalelschule, July 1914, CZA L42/272. 43 Report from teachers’ meeting, 28 April 1914, CZA L42/272 (original emphasis). 44 Brenner, kol kitvei, pp. 116–17. 45 R.Rubin, My Life, My Art, New York: Sabra Books, Funk and Wagnalis, 1969, p. 55. 46 H.Osborne (ed.), ‘Art education’, The Oxford Companion to Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 73–7. 47 Cf. the following small ivory carvings in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem: female nude with uplifted hands (no. 4589); seated female dressed in classical drapery with rock and sea landscape (no. 4567); male nude with one leg leaning on a platform (nos. 4631 and 4525); male nude runner with a torch (no. 4590); male nude in profile seated (no. 4604). 48 ‘Bezalel’ Gesellschaft, pp. 4, 5. Bezalel evening classes were attended by boys and girls aged 11 to 13, mainly of the Sephardi population of Jerusalem (their ethnic origin was specified in the students’ registers, CZA L42/272 and L42/295). 49 Zalmona, Boris Schatz, pp. 28–9; Mishori, shuru, p. 48. Ashbee, a leading advocate of the Arts and Crafts principles, wrote that Bezalel was neither more nor less successful than other similar schools around the world, of which, however, the people of Bezalel were utterly ignorant: A Palestine Notebook, p. 246. 50 Mishori, ibid., p. 100, 51 A.Hilton, Russian Folk Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 227–44; M.Rajner, ‘The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia’, Jewish Art, vol. 16–17, 1990– 91, pp. 116–18. 52 B.Schatz, al omanut, omanim u-mevakrim: pitgamim u-michtamim, Jerusalem: Bnei Bezalel, 1924, pp. 10, 16, 17. See also the memoirs of H.Gliksberg, shmurim ba-lev, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975, p. 128. 53 Y.Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim ba-omanut ha-ivrit ba-aretz’, teatron ve-omanut, no. 1, 17 June 1925, p. 11. 54 G.Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Bezalel Museum (1906–1929)’, in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 339. 55 A.D.Smith, National Identity, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 76. 56 R.I.Cohen, Jewish Icons, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 198ff. In a bit of an overstatement Cohen claims that Bezalel was established ‘as a museum with an accompanying school for arts and crafts’, p. 213. 57 Quoted in the memoir of the zoologist Israel Aharoni who was in charge of the flora and fauna collection of the museum. Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Bezalel Museum’, p. 339. 58 Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, p. 21; Ofrat-Friedlander, ibid., p. 346. It is worth noting that by ‘local inhabitants’ Schatz referred exclusively to the Jewish population of which only a minority had such national interests. 59 Schatz, An Open Letter, p. 16.

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60 Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Bezalel Museum’, p. 358. 61 In a letter of invitation to the British High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel, quoted in ibid., p. 353 62 ‘Memorandum: The Jewish National Museum of Fine Art’, Jerusalem, 2 November 1922, CZA A1 14/132. Zadok (Zigfried) Van Vriezland (1886–1939), a Dutch Jewish lawyer and Zionist activist, immigrated to Palestine in 1919, was active in finance and was also very interested in art, writing reviews and collecting paintings by Jewish artists in Palestine. 63 Ibid., pp. 2, 6. 64 ‘Report on Bezale’: to the Palestine Zionist executive, Jerusalem, 11 November 1924, CZA, A1 14/208, pp. 2, 6. 65 In a letter of June 1925, quoted in Ofrat-Friedlander, ‘The Bezalel Museum’, p. 355.

4 The iconography of Bezalel art 1 N.Shilo-Cohen (ed.), Bezalel 1906–1929, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983, ch. 6; I. Oltuski, Kunst und Ideologie des Bezaleles in Jerusalem: Ein Versuch zur jüdischen Identitätsfindung, Frankfurt (Main): Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 1988, ch. 2.6. 2 N.Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel shel Schatz 1906–1929, a supplement (in Hebrew only) to the above catalogue. This checklist describes every item, its function or form, giving a brief title or subject and other catalogue information. 3 N.Shilo-Cohen and Y.Zalmona, ‘The Style and Iconography of Bezalel Objects’, in ShiloCohen, Bezalel, pp. 215–16. 4 Calculation based on the catalogue checklist; the Menorah appears about twice as often as the Magen David and the Tablets of the Law added together. 5 G.Scholem, ‘The Star of David: History of a Symbol’, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971, p. 259. 6 Ibid., p. 281. 7 Ibid., p. 261; L.Yarden, The Tree of Light: A Study of the Menorah, London: East and West Library, 1971; Y.Israeli (ed.), In the Light of the Menorah: Story of a Symbol, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1999; R.Hachlili, The Menorah, The Ancient Seven-Armed Candelabrum: Origin, Form and Significance, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001. 8 I.Fishof, ‘Facing the Menorah: Jewish Art in the Mosern Era’, in Israeli, ibid., pp. 126–31; R.Arbel, ‘Mehorah and Magen David: Two Zionist Symbols’, Israeli, ibid., pp. 205–9. 9 Lilien used for Bezalel a design he had already made for the Songs of Solomon (1904) and he continued to use it for other illustrations. See E.M.Lilien Zeichnungen, Munich: Michael Hasenclever Galerie, 1987, ills 9, 25, 26. 10 B.Schatz, ‘The Bezalel Institute’, in I.Cohen (ed.), Zionist Work in Palestine, London: Fisher Unwin, 1911, p. 64. 11 In a letter from Lilen to his fiancée dated 16 August 1905 he states that drawing the creator of the Ark of the Covenant with the features of Schatz in the latter’s ex libris was well meant: R.Ofek (ed.), E.M.Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Tefen, Israel: Open Museum, 1997, p. 114. 12 Z.Vilnay, The Holy Land in Old Prints and Maps, Jerusalem: Mass, 1963, p. xxxvii; Y.Fischer, omanut ve-umanut be-eretz yisrael ba-meah ha-tesha-esreh, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1979, pp. 46, 65, 72, 124, 161–3, 184. 13 T.Parfitt, The Jews in Palestine 1800–1882, Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1987, pp. 119–21. 14 Traditions regarding biblical Rachel’s place of burial go back to the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century Rachel’s Tomb received its present form and Jewish claim on it was

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established. Mother Rachel is the holy mother figure in Jewish popular tradition and is associated with the lament on the exile of ‘her sons’ and the hopes for their return. The shrine attracted Jews from all ethnic groups and from many countries and its image decorated many ritual objects. See S.Weiss, atarim kedoshim be-eretz-yisrael, Jerusalem: Mass, 1987, pp. 1–17. 15 M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 137, 140. 16 D.Yahav, ‘migdal david (“ha-metzuda”) ba-omanut’, nativ, vol. 9/5, September 1996, p.42. 17 Among the rare examples is the first picture in sefer yerushalayim (Jerusalem Book) by Tuvia, son of Rabbi Yoel Moshe Solomon, published in Jerusalem in 1884. For other examples see Fischer, omanut ve-umanut, pp. 176, 199 and Yahav, ‘migdal david’, p. 45. 18 In the 1940s the Tower of David appeared on an approved proposal for the emblem of Jerusalem. See A.Mishori, shuru habitu u-re’u: ikonot u-smalim hazutiyim tziyoniyim batarbut ha-yisraelit, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000, pp. 224–5. 19 A typical example is a poster for the promotion of tourism in Palestine dated 1929, by Bezalel artist Ze’ev Raban (CZA). In small pictures flanking a map of Palestine a mixture of Jewish sites are shown: traditional Holy Places of the Temple Site, Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of Machpelah (in Hebron); the Tower of David, the two Zionist schools Bezalel and Herzliya, and the two Zionist colonies Rishon Le-tziyon and Metulah. 20 Schatz, ‘The Bezalel Institute’, p. 60. The story appears in Hebrew in Bezalel, toldotav, mahuto va-atido, Jerusalem: Snunit, 1910, p. 3. 21 Schatz, ibid., p. 58. 22 B.Schatz, ‘The Jewish Room’, Bezalel Archives, vol. 1/1, Tishrei 5688 (autumn 1927), p. 15. In this spirit Bezalel’s gifts to its members were a miniature Megillah (Book of Esther), a Passover plate and a Hanukkah lamp. 23 The sixth-century floor mosaic of the Bet-Alpha synagogue was excavated in 1929; the findings of the third-century Dura Europos synagogue with its unique wall paintings were published in 1933. On Jewish collections see R.I.Cohen, Jewish Icons, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998, ch. 5. 24 D.Patterson, Abraham Mapu: The Creator of the Modern Hebrew Novel, London: Horovitz Publishing, 1964, p. 6. 25 Ibid., p. 87. 26 Y.Fichman, Introduction to Avraham Mapu, ahavat tziyon, Warsaw: Achisefer, 1928, p. 6. 27 Boris Schatz, His Life and Work; Monography, Part I, Jerusalem: Bnei Bezalel, c.1925, p. 11. 28 See B.Goldman Ida, Ze’ev Raban: A Hebrew Symbolist, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Jerusalem: Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi, 2001, pp. 106–27. 29 G.Yardeni (ed.), sal ha-anavim, Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1967, pp. 11–12. 30 Y.H.Brenner, ‘ha-janer ha-eretz-yisraeli va-avizarehu’ (1911), in kol kitvei Y.H. Brenner, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1960, vol. 2, pp. 268–70. 31 A student record book (c.1913) with programme for eight semesters gives full details of the Hebrew studies, six hours a week: GSIC, Bezalel file. For the actual teaching see Bezalel teacher’s notebook, 1 July 1914 to 24 January 1915, CZA L42/278. All three subjects were taught by M.Mabshan (Menahem Mendel Bronstein). In the early years the Hebrew teacher was Yisrael Aharoni. Bezalel however preferred students who already knew the Hebrew language. See S. Haramati, reshit ha-hinuch ha-ivri ba-aretz, Jerusalem: Mass, 1979, pp. 82, 140, 309. During the 1920s Hebrew was no longer mentioned in the curriculum. See student record book, Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 363. 32 ‘mikra’, ha-entziklopedia ha-ivrit, vol. 24, Jerusalem, 1972, pp. 335–6. 33 Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, p. 12.. 34 A.D.Smith, National Identity, London: Penguin, 1991, pp. 9, 66, 78.

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35 A notable exception calling for Jewish settlement in other parts of the world was the East Africa plan (known as the Uganda proposal) that caused a deep crisis in the Zionist movement in 1903–5. See S.Almog, Zionism and History, New York: St Martins Press and Jerusalem: Magnes, 1987, ch. 4; E. Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist movement (1882–1904), Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988, ch. 10; D.J.Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 56–7. 36 J.Hutchinson, ‘Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration’, in J.Hutchinson and A.D.Smith (eds), Nationalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 123–4. 37 Schatz, ‘The Jewish Room’, p. 14. 38 M.Soloveitchik, rashei perakim be-madaei ha-mikra, Odessa: Moriah, 1916, pp. 6–7. 39 R.Brainin, ‘sefer ha-sefarim’ (1922), in G.Elkoshi (ed.), antologya mikra’it: ha-tanach bire’i ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-hadasha, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953, pp. 5–6. 40 J.Gutmann, ‘Is There a Jewish Art?’, in C.Moore (ed.), The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993, p. 6. 41 omanut, March vol. 2/1, 1941, p. 13. 42 N.Sokolow, ‘otzar ha-temunot be-Dresden’, in ketavim nivharim le-zecher hag hatzi ha-yovel li-f’ulato ha-sifrutit (1879–1904), 2nd edn, Warsaw [s.n.], part V, 1913, p. 15. 43 Ibid., p. 10. 44 Ibid., p. 24. 45 B.Schatz, ‘ta’aruchat Abel Pann’, ha-aretz, 22 October 1922, p. 3. The article was written on the occasion of Pann’s exhibition at the Citadel, of which a whole room was dedicated to themes from the book of Genesis mostly made during Pann’s stay in the USA. In 1924 Pann published an album of lithographs on Genesis. 46 N.Sokolow, ‘ha-yesh hen ivri?’; ‘melechet mahshevet ve-geza shem’, in ketavim nivharim, part V, pp. 28–39, 40–67; also his articles on Lilien, part III, pp. 41–4 and on Glicenstein, part V, pp. 68–74. 47 Ibid., part V, p. 66. 48 Idem, ‘tzeror admat eretz-yisrael (le-merashotei Mordechai Antokolsky)’, in ibid., part III, p. 24. 49 In a recent exhibition of nineteenth-century Jewish artists only five out of seventy-three exhibits were dedicated to biblical themes: S.Tumarkin Goodman (ed.), The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York and London: Merrell, in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, 2001. On artists in Russia see H.Kazovsky, ‘Jewish Artists in Russia at the Turn of the Century: Issues of National Self-Identification in Art’, Jewish Art, vol. 21–2, 1995–96, pp. 25–9. 50 D.A.Brenner, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 33–4, 73. 51 G.D.Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908: A Study in the Nationalisation of Jewish Culture’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1994, vol. 39, pp. 84, 90– 1. 52 I.Bertz, ‘Lesser Ury: Die Wiedergeburt des hebräischen Mythos’, in ‘Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk.’ Die Jüdische Renaissance in Berlin 1900 bis 1924, Berlin: Jüdisches Museum, 1991, pp. 23–8. Many of the biblical works by Ury were destroyed during the Second World War and are thus less well known. See B. Goldman-Ida, ‘Moses (Approaching Mt. Sinai) by Lesser Ury’, Tel Aviv Museum of Art Annual Review, no. 5, 1995, pp. 32–7. 53 The opening exhibition of the Israel Museum in 1965 was dedicated to Old Masters and the Bible. No Jewish artist was represented. On a similar line the exhibition Landscape of the Bible: Sacred Scenes in European Master Paintings marked the Millennium at the Israel Museum in 2000.

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54 B.Schatz, 31 temunot be-tsivei shemen, Jerusalem: Eretz Yisrael press, 1929; Prof. Boris Schatz 1867–1932 Memorial Exhibition, Jerusalem: Artists House, 1988. The painter Haim Gliksberg wrote in his memoirs that although Schatz was not observant he engraved on his reliefs verses from the Scriptures and prayers and the Bezalel Museum as a whole has the character of a synagogue. H.Gliksberg, shmurim ba-lev, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975, p. 129. 55 From a notice to the students, dated 15 Av 5674 (1914) and signed by the teacher of painting, modelling and drawing, Prof. B.Schatz, CZA L42/272. On Schatz’s visit together with his students to the Western Wall on the night of the Ninth of Av see Gliksberg, ibid. p. 30. 56 ‘The Activities of the School during the Term 5689’, The Palestine Weekly, vol. 19/530, 1 August 1930, p. 34. 57 Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Department of Prints and Drawings, Bezalel port-folio, Composition: numbers o.s. 3082.66; o.s. 3080.66; o.s. 3106.66; o.s. 3078.66. All works on paper, artists unknown (some signed). 58 N.Gutman and E.Ben-Ezer, bein holot u-kehol shamayim, Tel Aviv: Yavne, 1980, p. 130. 59 E.M.Hurll, The Bible Beautiful; A History of Biblical Art, London: Sisley’s, 1908, pp. 216– 20. Cf. B.Bernard, The Bible and its Painters, London: Orbis Publishing, 1983; R.Mühlberger, The Bible in Art: The Old Testament, New York: Portland House, 1991. 60 M.Warner, ‘The Question of Faith: Orientalism, Christianity and Islam’, in M. Stevens (ed.), The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, London: Royal Academy, 1984, pp. 32–3; E.W.Said, Orientalism (1978), London: Penguin, 1995, pp. 177, 230–1. 61 Schatz, ‘ta’aruchat Abel Pann’, p. 3. 62 The form of the Ark of the Covenant in Schatz’s works shows close resemblance to Tissot’s Ark. See The Old Testament by J.James Tissot, Paris, London and New York: M.de Brunoff, 1905, vol. I, pp. 275, 277. On the influence of Tissot on Abel Pann’s biblical painting see Y.Zalmona, ‘Hirszenberg, Lilien and Pann—Painters at Bezalel’, in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, p. 207. Tissot’s works are specifically acknowledged as a source for several Bezalel works (‘after Tissot’) as recorded in the first catalogue of Bezalel Museum, e.g., nos 444, 4699. Other artists are also mentioned as the source of Bezalel works: Records of inventory by M.Narkiss, temporary catalogue, 1936 (Hebrew), Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 63 Oltuski, Kunst und Ideologie, p. 54. 64 M.Narkis [Narkiss], ‘The “Bezalel” National Museum’, The Palestine Weekly, vol. 19/530, 1 August 1930, p. 9. 65 ha-aretz, 6 October 1922, p. 5. 66 The sculpture is recorded as no. 4149 in the museum’s first catalogue (compiled in 1936). No mention of it being a copy. A copy of the same David was displayed at the opening exhibition of the Tel Aviv Museum in 1932 and another copy was given by the city of Florence to the Tower of David museum in Jerusalem in the 1990s. 67 See Boris Schatz: Memorial Exhibition, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1963; and Memorial Exhibition, 1988. 68 Quoted in M.Narkis [Narkiss], ‘Let Your Eyes Behold Your Masters’, in Boris Schatz: Memorial Exhibition (1963), not paginated. Originally published in Bezalel Archives, no. 3– 4, June 1928. The biblical dictum is based on Isaiah, 30:20. 69 Cohen, Jewish Icons, ch. 3. 70 Z.Schatz, ‘melechet mahshevet’, ha-tzfira, [Hazefirah], Warsaw, no. 217, 18 December 1888, p. 3. 71 Quoted in Narkis, ‘Let Your Eyes’. 72 Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 142. 73 The identification between the man and the institution was even compared to that of Napoleon and France or Bismark and Germany! See O.Warburg, ‘“Bezalel” and Schatz’, The Palestine Weekly, vol. 19/530, 1 August 1930, p. 4. Caricatures in the Jewish press occasionally called Schatz ‘Rabbi Bezale’. See Y. Zalmona, ‘Boris Schatz’ in Shilo-Cohen, Bezalel, pp. 157–8.

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74 R.Wistrich, ‘Theodor Herzl: Zionist Icon, Mythmaker, and Social Utopian’, in R.Wistrich and D.Ohana (eds), The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma, London: Frank Cass, 1995, p. 28. 75 Ibid., p. 3. 76 Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, p. 135. 77 H.Struck, ‘As an Artist Saw Him’, in M.W.Weisgal (ed.), Theodor Herzl: A Memorial, New York [s.n.], 1929, p. 36. 78 Wistrich, ‘Theodor Herzl’, p. 31. 79 Lilien also used Herzl’s features for figures of Aaron the priest and Hezekiah the king and other biblical figures. See E.M.Lilien: Zeichnungen für Bücher, Munich: Michael Hasenclever Galerie, 1981. 80 M.Narkess [Narkiss], ‘The Arts Portray Herzl’, in Weisgal, Theodor Herzl, pp. 119–20. For various examples see D.Tartakover, Herzl in Profile: Herzl’s Image in the Applied Arts, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1978. 81 See notices of payment from 1915 to three sitters, Avraham Bakshi, Avraham Temani and Mrs Bahar, who were paid between half and one franc a day, CZA L42/43. 82 S.[K.Y.Silman], ‘ha-ta’arucha ha-omanutit (reshamim)’, part II, ha-aretz, 13 April 1921, p. 3. Pann also published a series of postcards of Jerusalem types. 83 B.Schatz, Bezalel, tochnito u-matrato, Jerusalem, 1906, p. 12. 84 M.Naor and D.Giladi, eretz yisrael ba-meah ha-esrim, 1900–1950, Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1990, pp. 14–16. 85 Parfitt, The Jews in Palestine, pp. 29–32. A 1911 source estimates the Ashkenazi population in Jerusalem at 40,000: L.Grünhut, ‘The Jewish Population of Palestine’, in I.Cohen (ed.), Zionist Work in Palestine, London: Fisher Unwin, 1911, p. 41. 86 J.Helpher, ‘edot ha-mizrah bi-yrushalayim be-meah ha-shanim she-kadmu le-hakamat hamedina’, in M.Lissak (ed.), edah, leom u-ma’amd ba-hevra ha-yisraelit, I, Tel Aviv: universita ha-petuha, 1989, p. 66. After the First World War there was a growing immigration of oriental Jews to Jerusalem (p. 58). According to Druyan’s calculations Jews of the Islamic world constituted one-quarter to one-third of the Jewish yishuv in Palestine before the First World War but in Jerusalem in 1913 there were 6254 souls (14 per cent of the Jewish population): N.Druyan, ‘yehudei artzot ha-Islam be-eretz yisrael bi-tekufat haaliya ha-shniya’, in Y.Bartal, Z.Tsahor and Y.Kaniel (eds), ha-aliya ha-shniya, I, Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1997, p. 324. 87 N.Druyan, ‘olei teiman ba-aliya ha-shniya’, in M.Naor (ed.), ha-aliya ha-shniya, 1903–1914, Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1984, p. 132. 88 G.Pozailov, ‘aliyat yehudei Buchara le-eretz yisrael ve-hityashvutam ba ad milhemet haolam ha-rishona’, pe’amim, no. 35, 1988, p. 123. 89 A.Osten, ‘Von den Juden des Araratgebietes’, vol. 1/9, 1901, pp. 657–60; ‘Exotiche Juden’, vol. 1/12, 1901, pp. 933–40; H.Burchardt, ‘Die Juden in Yemen’, vol. 2/5, 1902, pp. 338–42; ‘Kaukasische Bergjuden’, vol. 3/3, 1903, pp. 205–10; H.Landsdell, ‘Die Juden von Buchara’, vol. 3/9, 1903, pp. 621–32. There were also photographs and drawings of Jews from North Africa and Palestine. 90 D.Yelin, ‘ginzei teiman’, ha-shiloah, vol. 2, April-September 1887, pp. 147–61; N.Slouschz, ‘ha-yehudim be-mitzrayim’, ahiasaf, vol. 5, 1897–98. 91 A.Ya’ari, igrot eretz yisrael, Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1950; idem, shluhei eretz yisrael, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-rav Cook, 1951, pp. 146–50; T.Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002, pp. 211–14. 92 Y.Nini, yehudei teiman, Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1988, p. 13; T.Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1996, pp. 26–32. 93 Said, Orientalism, pp. 230–1. Said refers to the Arab but the same attitude was shown to oriental Jews.

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94 E.Ben-Yehuda, ‘benei teiman ve-harhavat ha-yishuv’, ha-tzevi, vol. 2, 1886, reprinted in Y.Nini, teiman ve-tziyon, Jerusalem: Ha-siffriya ha-tzionit, 1982, p. 308. The time of the mishna—c. 200 CE. 95 I.Schorsch, ‘The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 34, 1989, pp. 49, 53–5. In practice the Sephardi pronunciation was adopted only partially. See S.Morag, ‘The Emergence of Modern Hebrew: Some Sociolinguistic Perspectives’, in L.Glinert (ed.), Hebrew in Ashkenaz, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 213–14. 96 Y.Berlovitz, ‘dmut ha-teimani be-sifrut ha-aliyot ha-rishonot’, pe’amim, no. 10, 198l, pp. 77–82, 94. 97 Idem, le-hamtzi eretz le-hamtzi am: sifrut ha-aliya ha-rishona, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz hameuhad, 1996, p. 80. 98 Such a description of the various ethnic Jews of Jerusalem opens the chapter on the city’s inhabitants in the guidebook by H.A.Zuta and L.Sukenik, artzenu: sefer moreh derech beeretz yisrael u-va-aratzot ha-govlot ba, I, Jerusalem: Va’ad ha-tzirim, 1920, p. 64. The book illustrators, Bezalel teachers Schur and Gur Arieh, focused in this chapter exclusively on oriental Jews. The focus on oriental Jews was typical of such texts. See Grünhut, ‘The Jewish Population of Palestine’, pp. 29–42. 99 Schatz, Bezalel, toldotav, p. 9; Y.Lurie, ‘Bezalel’ II, ha-olam, vol. 5/1, 10–19 January 1911, p. 3. See also Haramati, reshit ha-hinuch, p. 308 n. 102. 100 M.Ehrenpreis, ‘Boris Schatz’, Ost und West, vol. 3/5, 1903, p. 314. 101 P.Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978, pp. 21– 2. 102 G.Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 92–111; Y.Nini, The Jews of the Yemen, 1800–1914, Chur and Reading: Harwood Academic Publisher, 1991, pp. 226–32. 103 Shafir, ibid., p. 99; Druyan, ‘yehudei artzot ha-Islam’, pp. 328–30.

5 A‘Hebrew style’: the early quest for local Jewish art 1 Bezalel Archives, vol. 1/1, Tishrei 5688 (1927), p. 1 (original English version with some corrections). 2 B.Schatz, Bezalel, tochnito u-matrato, Jerusalem, 1906, p. 7. 3 H.Struck, ‘Einige Worte ueber den ‘Bezalel’”, Ost und West, vol. 7/1, January 1907, p. 25 4 N.Shilo-Cohen and Y.Zalmona, ‘The Style and Iconography of Bezalel Objects’, in N.ShiloCohen (ed.), Bezalel 1906–1929, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983, pp. 215, 232–42. 5 I.Even-Zohar, ‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948’, Studies in Zionism, no. 4, Autumn 1981, p. 167. 6 Y.Shavit, me-ivri ad kena’ani, Jerusalem: Domino; Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1984, pp. 17–39 7 B.Schatz, al omanut, omanim u-mevakrim, Jerusalem: Bnei Bezalel, 1924, p. 28.

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Part II Art for the nation: the work of Reuven Rubin 1 ‘Art as Propaganda’, The New Palestine, 1928, an unidentified newspaper cutting. GSIC, Rubin file I. 2 H.N.Bialik, ‘The Artist Rubin’, introduction to catalogue, 1927, excerpt translated in C.Rubin (ed.), Rubin Museum: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993, p. 106. 3 Y.Katz, ‘Reuven’, ha-aretz, 27 February 1927, p. 2; W.Schack, ‘Rubin’, The Studio, vol. 98, 1929, p. 573; E.Fleg, introduction to catalogue, Exposition Rubin, Paris: Galerie Marcel Bernheim, 1926. 4 In 1930 painting prices for Jewish artists in Palestine were 20–80 Palestinian pounds while Rubin’s paintings sold at PP200 to PP400: U.Kesari, ‘etzel anshei ha-mikhol’, doar ha-yom, 14 January 1930, p. 2.

6 Beginnings in Romania 1 Rubin used to sign his works using his first name only, in Latin and later in Hebrew (Reuven), and thus became known as an artist by the name of Reuven in Jewish Palestine and Rubin abroad. Eventually he was called Reuven Rubin and in 1930, shortly before his marriage, he changed it officially. 2 M.Heyd, ‘Reuven Rubin in Palestine’, in Rubin Museum: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993, p. 100. 3 Rubin, My Life, My Art, New York: Sabra Books, Funk and Wagnalis, 1969, p. 17. Rubin also told that his maternal grandfather was a Rabbi in another town (p. 41). 4 Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, The Menorah Journal, vol. 12/15, October-November 1926, p. 497. Rubin’s father grew up in Falticeni but rebelled ‘against the narrow, closed Jewish life in the little town and had longed for wider horizons …to know more about the big world’. Thus he moved to the big city of Galatz in hope for better opportunities: Rubin, My Life, pp. 33–5. 5 Rubin, My Life, p. 55. See above, chapter 3 p. 36. 6 Letter (in Hebrew) to Boris Schatz from the director of The Romanian-Palestine Trading and Industry Company, Ltd (unclear signature), sent from Jaffa on 16 January 1922. Rubin’s message to Schatz was probably delivered verbally to the writer of the letter, which accompanied the catalogue of Rubin’s New York exhibition of 1921. The message also mentions that when Rubin intended to leave Bezalel Schatz offered him the job of artistic director of the ivory carving department. GSIC, Rubin file I. 7 His biographical outline states that he spent a year in Bezalel: Rubin Museum, p. 39; Rubin, My Life, p. 12. 8 Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, p. 498. 9 L.Bernheimer, ‘Tragic Fire of the East in Roumanian Paintings’, in Rubin and Kolnik: Paintings and Sculptures, New York: The Anderson Galleries, November 1921. Reprinted from the Sunday World, 30 October 1921: RMA. 10 Rubin, My Life, pp. 57–8. 11 G.Talpir, ‘Reuven Rubin’, gazit, vol. 22/5–8, December 1964—March 1965, pp. 45–8, 89; A.Werner, Rubin, Tel Aviv: Massadah, 1958; idem, ‘Reuven Rubin: Pioneer of Israeli Art’,

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Arts Magazine, vol. 42, April 1968, pp. 47–9; S.Wilkinson, Reuven Rubin, New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1974. 12 Rubin’s 1921 and 1926 descriptions of his earlier years show he could not have arrived in Paris before 1914 and a published conversation with him in 1924 states that Rubin came to Paris only two months before the War: R.Benyamin, ‘sha’ot im Reuven’, Catalogue of Rubin Exhibition at the Citadel, Jerusalem, 1924, p. 3, CZA A1 14/89 (also published in ha-aretz, 7 March 1924, p. 4). Affirming this later date is a paper issued by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 12 June (the year is missing) authorising Rubin (Mr Zelicovici) to ‘attend the oral classes and study temporarily in the galleries and library of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts during the permitted hours’ (but not in the studios—these words were crossed out): RMA. 13 Rubin, My Life, pp. 78–9. 14 Ibid., pp. 91–100. 15 Draft order dated 21October 1916 and subsequent renewal certificates of this exemption until 1919: RMA. 16 Rubin, My Life, pp. 108–19. Czernowitz (Chernovtsy) was annexed to Romania (1919–44). The Jewish population in the city at that time constituted almost half of the total population. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jerusalem: Keter, vol. 5, 1971, pp. 393–4. 17 Rubin, My Life, pp. 43–4. 18 Ibid., pp. 44–5. Adolf Stand was a Zionist leader in Galicia. The Tenth Zionist Congress in 1911 was held in Basel, not in Vienna as in Rubin’s story. 19 Ibid. From time to time Rubin sent drawings to his friends in Galatz and they sent them to exhibitions organised by Zionist groups (p. 38). 20 Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, New York: Herzl Press and McGraw-Hill, 1971, vol. 2, p. 956. 21 M.Schaerf, ‘ha-tenu’ah ha-trom tziyonit be-Romania’, in P.Segal et al. (eds), yahadut Romania bi-tekumat yisrael, I, Tel Aviv: S.Y.R, Shevet Yehude Romania, 1992, pp. 106–7. 22 Lippe was given this honour as the eldest of the delegates. In his address he described the beginning of the movement in Romania. ha-protokol shel ha-kongress ha-tziyoni ha-rishon, ed. and trans. H.Orlan, Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1997, pp. 9–11, 15. 23 Y.Aluf, ‘Maccabi’, in Segal, yahadut Romania, p. 176. Whether Rubin, then only fifteen, was indeed one of the founders of the association as claimed, or was given the credit due to his later fame it is hard to judge. 24 Reproduced in M.Schaerf, ha-avuka hudleka be-Romania: Shmuel Pineles ve-reshit hatziyonut be-Romania, Jerusalem: Ha-sifriya ha-tzionit, 1986, Pl. 29 (from an unidentified newspaper). 25 A.B.Yaffe, ‘Ya’akov Groper ve-sifrut yidish be-Romania’, in Segal, yahadut Romania, p. 296; Heyd, ‘Rubin in Palestine’, p. 96, ill. 19. One of the founders and editors of licht was the novelist, journalist and critic Jacob Botoshansky (1892–1964), who also contributed to the Zionist journal ha-tikva and whose portrait Rubin drew for the journal. An unidentified oil portrait of c. 1915 at the Rubin Museum is very likely that of Botoshansky. Another member of the group, Moti Rabinovitch, was a long-standing friend of Rubin, attending Rubin’s first show in Jerusalem and owner of some of Rubin’s paintings. 26 Heyd, ibid., p. 96. 27 M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 125–7. 28 See the title page of the Hebrew literary periodical ha-keshet, Berlin, 1903, showing a young, half-naked, barefoot man with classical drapery leading an old man, also barefoot, towards the rainbow; a postcard from Vitebsk, Russia, 1902, with young and old men and the lyrics and music of the Zionist anthem ha-tikva: R.Arbel, Blue and White in Color: Visual Images of Zionism, 1897–1947, Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth, Nahum Goldmann Museum of Jewish Diaspora, 1996, pls 7, 115. 29 ha-tikva, vol. I/3, 7 July 1915, p. 49.

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30 A photograph of the sculpture was published in ha-tikva, vol. 1/12–13, 24 November 1915, where an illustration by Rubin was also published. 31 Rubin, My Life, p. 95. For samples of his illustrations for other Jewish journals see GSIC, Rubin file I. In his certificate of Romanian citizenship, dated 19 July 1919 (RMA), Rubin’s profession is stated ‘caricaturist’. 32 Ibid., pp. 145–6. 33 Ibid., pp. 119–21. The Yiddish poet and writer Eliezer Steinberg (1880–1932) was the central figure in the yidisher shul-fareyn (Association of Yiddish Schools) founded in Czernowitz in 1919. 34 Arthur Kolnik (1890–1972), painter and printmaker, was born in Stanislaw, Galicia, studied at the School of Fine Art in Cracow and fought as an officer in the First World War. In 1918 he settled in Czernowitz, became associated with the group of Yiddish writers and in 1931 moved to Paris: Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 10, p. 1169. 35 E.Wyler, ‘Introduction: A Look at Ferdinand Hodler’, in P.Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1972, p. 13. It must be added that at the time Hodler painted and exhibited his famous paintings, which influenced Rubin, the question of whether his style was an appropriate Swiss style or whether he could be considered as representing any national characteristic was very much under debate in his own country. See S.L.Hirsh, ‘Swiss Art and National Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in M.Facos and S.L. Hirsh (eds), Art, Culture, and National Identity in fin-de-siècle Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 250–9, 263–5, 273. 36 Quoted in Bernheimer, ‘Tragic Fire’; Also Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, p. 498. 37 Rubin, My Life, p. 95. 38 R.Goldwater, Symbolism, London: Allen Lane, 1979, p. 1. 39 Ibid., pp. 4–9, 37. 40 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, p. 32. 41 S.L.Hirsh, Ferdinand Hodler, London: Thames and Hudson, 1982, pp. 7–9, 74. 42 Selz suggests that Death is shown as seducer, crouched on the artist’s genitalia while the artists tries to push him away. Ferdinand Hodler, p. 30. 43 Quoted in Bernheimer, ‘Tragic Fire’. 44 Ibid. 45 The whereabouts of these works is unknown but the exhibition catalogue and reviews allow some information on Rubin’s subject matter. 46 H.Bar-Yosef, Jewish-Christian Relations in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, Cambridge: The Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, 2000, p. 13. 47 Z.Amishai-Maisels, ‘Origins of the Jewish Jesus’, in M.Baigell and M.Heyd (eds), Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 51–86; idem, The Jewish Jesus’, Journal of Jewish Art, no. 9, 1984, pp. 84–104. 48 Bar-Yosef, Jewish-Christian Relations, pp. 15–16. It is very likely that Rubin met Itzik Manger (1901–69) in Czernowitz through Arthur Kolnik who became a close friend of the poet. In New York Rubin was close to Yiddish writers and met Scholem Asch (1880–1957) and painted his portrait (no. 18 in his New York exhibition). 49 Ibid., p. 14. For Christian images in Symbolist painting see Goldwater, Symbolism, pp. 90, 98, 100. 50 Particularly known is Leopold Pilichowki’s painting The Tired Ones (where-abouts unknown) showing two Jews seated in the street exhausted with their heads down. This and other similar images were published in the Jüdischer Almanach 5663, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1902, pp. 62, 237, 281. 51 The painting is reproduced in a newspaper cutting accompanying a review of the exhibition, RMA, file I.

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52 A similar composition of two men sitting on a bench, one of whom Jesus, is titled The Last Apostle, 1922, 110×100 cm, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 53 Goldwater, Symbolism, p. 91. Cf. Gauguin’s paintings: Self-Portrait with Halo (1889), Christ in Gethsemane (1889) and Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ (1890). 54 Quoted in Bernheimer, ‘Tragic Fire’. 55 Hodler’s reputation was at its peak at the turn of the twentieth century in central Europe and after 1914 was confined mainly to his native country. He was unlikely to be familiar to Rubin’s public in New York in 1921. 56 Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, 498. 57 F.Burger, Cézanne und Hodler: Einführung in die Probleme der Malerei der Gegenwart (1913), Munich, 1923. The book deals with various art issues and is richly illustrated with paintings not only by Cézanne and Hodler but also by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Titian, El Greco and others. The 1923 version was its fifth edition. 58 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings, New York, 3 May–15 September 1921. The exhibition included, among others, twenty-three paintings by Cézanne, ten by Gauguin and seven by Van Gogh. 59 Rubin, My Life, p. 139. Rubin incorrectly wrote that this was an exhibition of Van Gogh and Gauguin alone and that it was the first time they were shown in New York. 60 This painting is now titled Figure Composition, oil on cardboard, 78.5×50.5 cm, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Its dating should be 1921, after Rubin saw Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. 61 He arrived there at the beginning of summer 1921 (Rubin, My Life, p. 131) and left in February 1922: a travel document issued in New York, 28 December 1921, RMA. 62 Rubin, My Life, p. 141. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a photographer who in 1905 opened in New York a gallery that presented for the first time in America such modern masters as Rodin, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau and Picabia. It showed the most avant-garde art of the time in Europe and promoted modern American painters. See B.Rose, American Art Since 1900, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975, pp. 28ff. Among the artists Rubin mentions seeing were John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. It was Stieglitz who arranged the exhibition of Rubin and Kolnik at the Anderson Galleries. 63 M.Baigell, Artists and Identity in Twentieth Century America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 28. 64 In January 1923 Rubin exhibited in his studio in Bucharest fifty-seven paintings, fourteen sculptures and five drawings. A catalogue of the exhibits (RMA) and a few surviving works are the main sources of information for this phase. 65 The painting was recently and incorrectly dated at 1920 and also mentioned as having been exhibited in New York in 1921. It is also identified (correctly) as the painting Elijah and the False Prophets that was described as being planned by Rubin in a letter of 27 May 1922. See C.Rubin, Rubin: Home Visit, Paintings from Public and Private Collections in Israel and Abroad, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1998, cat. no. 4. The painting Truth and the False Prophets was exhibited in Bucharest in 1923 (no. 4 in the catalogue). 66 G.Ofrat, ‘Reuven, 1923, le-an?’, im ha-gav la-yam, Israel: Omanut Yisrael, 1990, pp. 333–4. Ofrat argues that the painting represents the biblical story of Elijah and the false prophets, I Kings, 18. 67 A drawing of 1922, pencil on paper, 22.3×31 cm, at the Israel Museum (s. 981.86) shows the crouching figure (without the tree) and the round altar out of which rise signs of smoke or fire. Behind it on the left two figures walking away, another is in the centre. This is perhaps the preparation drawing before introducing the Hodlerian figures. A figure crouching in a very similar position is seen alone in Rubin’s woodcut The Prayer on the Mountain, as part of the series The God Seekers, 1923. 68 Hirsh, Ferdinand Hodler, p. 32.

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69 Rubin confessed his feelings in a letter to his friend Bernard Weinberg in Paris, dated 27 May 1922. Rubin’s letters to Weinberg, written over a period of fifty years in Romanian and later in French, were translated into Hebrew by the journalist David Giladi and a few were published (ma’ariv, 13 November 1981, pp. 24, 48). A typewritten script of the letters, numbered and dated, is in the RMA and all references to them hereafter are from this source. In this letter Rubin mentions his exertions over the theme of Elijah and the False Prophets. He also discussed the painting Jesus and the Last Apostle now at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 70 Hirsh, Ferdinand Hodler, p. 68. 71 Ofrat, ‘Reuven, 1923’, p. 340. 72 See H.Bar-Yosef, maga’im shel dekadens: Bialik, Berdichevsky, Brenner, Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 1997, p. 171–1. 73 This motif is too close to Virgin by Fouquet (1420–80) to be coincidence. Rubin might have seen it illustrated in an article on the artist in L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 5 (February 1921), pp. 515–19, a journal familiar to him. 74 The female figure is probably a portrait. A similar woman appears in a drawing, signed and dated 1918 and titled (in English) on the page Madonna of the Poor, RMA. The identity of the woman is unknown.

7 Rubin in Palestine 1 R.Rubin, My Life, My Art, New York: Sabra Books, Funk and Wagnalis, 1969, p. 145; S.Wilkinson, Reuven Rubin, New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1974, p. 40; C. Rubin, Rubin: Home Visit, Paintings from Public and Private Collections in Israel and Abroad, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1998, cat. no. 1. The date 1923 is given so far only by G.Talpir, ‘Reuven Rubin’, gazit, vol. 22/5–8, December 1964-March 1965, p. 46. 2 The oft-reproduced Houses in Tel Aviv was given in several publications with the date 1912, i.e. the time of Rubin’s first stay in Palestine. See Talpir, ‘Reuven Rubin’, p. 45; Wilkinson, Reuven Rubin, p. 30. This date is now commonly rejected in favour of 1922. The painting Girl with Pomegranates is also dated 1922 in Wilkinson, p. 40 and in Rubin, My Life, p. 39. Two paintings at the Rubin Museum, Self Portrait with a Flower and Jaffa Port, are signed and dated 1922. Rubin seldom dated his paintings when signing them and his early exhibition catalogues do not indicate dates. He might have added these dates sometime later as all these and other erroneous dates appeared in the catalogue of his 1955 retrospective exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum. 3 Rubin returned to Romania from New York, via Paris, Vienna and Switzerland in March 1922 (travel documents, RMA). By May he was already working in Bucharest and planning to go to Paris (letter 4, 27 May 1922. On Rubin’s letters see p. 216, n. 69). The invitation/catalogue of his studio exhibition states it was held from 31 December 1922 to 31 January 1923. His passport, issued on 20 February 1923, shows entry to Palestine on 24 April 1923. RMA. 4 According to his first letter from Palestine, dated 25 June 1923, Rubin settled in Tel Aviv after a tour in the Galilee and he planned to go to Jerusalem the following month. In July he wrote from Jerusalem and in August again from Tel Aviv. In his memoirs he describes it differently—staying first in Jerusalem, with a family of Bucharan Jews, and only later moving to Tel Aviv and living there in a tent. Rubin, My Life, pp. 146–8. 5 Letters 9 and 10, dated 21 October and 23 December 1923 respectively.

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6 Rubin sold five paintings for PP85. But the exhibition in Tel Aviv (opened at the Herzliya School on 10 April 1924) was unsuccessful in terms of number of visitors and ended in a loss: letter 12, 29 April 1924. 7 The Jerusalem daily doar ha-yom reported twice during the exhibition (25 and 31 March 1924) on numbers of visitors and sales of pictures, in addition to a detailed report on the opening night (10 March 1924) and a discussion of the exhibition’s public success upon its closure (2 April 1924). Other newspapers also reported on the exhibition and the public response. See ha-aretz, 31 March 1924, p. 3. 8 In Rubin’s words: ‘My state as an artist in eretz yisrael after one and a half years of activity is brilliant. I am successful, I have the trust of the intellectuals and those who understand something… I have occupied here the position that I deserve as I would have done in any other place’ (letter 14, 30 July 1924). The opening of the exhibition was attended, in spite of bad weather, by the ‘who’s who’ of (secular) Jerusalem from the British Governor and Zionist leaders to writers and artists: doar ha-yom, 10 March 1924. 9 Letter 12, 29 April 1924; doar ha-yom, ibid. The Library was unable to pay the whole sum at once and eventually the purchase initiative was forgotten. See correspondence between the Hebrew University and Rubin dated 26 and 31 May 1936, CZA, A114/88. 10 Letters 11, 12 and 14, dated 12 March, 29 April and 30 July 1924 respectively. Since the Hebrew University was not yet built at that time and Rubin mentions no names or details, those plans were probably just an unspecified exchange of ideas with no practical intent. 11 See B.Donner, Between Collection and Museum, 1920–1932: From the Peremen Collection through the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2002. 12 Y.Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim ba-omanut ha-ivrit ba-aretz’, teatron ve-omanut, no. 1, 17 June 1925, p. 12. Hirszenberg’s large scale painting The Eternal Jew dominated the Bezalel Museum display. 13 ‘hartza’at Melnikov be-ta’aruchat Reuven’, doar ha-yom, 2 April 1924, p. 4; M.A.L (M.AviShaul), ‘segirat ha-ta’arucha shel Reuven’, doar ha-yom, 2 April 1924, p. 4. 14 Letters 7 and 9, dated 19 July and 21 October 1923 respectively. 15 Letter 10, 23 December 1923, mentions a visit made to Rubin by Van Vriezland who was later involved in the purchasing initiative. See doar ha-yom 10 March 1924 and letters addressed to Van Vriezland from the Hebrew University, CZA, A1 14/88. 16 Letter 12, 29 April 1924. 17 In letters 11 and 12 Rubin urged his friend to send him books on wall painting technique. 18 Letter 7, 19 July 1923. 19 ‘hartza’at Melnikov be-ta’aruchat Reuven’, part II, doar ha-yom, 3 April 1924, p. 4. 20 A.Goor and M.Nurock, The Fruits of the Holy Land, Jerusalem and New York: Israel Universities Press, 1968, pp. 70–88. 21 See The Goldfish Vendor, 1928, Jewish Museum, New York. The naked torso, however, was entirely untypical of Arab habits. 22 Unlike other plants banana is not mentioned in agricultural reports from Palestine of that time. See M.Zagorodesky, ‘ha-moshavot’, in E.Tzifroni et al. (eds), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael, I, Tel Aviv: Association of Hebrew Writers in eretz yisrael, 1923, pp. 328–59; British Empire Exhibition, Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide, London, 1924, pp. 67–8. Among Arabs bananas were grown in Palestine in the nineteenth century but plants were few and scattered in other orchards. In the 1930s banana groves expanded. Goor and Nurock, The Fruits, p. 280. 23 A banana plant in the garden of a small Tel Aviv hostel in the 1920s is mentioned by the painter Newman: C.Rubin, Elias Newman, The Last of the First Ones, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1996, pp. 2, 7. A nineteenth-century picture of an Arab house in Palestine shows a single banana tree in the garden: Goor and Nurock, The Fruits, p. 272. Banana plants appeared in several of Rubin’s paintings: Red-Bearded Jew, 1924, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv; Sabbath in the Colony, 1923–25, private collection, Tel Aviv; Rubin with brother Itzhak,

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1923, private collection, Jerusalem; Self Portrait in the Yard, 1925, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv. 24 G.Ofrat, ‘Reuven, 1923, le-an?’, im ha-gav la-yam, Israel: Omanut Yisrael, 1990, p. 364; Z.Amishai-Maisels ‘Jewish Artists: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present’, in G.SedRajna, Jewish Art, New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1997, p. 338. 25 The composition in which Eve is sitting and Adam stands next to her is found in several Renaissance paintings, most notably in Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. 26 Y.Katz, ‘Reuven’, ha-aretz, 27 February 1927, p. 3. 27 Letters 6 and 7, 25 June and 19 July 1923 respectively. 28 Rubin urged his friend to take up subscriptions for the album in Paris and informed him of subscribers in Bucharest. Letters 9–11, 21 October and 23 December 1923, 12 March 1924 respectively. The titles in English (in addition to Hebrew) given to the prints suggest that Rubin aimed this album also to the American market. 29 A.Melnikov, ‘be-darkei mevakshei elohim le-Reuven’, doar ha-yom, 10 March 1924, p. 3; Y.Katz, ‘mevakshei ha-elohim’, hedim, vol. 3/2, Tevet-Shvat 5684 (winter 923/24), p. 90. 30 Katz, ibid. 31 Letter 14, 30 July 1924. 32 Letters 6, 7 and 10, 25 June, 19 July and 21 October 1923 respectively. 33 Among the journals mentioned in the letters: Le Crapouillot reported regularly on the big Salon exhibitions in Paris, showing reproductions of fairly mediocre painters and hardly any of the prominent modernists. It was rich in woodcut illustrations and reported widely on cinema, music and theatre, and published literary texts; L’Amour de l’art was dedicated to ancient and modern art, architecture and applied art. It also showed the contemporary Salons alongside ancient, medieval and Renaissance art, non-European art, interior design, and contained essays on modern artists such as Vlaminck, Chagall, Rouault and Cézanne. L’Esprit nouveau was the most intellectual avant-garde and meagrely illustrated of them. Published irregularly since 1920 it discussed aesthetics, modern architecture, design of cars and aeroplanes, and modern artists, mainly of the Cubist circles plus some Renaissance art. 34 A.Melnikov, ‘ve-anahnu le-an?’, davar supplement, vol. 3/30, 21 Iyar 5688 (spring 1928), p. 4. 35 A.Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, London: Lund Humphries and Barbican Art Gallery, 1990, p. 22. 36 ‘hartza’at Melnikov’, 2 April 1924, p. 4 37 R.Benyamin, ‘sha’ot im Reuven’, Catalogue of Rubin Exhibition at the Citadel, Jerusalem, 1924, p. 4; also published in ha-aretz, 7 March 1924, p. 4. 38 Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, The Menorah Journal, vol. 12/5, October-November 1926, p. 499. 39 R.Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938, 1966), enlarged edition, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 78. 40 C.Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994, p. 71. 41 G.S.Hellman, ‘Palestine’s Gauguin’, The New Palestine, vol. 15/16, 7 December 1928, p. 467. 42 The exhibition Rubin: Paintings of Palestine was held at the Guarino Galleries, New York in December 1928, organised by Hellman who repeated these idea in his introduction to the catalogue. Rubin mentioned Hellman as his agent in letters 61 and 65, 28 September 1928 and 17 December 1928 respectively. 43 W.Schack, ‘Rubin’, The Studio, vol. 98, 1929, p. 573. 44 I.Fineman, ‘A Painter’s Palestine’, The New Palestine, vol. 15/3, 10 August 1928, p. 106. 45 Letters 19 and 21, 14 July and 14 August 1925 respectively. 46 Letter 25, 2 January 1926.

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47 M.Naor and D.Giladi, eretz yisrael ba-meah ha-esrim, 1900–1950, Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1990, pp. 157, 168–73; Y.Shavit and G.Biger, ha-historia shel Tel Aviv, I: mishechunot le-ir, Tel Aviv: Ramot, Tel Aviv University, 2001, pp. 126–7. 48 Letters 26 and 27, 7 June and 22 July 1926 respectively. 49 Letter 29, 26 September 1926. 50 Letter 32, 9 November 1926. 51 Letter 34, 19 January 1927. The letter also reports on further losses by his brother and the growing burden of supporting his family. In the following months Rubin continued to report unhappy feelings, physical weakness and loneliness. His personal misery was enhanced by an unresolved relationship with a woman who would not accept his rejection and who travelled from Romania in the hopes of marrying him. Letters 38 and 39, 4 May and 30 May 1927 respectively. 52 Letter 22, 24 August 1925. 53 H.N.Bialik, ‘ha-tzayar Reuven’, introduction to Exhibition of Paintings by Rubin, Jerusalem, 1927. The article was published in ha-aretz on 18 February 1927, two days before the opening of the exhibition, and according to Rubin (letter 35, 21 February 1927) it made a big impression. The exhibition was held in a private residence, Cheluch house in Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv from 20 February to 20 March. It brought immediate success in sales (letters 35 and 37, 21 February and 11 March 1927 respectively). The exhibition moved to Jerusalem, to the home of the former British governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, for the Passover period where it had more success in sales and in the press (letter 38, 4 May 1927). Rubin reported an overall sale of thirteen paintings and eleven drawings for total of PP330 (the catalogue lists thirty-seven paintings, four watercolours and sixteen drawings). 54 Bialik, ‘ha-tzayar Reuven’, reprinted in C.Rubin (ed.), Rubin Museum: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993, p. 13. 55 Ibid., p. 14. 56 Y.Koplevitz, ‘ha-ta’aruchot’, ketuvim, 28 March 1927, p. 3. 57 Katz, ‘Reuven’, p. 3. He specifically mentions Henri Rousseau as a misleading and bad influence. For another reference to the influence of Rousseau and French art see W.Schack, ‘A Great Painter in Palestine’, The New Palestine, 29 April 1927, p. 401. 58 Y.Zeh, ‘sihot im ha-tzayar Reuven’, ketuvim, 15 October 1926, p. 3. 59 See: The Meal of the Poor, c. 1922, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, showing seven tormented people around a table; The Poor, 1920, a bronze sculpture, h. 27.5 cm, Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv, showing a man and a woman seated bending forward; An Old Jew, 1920, and An Old Jew, c. 1920, both in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 60 M.Bernstein-Cohen, ke-tipa ba-yam, Ramat Gan: Masada, 1971, p. 145. See also A.Adar, ‘teatronim, lehakot, sahkanim u-vama’im’, in A.B.Yaffe (ed.), esrim ha-shanim ha-rishonot: sifrut ve-omanut be-Tel Aviv ha-ketana, 1909–1929, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1980, pp. 83–4. 61 The controversy peaked in a public trial organised by the writers’ association. See F. Rokem, ‘“ha-dibuk” be-eretz yisrael: ha-te’atron, ha-bikoret ve-hitgabshuta shel ha-tarbut ha-ivrit’, cathedra, no. 20, July 1981, pp. 183–202. 62 Letters 56–69, 2 August 1928 to 7 February 1929. 63 Letters 71 and 72, 2 May and 8 June 1929 respectively. From 1926 onwards investment in orange groves was common not only among the wealthy but also among people of more limited means. See D.Giladi, ha-yishuv bi-tekufat ha-aliya ha-revi’it (1924–1929), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1973, p. 78. 64 Letters 73–8, 10 August to 24 October 1929. 65 E.Fleg, The Land of Promise, trans. L.Wise, London: T.Werner Laurie, 1933, pp. 149–50 66 The Museum of Newark in the USA purchased a picture in 1929 and the Brooklyn Museum held an exhibition (letter 72). In May 1930 Rubin exhibited in London at the established

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modern art gallery, Arthur Tooth and Sons. The exhibition was reviewed by The Times, 12 May 1930; Observer, 25 May 1930; Jewish Chronicle, 9 May 1930; and Apollo, June 1930. 67 Letter 73, 10 August 1929. 68 E.Kolb, ‘Forty Years of Painting by Rubin’, in Rubin—Retrospective Exposition; Forty Years of Painting in Israel, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1955. 69 H.Gamzu, ‘Introduction’, Rubin—Retrospective Exhibition, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1966. The same credo was quoted by Kolb (previous note). 70 N.Kahansky, ‘ta’arucha retrospektivit shel Reuven Rubin’, ha-aretz, 20 May 1966.

Part III The Modernists of the 1920s 1 Y.Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim ba-omanut ha-ivrit ba-aretz’, teatron ve-omanut, no. 1, 17 June 1925, p. 10. 2 G.Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, p. 48. For similar views see R.Shechori, Art in Israel, Tel Aviv: Sadan, 1974, p. 11; B.Tammuz (ed.), with D.Levitte and G.Ofrat, sipura shel omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Masada, 1980, pp. 38–9; A.Barzel, Art in Israel, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1988, p. 22. 3 A.Hameiri, ‘ha-tzayar Feldman’, doar ha-yom, 27 April 1923; G.Talpir, ‘hayei ha-omanut beeretz yisrael’, gazit, vol. 19/9–12, December 1961–March 1962, pp. 161–2. 4 agudat ha-omanut ha-ivrit, Bezalel, Jerusalem. Undated pamphlet, GSIC, Bezalel file. Cf. G.Ballas, ‘agudat ha-tzayarim ve-ha-pasalim’, in Z.Shavit (ed.), toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-eretz yisrael me-az ha-aliya ha-rishona: beniyata shel tarbut ivrit, I, Jerusalem: Israel National Academy for Science and Mossad Bialik, 1998, pp. 416–17; Talpir, ‘hayei haomanut’, pp. 157ff.. The only founding member outside Bezalel was the sculptor Avraham Melnikov who was elected chairman of the association in April 1923. Rubin joined the association’s committee in December 1923 (Letter 9, 23 December 1923; on Rubin’s letters see p. 216, n. 69) and according to Talpir (ibid., p. 162) became one of the organisers of the third exhibition of the association in April 1924. 5 Ballas, ‘agudat ha-tzayarim’, p. 419; Y.Zalmona, ‘The Tower of David Days: The Birth of Controversy in Israel Art in the Twenties’, in The Tower of David Days: First Cultural Strife in Israel Art, Jerusalem: Tower of David museum, 1991, p. 72. 6 Ballas, ibid., p. 420. This development was bitterly described by Narkiss, the director of the Bezalel Museum, as a group of derivative artists whose art expressed no true experience gaining control over the Artists’ Association: M. Narkiss, ‘omanut be-eretz yisrael’, in P.Lahover (ed.), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael li-shnat 5694, Tel Aviv: Shem, 1933/34, p. 333. 7 The exhibition Modern Israel Art in its Beginnings, 1920–30, at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1957 claimed ‘to recall the atmosphere of the three ohel exhibitions’. In 1986 another exhibition, titled 60 Years Later: Exhibition of ‘Modern Artists’ in the Ohel Theatre in Tel Aviv and held at the Rubin Museum, was more comprehensive in reconstruction of the original exhibitions, but it also enhanced the received views of the group as a ‘reaction against Bezalel’. The Tower of David exhibitions were recreated twice: in 1968 at the Israel Museum, Migdal David– the Beginning of Painting in Eretz Israel, an exhibition organised by Yona Fischer, re-enacted the split between the two groups by showing the Bezalel artists separately, ‘as an introduction to the exhibition itself’ which consisted of artists who ‘laid the foundation of modern art in this country’. A fuller survey of these exhibitions, accompanied by historical research, was put up by Yigal Zalmona in 1991 at the Tower of David itself. In an attempt to present the art in the context of the art system of the 1920s it argued that ‘there was no real battle…only an all-round wrangle’: Zalmona, The Tower of David Days’, p. 67.

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8 The collection of the Zionist activist Ya’akov Peremen consisting of works by some twentyfive Russian Jewish contemporary artists was brought to Tel Aviv where it was exhibited briefly in 1920 and again in 1922. See B.Doner, Between Collection and Museum: From the Peremen Collection through the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2002. 9 E.Kolb, Modern Israel Art in its Beginnings, 1920–1930, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1957, not paginated.

8 A view from afar: landscapes of the homeland 1 Y.Zalmona, Landscapes in Israel Art, Jerusalem: D.K.Graubart Publishers, 1984, p. 22. 2 D.Cosgrove and S.Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; W.J.T.Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, in Landscape and Power, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994; S.Schama. Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins, 1995. 3 Most of these focus on pre-modern art in Britain and North America, e.g. A. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993; S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993; M.Rosenthal, C.Payne and S.Wilcox (eds), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. 4 A.R.H.Baker, ‘Introduction: On Ideology and Landscape’, in A.R.H.Baker and G.Biger (eds), Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 1–14; R.G.Fox (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures, Washington DC: American Anthropological Association, 1990, esp. pp. 2–4. 5 Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, p. 14. 6 Schama, Landscape and Memory, pp. 6–7. 7 A.D.Smith, National Identity, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 70. 8 J.Wolff, The Social Production of Art, London: Macmillan, 1993, p. 63. 9 Ibid., p. 61. 10 Ibid., p. 65. 11 M.Scheps et al. (eds), shnot ha-esrim be-omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1982. Out of 228 exhibits (excluding photographs), 92 were landscapes of one sort or another. By focusing on the Modernist group the exhibition excluded the Bezalel artists and other Jerusalem artists, among them notable landscape painters Anna Ticho (1894–1980) and Ludwig Blum (1891–1974). See also Appendix A. 12 Further editions were published in 1928 and 1930 (with English title: The Song of Solomon). Raban used the same biblical images for commercial posters and tourism advertisements. In 1931 he published a ten-plate album of views of towns of eretz yisrael depicted in a fairly naturalistic way and framed in decorations that included suitable biblical references. See B.Goldman Ida, Ze’ev Raban: A Hebrew Symbolist, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 2001, pp. 106–8, 122. 13 A.Hameiri, ‘shir ha-shirim shel Raban’, doar ha-yom, 14 December 1923, p. 4. 14 The catalogues surveyed are: the third (1924), fifth (1926), sixth (1927) and seventh (1928) Annual Exhibitions of the Jewish Artists’ Association and the three ohel exhibitions (1926– 28). Also considered were a 1926 exhibition in Haifa of the Jewish Artists’ Association, and photographs of exhibition displays, exhibitions reviews and illustrated articles on art, and the catalogue of the exhibition that reconstructed the ohel exhibitions 60 Years Later (see p. 221

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n. 7). Titles of paintings used in these catalogues were often general, such as Autumn or The Surrounding of Jerusalem, A Street in Jaffa or even Trees, Mountains or simply Landscape. However there is enough evidence to discern the choice of landscapes suggested below. 15 Haim Gliksberg (1904–70) painted some of these exceptions: A Jerusalem Courtyard, 1925 and King George Street, Jerusalem, c. 1927; see Scheps et al., shnot ha-esrim, pp. 59, 64. Gliksberg, who immigrated in 1925, was initially involved in Bezalel as a worker in the museum. He exhibited five one-man shows between 1927 and 1933 and was later ‘annexed’ to the Modernists. There are two more versions of King George Street by Gliksberg and Zaritsky also painted King George Street in a watercolour, 1924. Another artist, now forgotten (Ze’ev Silver Klonimus), exhibited a picture with the very same title at the sixth annual exhibition. 16 See Y.Ben-Arieh, Painting the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, Jerusalem: Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi; Hemed Books, 1997. 17 Zaritsky (1891–1985), who was born in the Ukraine, settled in Jerusalem in 1923 and in 1924 showed his first exhibition there. He soon became involved with the artistic life in Palestine and was the chair of the Artists’ Association. His major role in the history of Israeli art was from the late 1940s onwards as the leader of the abstraction movement ofakim hadashim (New Horizons). 18 From a published discussion on Israeli art in the architecture journal tvai, no. 1, April 1966; quoted in M.Omer, Zaritsky: retrospektiva, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1984, p. 33. A surprising side of the story is that it was used to illustrate Zaritsky’s claim about the significance of the climate(!) for painting in Israel. 19 In the summer of 1905 the French artist Matisse stayed in Collioure (the choice of his wife) where his style underwent a major transition as he entered his Fauve period. A.Barr, Matisse, His Art and His Public, New York: The Museum of Modern Art (1951) 1974, p. 54. 20 N.Schur, toldot tzefat, Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Dvir, 1983, p. 246; R.Elston, The Traveller’s Handbook for Palestine and Syria (Cook’s Traveller’s Handbook), 2nd edn, London: Simpkin Marshall, 1929, p. 263; M.Berkowitz, ‘The Invention of a Secular Ritual: Western Jewry and Nationalized Tourism in Palestine, 1922–1933’, in S.D.Breslauer (ed.), The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, p. 86. There were also opposite views describing filth and misery in the overcrowded Jewish quarter—in contrast to the striking scenery: J.Klausner, ‘olam mithave (rishmei masa beeretz yisrael’)’, ha-shiloah, vol. 30, 1914, pp. 447–9. 21 Cf. Haim Gliksberg, Synagogue in Safed, 1928, watercolour and pencil, private collection, Israel; Yitzhak Frenkel, Interior of Synagogue Ha-Ari, Safed, 1920s, oil on canvas, private collection, Tel Aviv; Moshe Castel, Interior in Safed, 1938, oil on canvas, Mishkan LeOmanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod. From the 1930s onwards Safed was often painted by Castel, Menahem Shemi, Mordechai Levanon and others. An artists’ colony was also established there. 22 An exception was Ludwig Blum who is known for his panoramic views of the desert area south of Jerusalem, many of which were painted during the 1940s. Anna Ticho is also famous for her images of barren hills but these were made later, mostly from the 1960s onwards. 23 By the year 1929 a hundred Jewish settlements had been erected in Palestine, twenty-two before 1900: M.Naor and D.Giladi, eretz yisrael be-meah ha-esrim, 1900–1950, Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1990, appendix 5. 24 In 1924 Ludwig Blum exhibited three pictures of figures and views of Bet Alfa and Tel Yosef (Kibbutzim in the Valley). Artists who lived in the new Kibbutzim also exhibited few images from there: a painter named David of Ein-Harod exhibited in 1927 two landscapes of the Kibbutz, and Yoel Teneh (Tenenbaum) (1889–1973) who lived for a while in Tel Yosef exhibited some farm scenes; see Scheps et al., shnot ha-esrim, pp. 81–3. 25 M.Avi-Shaul, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim bi-yrushalayim’, ha-aretz, 4 April 1926, p. 3.

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26 AYA (S.Eizen), ‘aharei ha-ta’arucha ba-ohel’, davar supplement, no. 23, 12 March 1926, p. 3. 27 G.Talpir, ‘ha-megamot ha-modernistiyot ba-omanut ha-plastit bi-shnot ha-esrim ba-aretz’, gazit, vol. 22/5–8, August-November 1964, pp. 46–7. Zalmona, ‘The Tower of David Days’, p. 70; Ofrat, One Hundred Years, p. 57. 28 A wider survey of Tel Aviv in Israeli art emphasised this limited presence: C. Rubin, Tel Aviv at 80, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1989; S.Shva, ‘Tel Aviv ha-metzuyeret’, in M.Naor (ed.), Tel Aviv be-reshita, 1909–1934, Jerusalem: Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi, 1984, pp. 107–21. 29 Shva, ibid., p. 110. On the dating of this painting see above Chapter 7, note 2. Elsewhere Shva wrote that the houses in the painting ‘express the renewed Jewish effort to take their destiny into their own hands and to establish a homeland in Palestine’: idem, ‘Tel Aviv on Canvas’, in C.Rubin, Tel Aviv at 80, n.p. 30 Between the summer of 1922 and the summer of 1924 Tel Aviv (united with the neighbourhoods) increased in size from 1007 to 1936 houses (excluding barracks and tents) and its population from 12,862 to 21,610 souls. See I.Shehori, halom she-hafach li-krach, Tel Aviv: Avivim, 1990, p. 400; Y.Shavit and G.Biger, ha-historia shel Tel Aviv, I: mishechunot le-ir, Tel Aviv: Ramot, Tel Aviv University, 2001, p. 93; D.Giladi, ha-yishuv bitkufat ha-aliya ha-revi’it (1924–1929), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1973, pp. 54–5. 31 Shavit and Biger, ibid., pp. 218–19. The original title of the painting is unknown and among the titles of Rubin’s early paintings in Palestine some referred to Tel Aviv neighbourhoods: Neveh Sha’anan, Yemenite Quarter and The Green Barracks. 32 Cf. the double portraits Rubin with Brother Itzhak, 1923, private collection, Jerusalem, and Les Fiances, 1929, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv. 33 Flowers at My Window, c. 1923, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Balfour Street, 1924, private collection, Israel; Yona ha-navi Street, 1928, Esther Rubin collection, Tel Aviv. 34 C.Rubin, Tel Aviv shel Reuven, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1984, n.p. Cf. J.Schlör, Tel Aviv: From Dream to City, London: Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 27–8. 35 From the first guidebook of Ze’ev Vilnay published in the journal mis’har veta’asiya, vol. 3/6–7, 1925; excerpt reprinted in E.Schiler (ed.), sefer Zev Vilnay, Jerusalem: Ariel, 1984, p. 43. 36 E.Fleg, The Land of Promise, trans. L.Wise, London: T.Werner Laurie, 1933, pp. 130–1. 37 Abstract paintings by Yitzhak Frenkel (1900–81) titled Composition without Objects that were exhibited at the first ohel exhibition in 1926 were exceptions and created some stir. Frenkel then abandoned this direction and abstract art was not introduced into Israeli art until the 1950s. 38 Zalmona, Landscapes, p. 12. 39 Shva, ‘Tel Aviv’, p. 110. 40 Zalmona, Landscapes, p. 11. 41 Y.Bar-Gal, moledet ve-geografia be-meah shnot hinuch tziyoni, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1993, ch. 2. 42 Ze’ev Vilnay was an influential guide, writer and lecturer who from 1921 published articles and books on a variety of subjects from archaeology and vegetation to history and folklore of eretz yisrael. The teacher, guide and cartographer David Benvenisti founded in 1927 the first ramblers’ association (agudat ha-meshotetim) in eretz yisrael and publicised his views in articles and illustrated lectures. With more ramblers’ groups developing in the 1930s and 1940s the country walks became a popular part of youth culture in the yishuv and Israel. 43 Z.Vilnay, ‘li-ydi’at ha-moledet’, kuntres, vol. 7/140, 12 Elul 5683 (1923). The emphasis on biblical and ancient Jewish presence in the land characterises the walks offered by one of the earliest Hebrew guidebooks: H.A.Zuta and L. Sukenik, artzenu: sefer moreh derech be-eretz yisrael u-va-aratzot ha-govlot ba, I, Jerusalem: Va’ad ha-tzirim, 1920, pp. 179ff. 44 Paldi either destroyed his paintings in Paris after an important gallery owner reacted coldly to his work, or left thirty paintings in a hotel’s cellar in Paris and they disappeared. Both

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versions are his own. See A.Barzel, ‘Paldi’, Israel Magazine (Tel Aviv), 8 August 1973, p. 45; typewritten script of a recorded conversation with Paldi held by Yitzhak Lodan on 12 June 1976, GSIC, Paldi file, p. 6. 45 W.Schack, ‘Israel Paldi’, The Menorah Journal, vol. xiv, February 1928, p. 161; idem, ‘Our Painters’, The New Palestine, vol. 14/14, 20 April 1928, p. 426. Paldi’s views were also preserved in a transcript of his speech at the opening of the first ohel exhibition, January 1926; the Theatre Museum archive, Tel Aviv, ohel exhibitions box. 46 Alexander Baerwald, the first Professor of Architecture at the Technion in Haifa, in an article on style published in tzafon (Haifa), 30 April 1926, quoted in L. Richter, Alexander Baerwald Architect and Artist, Haifa: National Museum of Science, Planning and Technology, 1990, p. 7. 47 See G.Ofrat, ‘ha-pardes’, in im ha-gav la-yam, Israel: Omanut Yisrael, 1990, pp. 39–81. 48 R.Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution, 1799–1917, Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1990, pp. 240–3. See also, S.Tolkowsky, ‘The Origin of the Jaffa Orange’, in The Gateway to Palestine: A History of Jaffa, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1924, pp. 178–81. 49 Elston, Handbook for Palestine, p. 72. 50 D.Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984, p. 26. 51 C.Rubin, Rubin: Jerusalem Landscapes, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1988, n.p. 52 In a letter dated 14 August 1925 Rubin mentioned a convalescence period at St Charles convent in Jerusalem following a physical and psychological breakdown. The hospice’s location is at the southeast end of the German Colony in west Jerusalem in Lloyd George Street near Beth Lehem Road. 53 S.Schein, ‘har ha-bayit ba-tefisa ha-notzrit bi-ymei ha-benayim’, in Schiler, sefer Vilnay, I, pp. 183–9; D.H.Weis, ‘The Image of the Temple in Crusader Art’, in B. Kühnel (ed.), The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art, Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998, pp. 210–17. Cf. Z.Vilnay, The Holy Land in Old Prints and Maps, Jerusalem: Mass, 1963, pp. XIV, 22–6, 40–1. 54 S.Sabar, ‘Messianic Aspirations and Renaissance Urban Ideals: The Image of Jerusalem in Venice Haggadah, 1609’, in Kühnel, ibid., pp. 295–312; Vilnay, ibid., pp. 31–4. 55 S.Weiss, atarim kedoshim be-eretz yisrael, Jerusalem: Mass, 1987, pp. 123–8. The Mount of Olives is, of course, also sacred to Christians as the place where Jesus prayed after the Last Supper and the place of the Ascension as mentioned in the New Testament: Matthew 26:30– 46; Mark 14:26–41; Luke 22:39–46; Acts 1:9–12. 56 The high tower of the Russian monastery next to the mosque can be seen at the centre of the painting, and the building on the left in front of a grove may be identified as the church Viri Galilae. The buildings in the right-hand corner may be either a Dominican monastery on the southern peak of the Mount or houses of the village of Al-Azzaria (ancient Bethany). Cf. Z.Vilnay, madrich yerushalayim (1946), Jerusalem: Ariel, 1978, pp. 189–203. 57 M.Mishal, Ramat Gan, Israel: Avivim, 1991, pp. 13–20. 58 In 1928 the painting was reproduced as Landscape near Tel Aviv. See W.Schack, ‘Our Painters’, The New Palestine, vol. 27–31. 21 December 1928, p. 513. In 1975 Lubin said that during his first three years in Palestine he produced mainly drawings including landscapes of the surroundings of Tel Aviv. His first attempt in oil painting was in 1924 when going out with Paldi to Rishon Le-tzion to paint the landscape. Interview with Lubin, conducted and edited by Shulamit Gera, November 1975: typewritten transcript, GSIC, Lubin file I, pp. 5– 6. In a reproduction in Ofrat, One Hundred Years, p. 53, the title reads Landscape in Sharona. 59 Cf. Roger de La Fresnaye, Landscape of Hauteville, 1922, Kunstmuseum, Bern. See R.Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 2–3. Similar features are also found in the landscape

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paintings of one of the major figures of the Jewish School of Paris, Moïse Kisling, e.g, Pastorale, 1913, Museum of Art, Ein Harod. 60 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 11. 61 A.D.Gordon, a leading ideologue of the Second aliya was one of the main spokesmen for this belief. See Gordon, Selected Essays, trans. Frances Burnce, New York: League for Labor Palestine, 1938, ch. IV; A.Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea; A Historical Analysis and Reader, New York: Atheneum, 1959, pp. 369–86. Cf. D.Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 33–7. 62 Cosgrove, Symbolic Landscape, pp. 26–7. 63 See V.Silver-Brody, Documentors of the Dream, Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel 1890–1933, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998; R.Sela, tzilum befalastinleretzyisrael bi-shnot ha-shloshim ve-ha-arba’im, Herzliya: Herzliya Museum of Art and Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz ha-meuhad, 2000. 64 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 15 65 Z.Gurevitch and G.Aran, ‘al ha-makom (antropologia yisraelit)’, alpayim, no. 4, 1991, esp. pp. 10–11,22–4. 66 B.S.Osborne, ‘The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art’, in Cosgrove and Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape, p. 163; Daniels, Fields of Vision, pp. 149–55. 67 Z.Ben-Porat, ‘Represented Reality and Literary Models: European Autumn on Israeli Soil’, Poetics Today 7/1, 1986, pp. 47–57. 68 D.Lévy-Eisenberg, ‘A Sense of Place: The Mediation of Style in Eretz Israel Paintings of the 1920s’, Assaph: Studies in Art History, Section B:3, 1998, p. 305. 69 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, p. 1. 70 Ibid., pp. 3–7; C.Green, Art in France 1900–1940, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 209–15. 71 It is worth noting that not only French painting but also British landscape painting of the 1920s presented an image of an Arcadia set in some past time when humans lived the ‘natural’ life unscathed by technology: Cosgrove, Symbolic Landscape, p. 264. 72 Z.Shazar, ‘oteh Tel Aviv be-agada’, davar, 17 October 1969, p. 18. 73 Not all artists who had immigrated to Palestine remained in the country. Like other immigrants some decided to move elsewhere after a short while. Among these were sculptor Joseph Constantinovsky (Constant), who emigrated from Russia in 1919 and in 1923 settled in Paris, and painter Joseph Presman, who came from Poland in 1923 and settled in Paris in 1926.

9 Orientalism, Primitivism and folklore: looking at the country’s ‘types’ 1 G.Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, p. 35. For a similar view see A.Barzel, Art in Israel, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1988, p. 19. 2 Of the total paintings shown in the seven exhibitions that were used for this calculation only just over 1 per cent depicted pioneers or Kibbutz members while about 16 per cent depicted ‘types’ such as oriental Jews, Arabs, old or poor people, religious students and rabbis. Images of oriental Jews or Arabs were exhibited in sculpture as well. 3 Y.Zalmona and T.Manor-Friedman, To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1998, English section, p. vi. Several scholars criticised the exhibition for adhering too strictly to Edward Said’s model of Orientalism. See ‘kadima: ha-simpoziyon’, Studio Art Magazine, Tel Aviv, no. 97, November 1998, pp. 34ff.

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4 I.Even-Zohar, ‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine: 1882–1948’, Studies in Zionism, no. 4, autumn 1981, p. 173 (original emphasis). 5 Ibid., pp. 173–4. See also G.Shaked, ‘The Arab in Israeli Fiction’, Ariel, 54, 1983, esp. pp. 74–5. 6 This view of the Jewish artists as outsiders who exoticise the native Palestinian land is often expressed by Palestinian authors. See K.Boullata, ‘Asim Abu Shaqra: The Artist’s Eye and the Cactus Tree’, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 30/4, summer 2001, pp. 69–70, 74–5; idem, ‘Facing the Forest: Israeli and Palestinian artists’, Third Text, no. 7, summer 1989, esp. p. 79. 7 Moshe Castel (1909–91) was born in Jerusalem, studied in Bezalel in 1922–25 and stayed in Paris 1926–40. After his Orientalist period he turned from the 1940s to sources in the Ancient East, particularly the ancient Hebrew alphabet. 8 C.Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994, p. 8. The onesided relations between canonical modern Western art and objects of other cultures that were defined as ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ has started to be challenged and problematised since the mid 1980s. See E.Court, Africa on Display: Exhibiting Art by Africans’, in E.Barker (ed.), Contemporary Cultures of Display, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 153–5. A recurrent argument in this debate is that modern European art imported visual ideas from Africa and the Pacific, exploiting this as they did their other resources while presenting the ‘discovery’ in a new style that was regarded as revolutionary. See S.Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspective on Art, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 11–12. 9 D.Miller, ‘Primitive Art and the Necessity of Primitivism to Art’, in Hiller, ibid., p. 55. 10 R.Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938, 1966), enlarged edition, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 52–3. 11 Rhodes, Primitivism, pp. 74–9, 86. 12 On the influence of Rousseau on Rubin see M.Heyd, ‘Reuven Rubin in Palestine’, in C.Rubin (ed.), Rubin Museum: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993, pp. 102–5. 13 A (Hebrew) longhand transcript of speeches at the opening of the ohel exhibition, 1926; the Theatre Museum archive, Tel Aviv. 14 Y.Karni, ‘ha-omanim ba-moledet’, hedim, no. 1, Nisan 5682 (spring 1922), pp. 37–8. 15 The editor of hedim, Ya’akov Rabinovitch, reproached Karni in his reply for introducing romantic Western ideas without truly examining the objects of his admiration. These were neither original nor a valuable base for high culture, he argued: Y.R., ‘neshikat ha-gamal’, hedim, vol. 1/4, Tishrei 5683 (autumn 1922), pp. 39–47. For analysis of this controversy see N.Sadan-Loebenstein, siporet shnot ha-esrim be-eretz yisrael, Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1991, pp. 68–9. 16 Y.Koplevitz, ‘Agadati’s Jewish Dance Art’, in G.Manor (ed.), Agadati—The Pioneer of Modern Dance in Israel, Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim and the Dance Library of Israel, 1986, pp. 19, 21. 17 P.Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978, pp. 6–10. 18 W.A.Wilson, ‘Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism’, in E.Oring, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989, pp. 28, 34. However, later studies show that folk culture not only cannot represent a unique national culture but it can also verify the opposite; the folk songs from central and Eastern Europe provide evidence for a common culture shared by Germans and Jews. See P.V.Bohlman and O.Holzapfel (eds), The Folk Songs of Ashkenaz, Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2001. 19 See A.Hilton, ‘National Art and Folk Art’, in Russian Folk Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, ch. 15. 20 J.Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: A Social History, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995, pp. 79–83. For the influence of folk art on the search for national

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Jewish art in Russia see R.Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987. 21 Agadati was a student at Bezalel in 1910–14 and must have known Yemenite Jews then. His early works in Palestine were Orientalist without particular reference to local inhabitants, e.g. the dance ‘Ali Baba (of the Thousand and one night)’ [sic] and a Caucasian dance, both performances in a recital in December 1920. See programme in Manor, Agadati, p. 10 (Hebrew part). 22 Goncharova and Larionov settled in Paris in 1919 and mainly designed costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Their drawings of Agadati date from 1925–26. The Russian Jewish avant-garde artist and designer Boris Aronson also designed costumes for Agadati during his stay in Berlin (1922–24). Drawings by these and other artists alongside photographs illustrated Agadati’s catalogue/programme of his European tour (Theatre Museum archive, Tel Aviv) and the accompanying book published in 1925 (see below, n. 26). See also the exhibition catalogue Agadati—Four Faces, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1985. 23 The outline of Yemenite Tale (agada teimanit) and the drawings of the set and figures were published in teatron ve-omanut, no. 3, 6 September 1925, p. 3. The report ends with the appreciation that ‘everything, from the subject itself to the drawings and dance, is an original eretz-yisraeli creation’. 24 See B.Carmiel, Tel Aviv be-tahposet ve-keter: hagigot purim ba-shanim 1912–1935, Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 1999. In the masquerades that Agadati organised costumes of Arabs, Bucharan and Yemenite Jews were popular: ibid., pp. 48–54. 25 Y.Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim ba-omanut ha-ivrit ba-aretz’, teatron ve-omanut, no. 1, 17 June 1925, p. 11. 26 The book Baruch Agadati, oman ha-rikud ha-ivri was printed on a fine paper, cloth-bound and decorated with golden bands in edition of 100 copies. It used ‘Scroll’-type typography for the texts and was illustrated by 32 reproductions of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs of the dancer’s work. It comprised three essays by Asher Barash, Yitzhak Katz and Menashe Rabinovitz (Ravina). A second edition of the book with two additional essays was published in 1986 (Manor, Agadati). 27 Gideon Ofrat argues that Litvinovsky’s affinity to Chagall peaked in 1926 after which he turned to the Orient and the Arab motif with a different stylistic dimension. See Litvinovsky, Jerusalem: Litvinovsky Foundation, 1998, pp. xii–xiii. 28 Sabbath in Tiberias, 1927, private collection, Tel Aviv, is a well-known example of a painting of Orthodox Jews in their old houses in Tiberias, living in presumed harmony with their Arab neighbour. The paintings The Synagogue ‘Avraham Avinu’ in Hebron and The Western Wall were reproduced in the literary weekly ketuvim on 9 May and 14 August 1929 but their current whereabouts is unknown. 29 G.Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, trans. Y.Lotan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 70–5. Nonetheless, these writers were regarded as ‘naïve’ and melodramatic, and were eventually marginalised in the Hebrew literary canon together with immigrant writers of the First aliya who described the ‘exotic’ Arabs or the Yemenite Jews. 30 N.Gutman and E.Ben-Ezer, bein holot u-kehol shamayim, Tel Aviv: Yavne, 1980, pp. 111– 12. Abel Pann came to Bezalel in 1913 and stayed for one year before returning to Paris where he made in 1916 a series of pastel drawings depicting the suffering of Russian Jews from pogroms at that time. Pann claimed that his stay in Palestine inspired him to depict the Bible although he probably produced his biblical pictures while in the USA. See Y.Zalmona, ‘Hirszenberg, Lilien and Pann—Painters at Bezalel’, in N.Shilo-Cohen (ed.), Bezalel 1906– 1929, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983, pp. 205–12. 31 Gutman and Ben-Ezer, ibid., p. 120. 32 Y.Zalmona, ‘To the East?’, in Zalmona and Manor-Friedman, To the East, p. xi. In the fuller Hebrew version of this essay (‘mizraha! mizraha?’, in ibid., p. 56) and in an earlier

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publication of this idea Zalmona clearly specifies that this interpretation is based on Gutman’s writings and views. See Y.Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, in S.Tumarkin Goodman, Artists of Israel: 1920–1980, New York: Jewish Museum, 1981, p. 31. 33 Zalmona, ‘mizraha! mizraha?’, p. 57; idem, ‘History and Identity’, p. 34. 34 Even-Zohar, ‘Emergence’, p. 175. 35 In July 1918 Gutman volunteered for the 38th Royal Fusiliers and was released in April 1920. Letter-certificate dated 4 July 1918 and Local Protection Certificate dated 11 March 1920. Gutman Museum, Tel Aviv. 36 Gutman and Ben-Ezer, bein holot, pp. 128–30, 135. 37 G.Saunders, The Nude: A New Perspective, London: Herbert, 1989, pp. 93–4. 38 A classic example is the woman with sheaf on her head and a jar in her hand by William Holman Hunt, The Afterglow in Egypt, 1854/63, Southampton Art Gallery. 39 E.Grant, The People of Palestine (1921), Westport, CN: Hyperion Press, 1976, p. 142. 40 Ibid.; S.Weir, Palestine Costume, London: British Museum, 1989, p. 54. 41 N.Gutman, ir ktana ve-anashim ba me’at (1959), Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1977, pp. 76, 131. 42 H.N.Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 76, 123, 125. The author claims that the ancient Hebrews were farmers but their preferred self-image as portrayed in the Bible was of seminomadic shepherds. 43 ‘kibush ha-mir’eh’ (1914), in A.Ya’ari, zichronot eretz yisrael, II, Ramat Gan: Masada, 1974, pp. 982, 987–8. 44 See C.Erskine Clement, Heroines of the Bible in Art, London: David Nutt, 1900, pp. 143–55. 45 S.Refaeli, ‘me-hayei ha-falahim’, in luah eretz yisrael (1914/15), Jerusalem: Ariel, 1980, pp. 266–7; a typical example of ethnographic literature supported by biblical references is Grant, The People of Palestine. 46 Pablo Picasso, Sleeping Peasants, 1919, tempera, watercolour and pencil, Museum of Modern Art, New York. For the previous titles see C.Zervos, Pablo Picasso, III, Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1949, no. 371; M.Raynal, Picasso, Munich: Delphin verlag, no. xxix, 1921. The resemblance of Gutman’s Siesta to the Picasso was also mentioned by Barzel and Ofrat but without any discussion: Barzel, Art in Israel, p. 24; Ofrat, One Hundred Years, p. 53. 47 Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, pp. 32–4. 48 W.George, Pablo Picasso, Rome: Editions de Valori Plastici, 1924, nos xiii, xvi; Raynal, Picasso, nos xxix, xxx. The drawing was also published in the journal L’Esprit nouveau, no. 1, 1920, p. 71, which was familiar to artists in Palestine. Lubin admitted he was influenced by modern French trends through journals such as L’Esprit nouveau that he found in Paldi’s: interview with Lubin, conducted and edited by Shulamit Gera, November 1975: typewritten transcript, GSIC, Lubin file I, p. 5. 49 The catalogue of the Rubin exhibition at the Citadel in Jerusalem, March 1924 lists three paintings concerning the festival of Succoth and one that was titled The Shehina [Divine Presence] Hovereth in Galilee. In Bucharest, in November 1924, Rubin exhibited Hasidim in The Strolling Man and On the Roads of Galilee (illustrated in the catalogue); he also probably included them in Shabat Shalom and Towards Meron, and certainly in The Dancer Agadati. 50 Y.Koplevitz, ‘ha-ta’aruchot’, ketuvim, no. 29, 28 March 1927, p. 3, illustrated on front page. Illustrated in the catalogue and mentioned in the introduction: H.N. Bialik, ‘ha-tzayar Reuven’, introduction to Exhibition of Paintings by Rubin, Jerusalem, 1927; reprinted in C.Rubin (ed.), Rubin Museum, pp. 13–14; Rubin himself mentioned it as a major work in letters to his friend Bernard Weinberg in Paris in 1927 and 1928 (letters 36, 47, 33, 52; on Rubin’s letters see p. 216, n. 69). 51 N.Schur, toldot tzefat, Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Dvir, 1983, pp. 146, 245. 52 Ibid., pp. 80–1.

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53 See A.Ya’ari, ‘toldot ha-hilula be-Meron’, tarbitz, 31, 1962, pp. 72–101. Also A.Z.Rabinowitz, ha-galil ha-elyon, Jerusalem: Ha-havatzelet, 5669 (1908/9), pp. 12–18. 54 Bialik actually describes it as ‘a joint multi-faced dance of the hilula’, a term commonly used to describe the lag ba-omer celebration: Bialik, ‘ha-tzayar Reuven’, p. 14. In his God Seekers album Rubin used the English title The Dancers of Meron and the Hebrew Lag baomer be-Mer on for the same print (Fig. 7.4). 55 The festival of lag ba-omer of that year was on 2 May. Rubin held an exhibition in Paris from 26 March to 8 April 1926. He returned in early June 1926 and visited Safed in October (letters 26 and 30). In mid January 1927 (letter 34) he reports on the painting as The Jews of Meron. He later mentioned it as The Dancers with no reference to the festival. 56 The daily ha-aretz published articles annually on the celebration around the time of the festival: 28 May 1925;26 April 1926;2 May 1926;19 May 1927. Among writers who reported their experiences see D.Frischman, ‘lag ba-omer be-Meron’, in Y.Fichman (ed.), sefer ha-aretz; antologia shel eretz yisrael, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1927, pp. 551–2. Visits by the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow and the British Governor Sir Ronald Storrs were reported 28 May 1925. 57 A.Z.Ben-Yishai, ‘yom ha-hilula be-Meron’, ha-aretz, 28 May 1925, p. 2. 58 Schur, toldot tzefat, p. 224. 59 Heyd, ‘Rubin in Palestine’, p. 99. 60 Ibid. Heyd links this influence to that of Henri Rousseau and argues that Rubin’s early imprints of the neo-Byzantine style ‘were reinforced during his second Rumanina period after his exposure to Rousseau’. This is based on several assumptions, one of them (p. 102) being that Rubin was exposed to Rousseau’s art during his first stay in Paris (1913–14, according to Heyd), an assumption very difficult to substantiate, even according to Rubin’s own biography. Moreover, Heyd demonstrates Rousseau’s influence on The Artist’s Family (1926, Tel Aviv Museum of Art), which Rubin painted in a short span from Dancers of Meron and both paintings were exhibited at his 1927 exhibition. It is more likely that influence of Rousseau and other Primitivist styles became significant after Rubin’s visit to Paris in the spring of 1926. 61 See Z.Shavit (ed.), toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-eretz yisrael me-az ha-aliya ha-rishona: beniyata shel tarbut ivrit, I, Jerusalem: Israel National Academy for Science and Mossad Bialik, 1998. These tenets are particularly common in the history of art of this period. 62 Even-Zohar, ‘Emergence’, p. 175. The author refers to the First aliya but this is as true for members of Third and Fourth aliyot. 63 F.Rokem,’ “ha-dibuk” be-eretz yisrael: ha-te’atron, ha-bikoret ve-hitgabshuta shel ha-tarbut ha-ivrit’, cathedra, no. 20, July 1981, pp. 183–202; idem, ‘Hebrew Theater from 1889 to 1948’, in L.Ben-Zvi, Theater in Israel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 63–9; M. Kohansky, The Hebrew Theatre: Its First Fifty Years, Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1969, pp. 70–1, 94. 64 F.Rokem, ‘“ha-dibuk” al kvish Haifa-Jedda: al ha-hatzaga ha-rishona shel “ha-dibuk” beeretz yisrael’, cathedra, no. 26, December 1982, pp. 186–93. 65 Kohansky, The Hebrew Theatre, pp. 58, 100. 66 Rokem, ‘“ha-dibuk” al kvish Haifa-Jedda’, pp. 192–3. 67 D.Laor, hayei Agnon: bigografia, Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998, pp. 184–5. Other writers of the time also turaed to tales of the East-European shtetl. According to Nurit Govrin it was a reaction to Y.H.Brenner’s famous essay of 1911 on the eretz yisraeli genre in which he fiercely criticised the attempts to portray, in an idealist manner, the newly formed life of Jews in Palestine. N.Govrin, ‘ben kesem le-resen’, in maftehot, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978, pp. 9–19. 68 A.K.‘sifrutenu bi-shnat tarpah [5685]’, in E.Tzifroni et al. (eds), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael, vol. 2–3, Tel Aviv: Association of Hebrew Writers in eretz yisrael, 1925, p. 353. Agnon was perceived by his early critics primarily as a folklorist who conveyed ‘real’ day-

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to-day stories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe of past and present. See J.Halevi-Zwick, reshita shel bikoret Agnon (1909–1931), Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1984, pp. 82, 101. On Agnon’s collaboration with Martin Buber and Bialik on a project of collecting Hasidic tales see Laor, ibid., p. 158. 69 M.W.Kiel, ‘sefer ha’aggadah: Creating a Classic Anthology for the People and by the People’, Prooftexts, vol. 17/2, May 1997, pp. 177–97. 70 Bialik, ‘ha-tzayar Reuven’, p. 14. 71 Rubin’s Dancers of Meron was reproduced alongside sayings by Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk. The journal also published writings by a contemporary religious leader in Palestine Rabbi Avraham Cook; see ketuvim, no. 15, 1926. 72 See ketuvim 12 (6 December 1928), 15 (27 December 1928), 19 (31 January 1929), 21 (14 February 1929) and 23 (28 February 1929). 73 S.A.Horodetzky, zichronot, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1957, pp. 84–7. Horodetzky published a series of essays on Hasidism in ha-shiloah and ha-olam and in 1922 his book on Hasidism was published by Dvir, the Hebrew publishing house that Bialik founded in Berlin. In 1926 Dvir published in Tel Aviv a book on the history of Kabbalists, Sabbetaians and Hasidim by David Kahana. 74 M.S.Geshuri, ‘im ha-tzlil ha-rishon’, in la-hasidim mizmor, Jerusalem: Ha-tehiya, 1936, pp. 7–8; S.A.Horodetzky, ‘ha-rikud ha-hasidi’, in ibid., p. 74. These views were shared by other Hebrew writers. See essays by R.Benyamin, ‘zimra mi-tziyon’, and Y.Fichman, ‘al hanigun’, in ibid. 75 E.Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (1882– 1904), Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988, esp. chs 2, 5 and 6. 76 S.Almog, Zionism and History, New York: St Martins Press and Jerusalem: Magnes, 1987, pp. 58–66. 77 A.Shapira, ‘The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement’, in S.Almog, J. Reinharz and A.Shapira (eds), Zionism and Religion, Hanover, MA: Brandies University Press, 1998, pp. 255–8. For a different view on the use of messianic language with regard to Zionism see Y.Shavit, ‘Realism and Messianism in Zionism and the Yishuv’, in J.Frankel (ed.), Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, VII, Oxford, 1991, pp. 100–27. 78 H.Hever, ‘Poetry and Messianism in Palestine Between the Two World Wars’, in Frankel, ibid., pp. 128–58. 79 Portrait of the Poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, c. 1924, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, probably the same as Portrait of Mr. G exhibited in Rubin’s first Palestine exhibition of March 1924. In 1924 Greenberg (1896–1981) published his first work in Palestine, the collection of poems eima gedola ve-yareah (Great Fear and the Moon) in which the concluding poem deals with the question of the Messiah. See Hever, ibid., pp. 130–5. Rubin’s description of the pioneers as ‘the crucified’, in a letter dated 24 August 1925, may reflect Greenberg’s conception of the pioneers as the representatives of the Messiah of these times. The use of Christian symbols to mythologise the suffering of the Zionist pioneers was shared by several Hebrew poets of the time. See H.Bar-Yosef, Jewish-Christian Relations in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, Cambridge: Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, 2000, pp. 25–6. 80 A.Holtzman, melechet mahshevet—tehiyat ha-umah: ha-sifrut ha-ivrit le-nochah ha-omanut ha-plastit, Haifa: Haifa University and Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1999, pp. 185–9. 81 Y [Y.Yatziv], ‘Shabbetai Zvi’, kuntres, vol. 14/288, 26 Tevet 5687 (1927), pp. 19–22. The weekly kuntres was the organ of the workers’ party ahdut ha-avoda. For the relationship of Zionism to past messianic movements see Y.Kolatt, ‘tziyonut u-meshihiyut’, in Z.Baras (ed.), meshihiyut ve-eschatologia, Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, Historical Society of Israel, 1983, p. 421. 82 Bistritzky was the co-editor of the collective memoir of this group, kehiliyatenu, 1922. For the group’s fascination with mysticism and Hasidism and its influence on their views see

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Y.Weiler, ‘ha-kesem shel “ha-shomer ha-tzair”’, cathedra, no. 88, July 1998, pp. 73–94. Bistritzky’s Shabbetai Zvi was produced at the ohel in 1931 and a revised version was published in 1936. He also wrote a drama on Jesus and early Christianity entitled Judas Iscariot (1930). 83 L.Nochlin, ‘Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art’, in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, London: Thames and Hudson, 1989, p. 141. 84 Saunders, The Nude, pp. 91–3. 85 See G.Ofrat, Nahum Gutman: sod ha-pardes, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1991. 86 See D.Manor, ‘Erotic and Exotic: The Image of the “Oriental” Woman in Israeli Art’, Issues, University of East London, vol. 5/1, 1997, esp. pp. 74–6. 87 Gutman stayed again in Paris from 1929 until 1931. While there he produced etchings of café scenes in Jaffa. Some of his female bather paintings date from 1929–30. 88 A possible source for the image of the solitary female bather could be a story by Moshe Smilansky, nikmat humadi (Humadi’s vengeance), which describes the beautiful daughter of the Sheikh bathing naked at night in the spring. The story was first published in 1909 in the periodical ha-shiloah, no. 21, and again in the author’s collection of folk-like stories from the life of the Arabs benei arav, vol. 2, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Ahi’ever, 5687 (1926/7). In his memoir Gutman claimed that his curiosity about the prostitutes of Jaffa was motivated by the literature he had read. Gutman and Ben-Ezer, bein holot, p. 194. 89 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, pp. 19–21. 90 Gutman and Ben-Ezer, bein holot, p. 206. 91 L.Nochlin, ‘Women, Art, and Power’, in Women, Art, and Power, p. 19 (original emphasis). 92 C.Duncan, ‘Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 55, December 1973, pp. 574–7, 582. 93 W.Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, p. 268. 94 See Almog, Zionism and History, pp. 108–18; M.Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 19, 93–4, 99ff. 95 G.L.Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality—Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig, 1985, pp. 17–18. 96 D.Bernstein, ‘ha-halutza bein ha-dvadim: ma’amadan shel nashim be-koah ha-avoda bitekufat ha-yishuv’, megamot, no. 28, June 1983, p. 11; D.Biale, Eros and the Jews, New York: Basic Books, 1992, pp. 187–9. 97 Bernstein, ibid., pp. 10, 16; idem, The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society, New York: Praeger, 1987, pp. 52–3, 82–3. 98 See M.Scheps et al. (eds), shnot ha-esrim be-omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1982, pp. 91, 126. Paldi’s painting was first reproduced in The Menorah Journal, vol. 14, February 1928. 99 See Biale, Eros, p. 183; G.Ofrat, ‘dmut ha-uma: gilgulei ha-mitos ha-leumi ha-nashi betarbutenu’, in ganim teluyim, Jerusalem: Omanut Yisrael, 1991, esp. pp. 74–82. 100 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 18. Cf. J.Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. M.Ryan, La France: Images of Woman and Ideas of Nation, 1789–1989, London: South Bank Centre, 1989. 101 Barzel, Art in Israel, p. 18; Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, p. 31. This view is well supported by the illustrations in books on Israeli art that concentrate on oriental figures and show no Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews. 102 Sadan-Loebenstein, siporet shnot ha-esrim, p. 67.

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10 Art and ideas: artists, critics and the role of art 1 Rubin often complained of difficulty in sales and some of his best-known pictures—the triptych First Fruits and Dancers of Meron—were never sold in spite of his efforts, remaining in the artist’s possession throughout his life. Some of Nahum Gutman’s famous paintings were sold to museums in Israel only after his death in 1980. 2 Y.Zaritsky, ‘ha-omanut ve-ha-itonut’, ha-aretz, 23 May 1927, p. 3 (original emphasis). 3 N.Gutman, ‘bikoret ha-omanut’, ketuvim, 25 October 1928, p. 1; ‘michtav lama’arechet’ (a letter signed by seven artists), ketuvim, 8 November 1928, p. 4; B. Schatz, ketuvim, 15 November 1928, p. 2; S.Tagger, in ‘she’elot u-teshuvot’, turim, 3 October 1933, p. 15. 4 Y.Pressman, ‘keitzad mevakrim omanut ha-tziyur’, ketuvim, 15 October 1926, p. 3; Y.Paldi, ‘al ha-hitrashmut ve-al ha-bikoret’, ketuvim, 29 June 1927, p. 2; ‘michtav la-ma’arechet’, ibid.; Schatz, ibid. 5 Yitzhak Katz (1901–92) himself was not a professional critic either. His main occupation was in management in economic and trading organisations in the yishuv and Israel. He was closely involved with the Modernists of the 1920s; his house was a meeting place for artists and he kept up a long-standing friendship with some of them. Among the poets and writers who reviewed exhibitions, most notable were Ya’akov Koplevitz (later known as Yeshurun Keshet, 1893–1977) and Mordechai Avi-Shaul (1898–1988). 6 N.Soker [Gutman], ‘sach ha-kol (ha-tziyur be-tarpat [5689])’, ketuvim, 4 October 1929, p. 2. 7 Tagger, ‘she’elot u-teshuvot’, p. 15. 8 ‘michtav la-ma’arechet’, p. 4. 9 Liri, ‘mi-ta’aruchat ha-omanim bi-yrushalayim’, ha-poel ha-tza’ir, vol. 15/25, 5 May 1922, p. 10. 10 M.Avi-Shaul, ‘ta’aruchot’, ketuvim, 9 January 1930, p. 2. 11 Lani, ‘eged u-masad (ta’aruchot ha-tzayarim be-Tel Aviv)’, ha-aretz, 10 January 1930, p. 8. 12 Z.Y.Schwed, ‘ta’aruchot’, ha-aretz, 14 May 1925, p. 6. 13 AYA [S.Eisen], ‘aharei ha-ta’arucha ba-ohel’, davar supplement, 12 March 1926, p. 3. 14 N.Alter, ‘ta’aruchat ha-tzayarim ha-modernim’, kuntres, vol. 17/336, 21 Iyar 5668 (May 1928), p. 23. 15 S.Lev-Ari, ‘hitpathut ha-teatronim’, in Z.Shavit (ed.), toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-eretz yisrael me-az ha-aliya ha-rishona: beniyata shel tarbut ivrit, I, Jerusalem: Israel National Academy for Science and Mossad Bialik, 1998, pp. 347, 352. 16 Y.Hirshberg, ‘hitpathut ha-gufim ha-mevatz’im be-muzika’, in Shavit, ibid., pp. 306, 330. 17 Z.Shavit, ‘hitpathut ha-molut [publishing] ha-ivrit be-eretz yisrael’, in ibid., p. 228. 18 Van Vriezland, ‘ta’arucha le-omanut u-le-mlechet mahshevet’, ha-aretz, 19 April 1921, p. 3. 19 V.V. [Van Vriezland], ‘Art in Jerusalem’, The Palestine Weekly, 5 May 1922, pp. 312–13. The second exhibition at the Citadel was dedicated to crafts only. A painting exhibition of the Artists’ Association was held separately. The article was first published in Hebrew in haaretz, 3 May 1922, p. 3. 20 S.Spiegel, ‘hirhurim u-reshamim (le-raglei ha-ta’arucha shel agudat ha-omanim ha-ivrit bemigdal david bi-yrushalayim)’, ha-aretz, 14 May 1924, p. 4. See also Y [J.Klausner], ‘oman le’umi (rishmei mistakel)’, ha-aretz, 10 May 1922, p. 2; M. Avi -Shaul, ‘ta’aruchat haomanim bi-yrushalayim’, ha-aretz, 4 April 1926, p. 3. 21 Spiegel, ibid. 22 N.Gutman, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim ba-ohel’, ha-aretz, 11 May 1928, p. 3 (original emphasis). 23 M.Shemi, ‘al eretz-yisraeliyut ba-tziyur (he’ara ktana)’, ketuvim, 14 May 1928, p. i.

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24 Y.Zaritsky, ‘shana shel ta’aruchot bi-yrushalayim’, teatron ve-onamut, no. 8, Iyar 5687 (1927), p. 13. 25 Van Vriezland, ‘Art in Jerusalem’, p. 312. 26 See J.Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914, London: Quartet Books, 1982, ch. 9. The Palestinian crafts exhibitions at the Citadel were the initiative of C.R.Ashbee, a follower of the Arts and Craft movement who believed in the importance of crafts for the economic and social regeneration of the country (he referred mainly to the Arabs). 27 A.Melnikov, ‘omanut la-am’, ha-aretz, 16 January 1925, p. 6. 28 Schwed, ‘ta’aruchot’. 29 Reported in ha-aretz, 8 May 1927, p. 4. 30 From the introduction to the catalogue of the first exhibition, Museum Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, c. 1932. With plans for opening an ethnographic section and a Biblical Gallery the concept was similar to the Bezalel Museum. See also T.KatzFreiman, ‘yisud muzeon Tel Aviv 1930– 1936’, shnaton muzeon Tel Aviv, no. 1, 1982, pp. 9–42. 31 See Melnikov’s lecture at the first exhibition of Rubin, published in doar ha-yom, 2 April 1924, p. 4; Y.Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim ba-omanut ha-ivrit ba-aretz’, teatron veomanut, no. 1, 17 June 1925, pp. 10–13. 32 Y, ‘oman le’umi’, p. 2. 33 Yitzhak Frenkel (he later changed his name to Frenel) was born in Russia, came to Palestine in 1919, went to Paris in 1920 and finally returned in 1925 and opened a studio in Tel Aviv for teaching painting. 34 A.Even-Ezer, ‘sujet ve-hibur le-lo atzamim’, ha-aretz, 20 May 1927, p. 3. 35 M.Avi-Shaul, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim bi-yrushalayim’, ha-aretz, 4 April 1926, p. 3. 36 From the introduction to the catalogue ta’aruchat omanim modernim, Tel Aviv, January 1926. These were undoubtedly the words of the ohel’s founder Moshe Halevi (1895–1974), who aspired to establish a workers’ theatre, one not necessarily made up of the participating artists. Halevi also declared this exhibition to be the first of its kind, which suited the artists who wanted to distinguish themselves as a group. 37 AYA [S.Eisen], ‘aharei ha-ta’arucha ba-ohel’, p. 3. A couple of years earlier the same critic was very positive towards Rubin’s paintings: S.Eisen, ‘le-ta’aruchat Reuven’, ha-aretz, 29 April 1924, p. 4. Incidentally, the critic was rather positive toward Frenkel’s abstract paintings which reminded him of workers and the machine. 38 Z.Shavit, ‘hitpathut kitvei ha-et ve-ha-itonut’, in idem, toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi, pp. 128– 9. 39 Y.Zalmona, The Tower of David Days: The Birth of Controversy in Israel Art in the Twenties’, in The Tower of David Days: First Cultural Strife in Israel Art, Jerusalem: Tower of David museum, 1991, pp. 73–4. 40 S [K.Y.Silman], ‘ha-ta’arucha ha-omanutit (reshamim)’, ha-aretz, 13 April 1921, p. 3. 41 Idem, 15 April 1921, p. 4. 42 Van Vriezland, ‘ta’arucha le-omanut’, p. 3. 43 Spiegel, ‘hirhurim u-reshamim’, p. 4. R.K. [R.Katzanelson], ‘be-ta’aruchat Feldman [Paldi]’, davar supplement, 1 April 1926, p. 4. 44 Spiegel, ibid.; Van Vriezland, ‘ta’arucha le-omanut’, p. 3. 45 E.Lubrani, ‘signon’, ha-aretz, 21 May 1925, p. 5. 46 Avi-Shaul, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim bi-yrushalayim’. The writer then reprimands the artists for ignoring pioneering work. 47 Y.Koplevitz, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim ha-shvi’it bi-yrushalayim’, ketuvim, 3 May 1928, p. 2. 48 A.D.Smith, National Identity, London: Penguin, 1991, pp. 84–93. 49 In Russia Slavophiles urged painters to reject imported influences, mainly Western art, and create a genuine national art: see E.K.Valkenier, ‘The Intelligentsia and Art’, in T.G.Stavrou (ed.), Art and Culture in Nineteenth Century Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

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1983, pp. 155–6. In France nationalists rejected Cubism as foreign to the ‘true’ French tradition: see C.Green, Art in France 1900–1940, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 210–15. 50 M.Shemi, 48 temunot u-mivhar igrot ve-rishumim, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1958. Quotations hereafter are from these selected published letters. 51 Ibid., p. 3, letter to his brother in Paris dated 3 September 1920. 52 Ibid., p. 7, letter to his brother dated 2 April 1922. 53 Ibid., p. 12, letter to his brother from 1924. 54 Ibid., p. 15, letter to his wife from Paris dated 27 August 1928. 55 Ibid., p. 16, letter to his brother dated 1 February 1930. 56 Ibid., p. 7, letters from 1922. 57 S.Gera, interview with Arieh Lubin, 1975, typewritten script, GSIC, Lubin file I, p. 5. Lubin was exposed to modern art in Chicago, where he studied art, and during his journey in Europe before settlement in Palestine in late 1923. However, he came to recognise its significance only after meeting Paldi. Lubin’s paintings of the 1920s show various tendencies but some follow very closely paintings by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, the editors of L’Esprit nouveau and founders of the movement called ‘Purism’. On the influence of modern art on the painters of the 1920s see G.Ballas, ‘tzayarei eretz yisrael bishnot ha-esrim ve-ha-kubizm’, in M.Scheps et al. (eds), shnot ha-esrim be-omanut yisrael, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 1982, pp. 11–23. 58 Ballas records Zaritsky’s story of how he would travel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv every time he heard that one of the artist had received a new reproduction: ibid., p. 12. 59 Ibid., p. 22. 60 Y.Paldi, ‘al ha-hitrashmut ve-al ha-bikoret’, ketuvim, 29 June 1927, p. 2. 61 Koplevitz, ‘ta’aruchat ha-omanim ha-shvi’it’, p. 2. 62 M.Shemi, ‘al eretz-yisraeliyut ba-tziyur’, p. 1. 63 A.Melnikov, ‘ve-anahnu le-an?’, davar supplement, vol. 3/30, 21 Iyar 5688 (spring 1928), p. 4. A similar view was pronounced several years later by Narkiss who claimed that the history of art in Palestine after the War was ‘none other than an echo of the history of modern art in Europe on a provincial scale’ and that the dependency on these modern schools prevented the artists in eretz yisrael from pursuing their initial desire to impart a unique character to the art in the country: M.Narkiss, ‘omanut be-eretz yisrael’, in P.Lahover (ed.), sefer ha-shana shel eretz yisrael li-shnat 5694, Tel Aviv: Shem, 1933/34, pp. 329, 335. 64 Melnikov, ibid. 65 A.Melnikov, ‘neum ha-petiha shel ha-pasal Melnikov be-ta’aruchat ha-tzayar Shmuel Schlesinger’, ha-aretz, 18 December 1925, p. 3. 66 Katz, ‘ha-zramim ha-hadashim’, p. 12. 67 The events of Tel Hai developed into a significant Israeli myth of heroism to which the sculpture by Melnikov contributed. See Y.Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, chs 3, 6, 9. For Melnikov’s biography and work see I.Ortar, Melnikoff: ‘The Awakening Judah’ Homage to Awahahm Melnikoff Pioneer of Israeli Sculpture, Haifa: University of Haifa Art Gallery, c. 1982. On the theme of the lion in the sculpture see G.Ofrat, ‘le-mi shaag ha-arieh?’, al ha-aretz; ha-omanut ha-eretz yisraelit, vol. 2, Israel: Omanut Yisrael, 1993, pp. 969–96. On the background to the monument and its erection see T. Guy, Tel Hai 1920–2000. pesel ha-arieh mi-semel leumi le-semel amami, Israeli Museum of Photography at Tel Hai industrial park, 2000. 68 The Monument Committee’s Report, 6 February 1934, in Ortar, Melnikoff, p. 41. 69 A.Kampf et al., ‘The Myth of Canaan and Israeli Art’, in The Myth of Canaan, Haifa: University of Haifa Art Gallery, 1980, p. 32; Cf. Y.Zalmona, ‘History and Identity’, in S.Tumarkin Goodman, Artists of Israel: 1920–1980, New York: Jewish Museum, 1981, pp. 40–1; Ofrat, ‘le-mi shaag ha-arieh?’, pp. 983–7.

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70 See T.Manor-Friedman, ‘yamenu ke-kedem: al ha-zika la-mizrah ha-kadum’, in Y.Zalmona and T.Manor-Friedman, To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1998, pp. 95–119. 71 Y.Fichman, ‘mizrah u-ma’arav’, Illustration Juive, vol. 1/1, 25 March 1929. (The article appeared in the Hebrew section of this bilingual Zionist cultural journal published in Egypt.) 72 Ibid. In contrast, Martin Buber argued that the Jews remained Eastern even when dispersed in the West and this quality gave them the advantage in the mission of mediating between East and West: M.Buber, ‘ruah ha-mizrah ve-ha-yahadut’ (1912), te’uda ve-yi’ud, I, Jerusalem: Ha-sifriya ha-tzionit, 1960, pp. 54–69. 73 N.Sadan-Loebenstein, siporet shnot ha-esrim be-eretz yisrael, Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1991, p. 22. 74 Ibid., p. 65. See also G.Shaked, ‘tzipiyot u-mimushan: tzipiyot ha-bikoret ve-ha-modelim haikariyim le-mimushan ba-sifrut ha-ivrit be-eretz yisrael’, ha-sifrut, vol. 29, December 1979, pp. 1–12 75 For a different view see Ballas, ‘tzayarei eretz yisrael’, p. 12. An exception is the architect, designer and artist Arieh El-Hanani (Sapoznikov) who prior to his immigration to Palestine in 1922 joined a group of artists in Kharkov in 1917 that designed revolutionary propaganda posters. El-Hanani also participated in the Jewish anthropological expedition into the Pale of Settlement led by An-Sky that had a significant influence on Russian Jewish avant-garde art. These influences are apparent in his stage designs in Russia and later in Palestine where he designed among others the set for the first production of the ohel theatre dedicated to Peretz stories. El-Hanani also participated in the second ohel exhibition of 1927. See C.Rubin, Arieh El-Hanani, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993. 76 Ballas, ibid. 77 M.Schmidt (Shemi), ‘al omanut ha-tziyur ba-aretz’, gazit, vol. 2/5–6, 1935, p. 26. In a letter of 2 September 1930 Shemi was dismissive of all German art trends; see 48 temunot, p. 16. 78 Ballas, ‘tzayarei eretz yisrael’, p. 18. 79 R.Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 5–6; Green, Art in France, pp. 86–8, 224. 80 Ballas also mentions Frenkel, Rubin, Mokadi and Newman as being influenced by Derain: ‘tzayarei eretz yisrael’, pp. 17–18. The pairing of Derain with the nineteenth-century painter Corot (as influencing Paldi) also derives from the connection made by French critics between Corot and Derain. See Golan, ibid., p. 36. 81 Golan, ibid., p. 5; Green, Art in France, pp. 211–15. 82 Golan, ibid., p. 7. 83 Ballas, ‘tzayarei eretz yisrael’, p. 22. Ballas claims that the influence of Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) came via the mediation of Russian painters, unlike the direct influence of Lhote and Derain. In my view all these influences came through the same route and were absorbed for the same reasons. Some paintings in Palestine also show affinity with landscape and nudes by the Jewish Parisian painter Moïse Kisling who achieved considerable success by the mid 1920s and might have been familiar to Jewish artists from Palestine. On Kisling’s status see Green, Art in France, p. 225. 84 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, p. 47. 85 Y.Katz, ‘Reuven’, ha-aretz, 27 February 1927, p. 3. Cf. M.Heyd, ‘Reuven Rubin in Palestine’, in C.Rubin (ed.), Rubin Museum: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, 1993, p. 103. 86 M.Hartley, Adventures in the Arts (1921), New York: Hacker Art, 1972. On Rubin’s contacts with Stieglitz see above p. 89 87 Rubin, ‘I Find Myself’, The Menorah Journal, vol. 12/5, October-November 1926, p. 499. For a fuller quotation see above p. 101. 88 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, p. 47.

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89 ‘Through the Looking Glass’, The Jewish Standard (New York), 30 September 1932; reprinted in Rubin: A Self Portrait. An Exhibition marking Rubin’s Centenary, Tel Aviv: Rubin Museum, c. 1993, p. 45. 90 E.Cowling and J.Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930, London: Tate Gallery, 1990, p. 12. In France the Latinist Mediterranean culture was not fully accepted as truly French and some rejected it in favour of a northern identity. See Green, Art in France, p. 217. 91 I.Even-Zohar, ‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948’, Studies in Zionism, no. 4, autumn 1981, p. 173. 92 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, ch. 6; Green, Art in France, p. 206. 93 P.Litvinovsky, ‘yamim be-Paris’, ketuvim, 3 January 1929, p. 1. In this report from Paris Litvinovsky mentioned numerous Jewish artists who wanted to help painters from Palestine to exhibit in Paris, and particularly mentioned Chagall in whose company they felt ‘something like a territory’. An important contact in Paris, particularly for Rubin, was the sculptor Hana Orloff (1888–1968) who also exhibited in Palestine in the 1920s. Her Hebrew article about art in Paris emphasised the importance of Derain: H.Orloff, ‘sihat hulin’, ketuvim, 4 October 1929, p. 6. 94 W.George, ‘al ha-plastika ha-yehudit’, davar supplement, vol. 6/4, 16 Heshvan 5691 (1930), pp. 2–3; idem, ‘li-she’elat ha-omanut ha-yehudit’, gazit, vol. 1/9–10, 1932–33, n.p. On Waldemar George’s extreme nationalism and his writings in defence of French art see Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, pp. 152–4; Green, Art in France, pp. 222–4. 95 Cf. H.Gliksberg’s view in his response to a questionnaire, turim, 3 October 1933, p. 18; M.Castel, ‘el mekorot ha-tziyur ha-gadol’, gazit, vol. 4/3–4, 1941, p. 40.

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Index

Agadati, Baruch 138–42, 148, 149 Agnon, S.Y. 152 Ahad Ha-Am 15–16, 19, 26–7, 58, 59, 62 Aliya: First 4, 55, 67, 79, 145; Second 4, 29, 55, 67, 131, 147, 153; Third 131, 153; Yavnieli 68 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) 12, 13; ha-torah ve-ha-melacha school 12 An-Sky, S. 17, 107, 152 Antokolsky, Mark 15–16, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 58, 86 Arabs, Palestinian 5, 6, 34, 68, 69, 95, 97, 102, 105, 107, 109, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127, 134–6, 138, 139, 142–8, 151, 154, 155, 156, 161–2, 173, 180, 184; Bedouin 135, 145, 147; dance 141; fellahin 135, 145, 147; village 115, 118, 121, 123, 128, 134, 146 Aran, Gideon 131 Arcadia 129, 132, 133, 148, 180, 183 Ark of the Covenant 43, 45 Arnason, H.H. 3 Art Nouveau 72, 80 art: ancient of the East 174; and ideology 2–3, 6–7, 113–14, 143, 166, 178, 184; and the press 164–5; beauty in 166–7; education 35, 37; European (Western) 59, 60, 75, 121, 146, 156, 160, 168, 171, 172, 173–4, 176, 180, 182; folk 4, 17, 18, 37, 68, 101, 141 see also folklore; French see France; Israeli 4, 5, 9–10, 14, 33, 39, 113, 129, 133, 136, 142, 156, 163, 184; Jewish see Jewish; journals 99–100, 172, 174; landscape see landscape;

Bibliography

251

modern 2–3, 4, 34, 39, 77, 98, 100, 116, 118–19, 121, 122, 131–2, 134, 136, 137, 168, 174, 176–7, 185; national 72–3, 170, 182, 184, 185; originality in 173; Polish 22; portrayal of Jesus in 86; ‘primitive’ 102, 137–8, 154, 179, 180, 185; role of 2, 13–14, 21, 22, 109, 163, 165, 168, 183; Russian see Russia Artists’ Association see Jewish Artists’ Association Arts and Crafts movement 18, 37, 168 Ashbee, Charles Robert 34 Avi-Shaul, Mordechai 170 Baerwald, Alexander 123 Ballas, Gila 176 Bar-Yosef, Hamutal 86 Ben Shemen project 32–3, 69 Ben-David, Shmuel 23, 24, 35, 65 Ben-Porat, Ziva 131 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 13, 62, 67 Berkowitz, Michael 13, 48, 63 Berlovitz, Yaffa 67 Bernstein-Cohen, Miriam 107 Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts 2, 4, 5–6, 9–75, 78, 80, 102, 111–12, 114, 124, 125, 134, 136, 137, 142–3, 169–70, 182–3, 184; building 45, 50–1; criticism of 27, 29, 33, 34, 36, 39, 73, 93–4, 106; exhibitions 34; museum 10, 39–42, 57, 60, 71, 93–4, 114, 168 Bialik, H.N. 62, 75, 105–6, 128–9, 152–3, 180 Bible 54–5, 68, 182; studies 56–7, 72; art 58–60; stories 147; images from 52, 58, 60, 63, 143 Bistritzky, Natan 154 Bourdieu, Pierre 6 Brainin, Reuven 57 Brenner, YH 11, 36, 55 British Mandate 33, 62, 94, 122 Buber, Martin 2, 14, 58, 59 Bulgaria 23, 25 Burke, Peter 17 Burla, Yehuda 142 Castel, Moshe 10, 136 Cézanne, Paul 87, 88, 172, 177 Chagall, Marc 86, 100, 101, 105, 142, 143, 148, 152, 176, 185 Citadel see Tower of David

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Cormon, Fernand 22, 23 Cosgrove, Denis 125 Crafts 12, 17–18, 25, 27, 29, 36, 166, 167–8; education 25–6 Cubism (Cubist) 122, 129, 132, 172, 176, 178 davar 152, 169 Derain, André 176–8 Dizengoff, Meir 168 Ehrenpreis, Marcus Dr. 24, 27 England 18, 37, 168 Even-Zohar, Itamar 135, 143, 151, 181 Expressionism (Expressionist) 98, 176 Fauves, Fauvism 98, 177 Fichman, Ya’akov 54, 175 Fischer, Yona 9–10 Fleg, Edmond 108, 121 Folk(lore) 40, 68, 183, 185; culture 16, 138–142, 153; literature 152; Hasidic culture 153 see also art France 3, 23, 102, 157, 171, 183; art 131–2, 143, 145, 158, 172, 176–9, 180, 181, 184–5 Frenkel, Yitzhak 168, 172 Galilee 33, 105, 117, 118, 123, 174 Gamzu, Haim 109 Gauguin, Paul 87, 88, 96, 97, 98, 102–3, 158, 180 Geertz, Clifford 6 George, Waldemar 181 Germany 1, 3, 55, 99 Ginzburg, David Baron 17 Gleizes, Albert 178 Gliksberg, Haim 10, 39 Gnessin, Menahem 107 Goldwater, Robert 84, 102 Golan, Romy 178, 179 Greenberg, Uri Zvi 154 Gur-Arieh, Meir 34, 35, 65 Gurevitch, Zali 131 Gutman, Nahum 10, 59, 124–5, 126, 129, 130, 132, 136, 142, 143–8, 156–8, 164, 167, 179, 180; A House in an Orange Grove 124–5; Bearer of Sheaves 144–6, 158; Jaffa Coast 156; Siesta 147–8; The Goatherd 143–5, 146, 147

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ha-dibuk 107, 152, 154 ha-poel ha-tza’ir 29, 165 ha-shiloah 15 haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment) 11, 15, 54, 55, 57, 67; maskilim (Enlightened Jews) 44, 54, 56 ha-tikva 79, 80, 83 ha-tzfira 21, 22, 51 Hebrew: art 15, 27, 36, 39, 58, 72, 105–6, 138, 169–70, 181; culture 138, 143, 151, 153, 161, 175, 183; dance 141; language 55, 58, 67; letters 72; literature 54, 86, 90, 142, 152, 163, 175; poetry 131, 153; theatre 138, 166; University 19 Hellman, George 103 Herder, J.G. 1, 14, 17, 141 Herzl, Theodor 25, 27, 40, 48, 57, 62–4, 79 Herzliya School, Tel Aviv 50–1, 119, 121 Hever, Hannan 153 Heyd, Milly 80 Hildesheimer, Hirsch Dr. 25 Hirszenberg, Shmuel 35, 59, 93 Hodler, Ferdinand 83–4, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 98; Night 84–6; Truth 89–90 Holy Land 26, 47, 102, 128 Holy Places 46–48, 49–50, 55, 73, 114, 128 Hurgin, Yaakov 142 Hutchinson, John 18 Israel Museum 10, 42, 43, 59, 60, 135 Israëls, Jozef 2, 14 Jaffa 34, 117–18, 121, 124, 125–6, 134, 146, 156 Jerusalem 4, 19, 32, 46, 49–50, 73, 105, 115, 118, 119, 121, 126–8, 149, 171–2; Jewish community in 11, 12–13, 65, 66, 67, 134, 143; Pro- Society 34 Jews: Bucharan 64, 66, 68, 134, 143, 156; Hasidic 105, 107, 138, 139, 149–50, 153, 154, 161, 184; ‘New’ 72, 97, 111, 122, 135, 161; oriental 134–5; Orthodox 56, 62, 65, 80, 105, 106–7, 117, 142, 148–9, 150, 152, 161; Yemenite see Yemenite Jewish Artists’ Association 92, 111–12, 118, 144, 163, 165, 169 Jewish National Fund (JNF) 31, 32, 48, 50, 63, 68–70, 118, 122, 130 Jewish:

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art 1–4, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 18, 26, 39, 52, 59, 54, 57–9, 72, 73, 87, 111, 127, 169, 170–1, 181, 182 see also Hebrew art; dance 142; Diaspora 45, 56, 63, 143, 152, 174, 183; Ethnographic Museum 17; folklore 17, 47, 62, 100–1, 106, 107, 127–8, 149, 152–3, 154, 176; museums 40; national art 16, 19, 22, 26, 55, 58, 59, 60, 68, 71, 72, 101 Jüdischer Verlag 14 Kabbalah 116, 150 Kampf, Avram 101 Karni, Yehuda 138, 139, 142, 153 Katz, Yitzhak 39, 92–3, 97–8, 105, 106, 111,164 Kauffman, Richard 118 keren ha-yesod 82, 104 ketuvim 153 Kolb, Eugene 109 Kolnik, Arthur 83, 86 Koplevitz Ya’akov 106, 170–1, 173 lag ba-omer celebration 150–1 landscape painting 113–35, 178, 183; in Western art 47, 131–2 Lhote, André 125, 178, 184 Licht 80, 83 Liebermann, Max 2, 14 Lilien, Ephraim Moses 2, 14, 25, 35, 45, 59, 62, 63, 80 Litvinovsky, Pinhas 10, 36, 107, 136, 142, 152, 176; criticism of 169 Lubin, Arieh 121, 129, 130, 172; View of the Hills of Ramat Gan 129; The Diner 160 Magen David see Shield of David Mapu, Avraham 54, 55, 79, 115 masad 165, 172 Melnikov, Avraham 95, 100, 101, 168, 173–5; Roaring Lion 174 Menorah 43, 44–45, 106 messianism 45, 48, 153, 154 Metzinger, Jean 178 Michelangelo 58, 60 Mitchell, W.J.T. 113 Modernists, art group 4, 5, 6, 92, 111–82, 183, 184 Montefiore, Moses Sir 12 Morris, William 18 Moses, images of 23, 52, 58, 60, 63, 82 Murillo 58, 60

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Narkiss, Mordecahi 41,42, 57 national art 2–3, 6, 7, 11, 13–16, 19, 29, 39, 56, 59, 61, 62, 72–3, 105–6, 162, 168, 170, 182, 185; in Russia 16–17, 141 nationalism 2–3, 56, 113–14, 160, 171, 178, 185; cultural 18, 56, 101; in art 16; romantic 17, 68, 182 Neo-classicism 180 New York City 34, 88, 89 Nochlin, Linda 158 Nordau, Max 13–14, 62 Nossig, Alfred 14 Ofrat, Gideon 32–3, 90 Ohel Theatre 152, 154; exhibitions 111, 112, 118, 137, 144, 165, 166, 168, 169, 173 Oppenheimer, Franz Dr 25 Orientalism 134–7, 146, 161, 173, 182 Ost und West 14, 27, 58, 59, 67 Paldi, Yisrael 10, 36, 111, 112, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 141, 147, 172, 173, 178; Family 160; Pastoral 123–4 Palestine Foundation Fund see keren ha- yesod Pann, Abel 35, 60, 65, 143 Paris 16, 22, 23, 26, 36, 38, 51, 78, 99–100, 132, 137, 144, 157–8, 159, 171, 172, 174, 176, 181, 184–5 Peretz, Y.L 152 Picasso, Pablo 146, 147–8, 174, 180 Pineles, Shmuel 79–80 Primitivism 17, 106, 136–8, 141, 142, 180, 185 Raban, Ze’ev 34, 55, 65; criticism of 114; Song of Songs (shir ha-shirim) 55, 114 Ramat Gan 129 Rhodes, Colin 102 Romanticism 185; German 72 Rothchild, Julius 35 Rousseau, Henri 137, 179, 180 Rubin, Reuven 6, 10, 36, 75–110, 112, 118–21, 126–7, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142, 148–53, 156, 158, 159, 160–1, 168, 172, 176, 179–80, 183; Christian imagery in 86, 102; criticism of 106, 169; Dancers of Meron 105, 150, 151, 153, 154–5, 180; exhibitions 6, 71, 86–7, 88, 89, 90, 92, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109; False Prophets 89–90; Family of Safed 151, 158, 159;

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First Fruits 92, 93, 94–8, 156, 158; Girl with Pomegranates 156; The Goldfish Vendor 180; Hasidic Ecstasy 148, 149; Houses in Tel Aviv 92, 119; image of Orthodox Jews in 106–7; Jerusalem 126–9, 180; Madonna of the Homeless 90, 95; Sabbath in Safed 150, 161–2; Sophie 156; Succoth in Jerusalem 105; The God Seekers (woodcuts) 98, 101, 148; The Temptation in the Desert 84–6, 87, 95 Rubin, Carmela 126 Ruskin, John 18 Russia 1, 3, 16–18, 23, 29, 37, 100–1, 141, 171, 182; art 15, 176; Peredvizhniki 22 Sadan-Loebenstein, Nili 175 Safed 107, 108, 115–7, 134, 142, 148, 149, 150–1, 154–5, 161 Schama, Simon 113–14, 129, 130 Schatz, Boris 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 20–7, 28–9, 31–2, 33–5, 37–42, 45, 51–2, 55–6, 57, 59, 60, 61–2, 65–6, 71–2, 78, 94, 141, 168, 171, 182; in Bulgaria 23–5, 68; Mattathias 23, 82 Scholem, Gershom 43–4 Schur, Aharon Shaul 35, 65 Schwarz, Joseph Rabbi 49, 128 Shabbetai Zvi 154 Shaked, Gershon 142 Shami, Yitzhak 142 Shavit, Ya’akov 72 Shazar, Zalman 132 Shemi, Menahem 10, 115, 117, 136, 148, 167, 171–2, 173, 174, 175, 176; Fishermen 180 Shield of David (Magen David) 43–4, 45, 106 shtetl 58, 59, 152 Shva, Shlomo 119, 122 Silman, Kadish 30 Smilansky, Moshe 145 Smilansky, Ze’ev 29 Smith, Anthony D. 114 Smolenskin, Peretz 20, 22 Sokolow, Nahum 22, 57–8 Soloveitchik, Menahem 56 Stasov, Vladimir 16–17, 22 Steinberg, Eliezer 83 Stieglitz, Alfred 89, 179 Storrs, Ronald Sir 34 Struck, Herman 14, 35, 59, 63

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Symbolism 84, 86, 87, 90 Tagger, Sionah (Tziona) 10, 125, 129, 164, 178; At Jaffa Port 125–6 teatron eretz-yisraeli (TAI) 107 Tel Aviv 4, 34, 92, 112, 119–21, 124, 126, 134, 141, 146; economic crisis 1926 103–4; Museum 42, 60, 109, 114, 168 Tiberias 115, 117, 119, 142 Tissot, James 60 Tower of David 46, 48, 49–50, 64; exhibitions at 34, 92, 111, 112, 118, 166, 169 Ury, Lesser 14, 58 Valley of Jezreel 118 Van Gogh 87, 88 Van Vriezland, Zadok 41, 166–8, 170 Verrocchio 60 Vilnay, Ze’ev 122 Warburg, Otto 25, 27, 62 Wolff, Janet 6, 7, 114 women 156–62; in European art 156; ‘natural’ 158–9; nude 156–8; oriental 156–8, 160; role of in Zionism 160 Yemenite Jews 30, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68–70, 96, 102, 134, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151, 184; Bezalel workers 31–2, 34; in Ben Shemen 32–3, 69–70; dance 141; families 158, 159; women 160 Zalmona, Yigal 122, 143 Zaritsky, Yosef 111, 112, 115–16, 142, 163–4, 167 Zionism (Zionist) 2, 5–6, 13–14, 44, 63, 19, 79, 134, 153, 160, 171; Congress 2, 14, 31, 63, 79–80, 183; ‘Cultural’ 13, 19, 26, 171; ‘Democratic Faction’ of 14; iconography 43–4, 48, 80, 82; ideology 3–4, 143, 183; immigration to Palestine 118, 151, 160, 183 see also Aliya; Labour 129–30; and messianic ideas 153–4; movement 24, 72;

Bibliography movement in Bulgaria 24–5; movement in Romania 79; Organization 4, 14, 20, 33, 41, 122, 182; ‘Political’ 13, 63; ‘Practical’ 13, 19, 25 Zulawski, Jerzy 154

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