TEL AVIV — When the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s permanent collection of Israeli art reopened in February, the first work visitors saw wasn’t even Israeli. It was a bust of a Scottish Jewish artist, Benno Schotz, who spent most of his life in Glasgow.
The largest work was a 30-meter painting by a Palestinian Ukrainian citizen of Israel, Maria Saleh Mahameed, who grew up in an Arab town in the north of the country.
The oldest, a small oil painting by Samuel Hirszenberg from 1908, shows the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine in Jerusalem that has since become an emblem of Palestinian nationalism.
For months, the collection, the world’s largest permanent public exhibition of Israeli art, had been closed while the museum traded the artwork. The new exhibition is nothing less than a reinterpretation of the Israeli artistic canon and how it should be displayed.
It showcases artists from outside the traditional pantheon, including both West Bank settlers and Palestinians, highlights some lesser-known works by well-known artists, and builds on a chronological narrative that puts art at the service of Israeli history.
The goal is to allow visitors to enjoy the artworks on their own terms, rather than as illustrations of a moment in Israeli history, or some aspect of Israeli identity, the collection’s curator, Dalit Matatyahu, said in a statement. recent interview.
“We’ve learned, or learned, to look at art as a symbol for something else,” said Dr. Matatyahu. “I try to look at the art as if I don’t know anything.”
While the Tel Aviv Museum was not the first in Israel to raise such ideas, it is the most prominent.
A recent exhibition at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art explored the extent to which Israeli art can challenge Israeli institutions; clumsily, it was closed prematurely after the city’s mayor complained about a work that seemed to mock devout Jews. Last year, a major retrospective at the Haifa Museum of Art won praise for bringing several artists to the fore, including local Palestinians, who had previously received little attention.
But critics say the changes to the Tel Aviv collection are particularly significant: it is the oldest art museum in Israel, with one of only three permanent public collections of Israeli art, and it is one of the main gateways to Israeli culture for foreign visitors.
“This is a really big shift,” said Gilad Meltzer, art critic for Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper. “It allows us to look through a different lens at what has been done in Israeli art over the past nearly 120 years.”
Since the early Zionists built the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem in 1906, the creation, display and discussion of Israeli art has been closely intertwined with the history of the Israeli state.
Initially, some artists explicitly associated their work with the Zionist project of building a new state and a new Jewish culture. For example, early Zionist illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien depicted Jews as strong and triumphant figures. After the establishment of the state, artists often associated their work with debates about Israeli identity.
Later, after Israeli artists became less directly involved in that discussion, curators often presented Israeli art chronologically—telling the story of Israeli art, barely more than a century old, through the stories of Zionism, Jewishness, and Israeliness. identity.
The new version of the Tel Aviv collection, entitled ‘Material Imagination’, has attracted attention by abandoning this sense of storytelling. The 130 works are not shown in historical order or historical theme.
The art is instead loosely grouped according to its aesthetic content – paintings and sculpture related to the land, for example, fill one room, while pieces more focused on water and sky fill another. The resulting selection, expected to last for several years, juxtaposes contemporary artists with the long-dead, painters with sculptors, and religious Jews with secular Arabs.
“Israeli art was preoccupied with its identity from the beginning,” said Dr. Matatyahu. Throughout the history of Israeli art, she added, artists and curators have wondered, “What is Israeli about art? What is Israeli art?”
“I’m trying to get out of this story,” she added.
By prioritizing artistic content over artistic reputation, Dr. Matatyahu omitted some of the biggest names in the Israeli canon, such as Menashe Kadishman and Micha Ullman, and selected sometimes lesser-known works from the canonical artists who still made the cut.
More than a quarter of the work on display had never been seen in the museum before. Forty-one of the artists are women, about a third more than in the previous incarnation of the permanent collection. And while the show doesn’t prioritize the work of Israel’s Arab minority, some of whom don’t want their work shown in Israeli settings, the number of Arab artists is still higher than before.
In a sense, this approach is almost apolitical and allows for many contrasting perspectives, but devoid of its own unifying ideological premise.
That lack of a punchy statement is Mr. Meltzer’s main criticism of the show: “I don’t feel like I need to argue against it,” he said.
But even if the exhibit doesn’t have an overall political arc, certain choices and juxtapositions are deeply political — though not in a unified or predictable way.
Some works have a left-wing undertone. There are paintings and photographs that address Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, including work by David Reeb, an artist with ties to the Israeli left, depicting a Palestinian protester in the occupied West Bank.
The bust of Benno Schotz is of Theodor Herzl, the early Zionist leader – depicted not as a triumphant hero, but as a gloomy, heavy thinker.
The huge canvas of Mrs. Saleh Mahameed — so big she’d never seen it in its entirety before — smacks of police surveillance of Israel’s Arab minority.
“It’s so important to come to the Israeli art collection and see me as an Arab and as a woman too,” Ms Saleh Mahameed said in an interview.
But there are also works not usually associated with leftist, secular cultural institutions such as the Tel Aviv Museum.
dr. Matatyahu devotes most of one wall to Jewish religious art, including a large canvas filled with Jewish symbolism by Samuel Bak, a well-known artist previously considered old-fashioned in Israel, whose work was not shown in the earlier incarnation of the permanent collection or in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Most notably, the exhibit features a diptych of a West Bank settler jailed for planning a bomb attack on Palestinians. The diptych, the work of a prominent settler artist, Porat Salomon, is a painted facsimile of two subtitled screen fragments from a true television interview with the militant Yarden Morag. In the first part of Mr. Salomon’s piece, the subtitles suggest that Mr. Morag apologizes for his actions; in the second, it becomes clear that he is apologizing to God, rather than to his potential victims.
It was a surprise to Mr. Salomon that such a work was included in the rehung collection, on display by a largely secular and liberal-oriented crowd. And precisely because the show itself lacked any common narrative, it was able to give voice to a kaleidoscope of more marginalized voices, including his own, Mr Salomon said.
“It’s all new,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a new perspective – of allowing new perspectives.”
