The view that Israeli painting and sculpture was launched in 1948 is a false impression.
By GIL STERN STERN GOLDFINEJosef Zaritsky art 88 224(photo credit: Museum of Art, Ein Harod)
Politically, 1948 was the year that a piece of Palestine became Israel, but the history of its cultural seeds was sown decades before. The challenge presented to six of Israel's major museums this past year by the Department of Museums at the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport was to create a summation of the plastic arts for the country's first 60 years is almost a de-facto proclamation that our cultural heritage, limited as it may be, was born in 1948.
By establishing the ground rules to fit these museum celebrations, the ministry has eliminated years of rooted art, especially the pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s. Not to forget the messianic figure Boris Schatz (1866-1932), who established the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Palestine in 1906, thus launching an institutional base for the visual arts.
Although its objective was the creation and dissemination of crafted art objects with Jewish motifs motivated and influenced largely by a combination of existing Middle Eastern ornamentation and European themes, Bezalel - with teachers like Abel Pann, Ze'ev Raban and Ephraim Moshe Lilien - became the cornerstone of an Eretz Yisrael art largely confined to the historical and mythological underpinnings of life in the Jerusalem ghetto and Old Testament heroes.
At some time the pre-1948 roots that took hold in Eretz Yisrael by painters like Menachem Shemi, Reuven Rubin, Nahum Gutman, Ziona Tagar and Arieh Lubin, and the sculptors Avraham Melnikov, Batya Lichansky and Chana Orloff, should be given the same attention given the first 60 years of the state. And let us not forget Yitzhak Danziger, his sculpture Nimrod and the significance of the Canaanite movement active from 1939 to 1949.
That having been said, The First Decade: A Hegemony and a Plurality, at the Museum of Art, Kibbutz Ein Harod (until October 15), is a mosaic of paintings, sculptures, drawings and graphic arts that crisscrosses 10 years of upheavals and changes in the political and social spheres of Israeli life from 1948 to 1958. The curators of the exhibition, Dr. Galia Bar-Or and Prof. Gideon Ofrat, have assembled a very meaningful and very concise survey that is not only interesting from a historical point of view but is also educational and in several instances aesthetically surprising.
Of the six countrywide exhibitions, The First Decade is the most riveting because it does not only deal with art as a function of individual expression, but it also confronts the socio-cultural issues that concerned the founding fathers. It was also a period of Holocaust survivors arriving with their tattered emotional baggage, mass migrations from the Arab countries, the War of Independence, the emergence of women artists as equals and the shaping of a collective national identity. All these cataclysmic events are investigated or touched upon by Bar-Or and Ofrat.
In the main, the art world of the 1950s presented a conflict of ideals, one fostered by the New Horizons group (established in 1948) which championed the concept of "art for art's sake," a Parisian influenced interpretation of what modernist art should be. Its conclusions led to a dedicated lyrical abstract style that was opposed by several literal-oriented painters who believed in the notion of "art for society's sake."
The former, led by Joseph Zaritsky, included a core that comprised, among others, Marcel Janco, Arieh Aroch, Yehezkel Streichman, Avigdor Stematsky and Zvi Mairovich. Those who championed a plurality of creative styles in 1950, ardently supporting the labor movement attached to the kibbutz movement included Moshe Gat, Yohanan Simon, Naphtali Bezem, Ruth Schloss, Shraga Weil, Shimon Tsabar, Gershon Knipsel and Avraham Ofek. Their work presented a viable, inner-directed, and alternative to the abstraction of New Horizons.
They were encouraged by the postwar international left-wing political movement and advocated a range of works based on social realism. Immersed in the struggle for building a national identity through illustrative means, they created narrative and allegorical paintings meant to awaken the masses and present a quasi-educational front that all too often was unabashedly obvious and propaganda-like.
In her chapter "Universal and International Art in the Kibbutz in the First Decade," Bar-Or illustrates the broad differences between artists lodged in the Kibbutz Artzi/Hashomer Hatza'ir movement and Mapam and those belonging to Kibbutz Meuhad, the international-oriented group whose language was the medium, the pigment, the brushstrokes, the welded iron and the individual's response to life without considering the burdens of social or a collective narrative content.
In her essay "Discourse of Memory, Displaced Persons and Refugees," Bar-Or not only digresses on the context of personal and collective memory and displacement but takes her thoughts to art studios established in the Cyprus internment camps by the painter Naphtali Bezem and the sculptor Ze'ev Ben-Zvi. Reemergence is deeply embedded in Diaspora Jewry, and the exhibition displays several large murals created for kibbutz dining halls for the Pessah Seder. One, by Ukrainian-born David Navot, rambles on for several meters with pictures, symbols and narrative events of Jewish life and the family from the pharaohs to the Holocaust with lots in between.
Toward the end of the decade, from 1956 to 1959, the winds of change began to blow in the art community. Distressed by the total acceptance of lyrical abstraction by an entire generation, several artists (Fima, Arikha and Yosl Bergner among others) initiated a vanguard of personality oriented art, creating oils and watercolors in a language that used symbolic content, semi-figurative drawing and, at times, surrealistic content that were centered on the human being, his body and soul.
Ofrat reminds the spectator of two important exhibitions. The first, "Conquest of the Wilderness," held in 1953, was a public affair that bordered on exceptional propaganda, with socialist realism taking the lead as the organizers gathered works that would fit the themes of poultry coop, fisheries, swamp draining and additional labor-directed labels. This fiasco, which did not identify the true nature of Israeli art at the time, had a second attempt with "The First Decade" in 1958. Organized by the government, the exhibition was a far-ranging fair in which the state's achievements in agriculture, industry, military accomplishments and health services were shown under the banner of "an ancient people with our face to the future." Abstract paintings by New Horizon activists Castel, Danziger, Mairovich, Naton and Zaritsky led the way, but in a show of ignorance and governmental interference for the greater cause, David Ben-Gurion had Zaritsky's monumental abstraction, Power, removed from the pavilion's entrance.
Women artists were not a major force in the art world between 1948 and 1958. Although there are several works based on social injustices by Ruth Schloss and a pair of still lifes by the kibbutz painter Roda Reilinger, Bar-Or has concentrated her efforts on a trio of women painters; Aviv Uri, Hagit Lalo and Lea Nikel. Their canvases and drawings are displayed in a single hall and each shows a capacity for non-objective painting, but it was Lalo who thoroughly understood the familiar quality of chromatic energy and push and pull, backbones of abstract expressionist painting of the period.
The First Decade: A Hegemony and a Plurality should not be judged on its aesthetic content, for many of the paintings and limited sculptures should not have been included. But from a historical perspective and an academic summary of the period, it covers all the bases. Certainly worth a trip to the Jezreel Valley.
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