A museum as an icon

An interview with fine arts curator, Mira Lapidot, as the Israel Museum marks its 50th birthday.

By MICHAL LEVERTOV
The Israel Museum (photo credit: TIM HURSLEY / COURTESY THE ISRAEL MUSEUM)
The Israel Museum
(photo credit: TIM HURSLEY / COURTESY THE ISRAEL MUSEUM)
EVERY DAY, Mira Lapidot travels by car or public transport from her home in central Tel Aviv to her workplace at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is a journey that, with the inevitable heavy traffic on Route 1, can extend much longer than the 40 minutes it should take. But the 44-year-old chief curator of the fine arts wing at the museum – the institution’s most prominent department – says it is an inconvenience that has its merits.
“It prevents inertia,” she says in an interview with The Jerusalem Report. “It generates continuing self-reflection of one’s routine. The need it creates to keep asking yourself ‘is it worth the effort?’ keeps you on your toes – in the good, constructive sense.”
Lapidot has good reason to fear inertia.
The Israel Museum, an establishment seen both here and abroad as a national cultural icon, by definition generates high expectations.
This year, the museum marks its 50th anniversary and is expected to attract even greater interest than usual. All the more so, when this milestone comes five years after the 2010 grand reopening of the museum following a 100 million shekel renovation.
In the half a decade since its reopening, attendance has climbed precipitously, with the annual number of visitors now hitting almost a million, equally divided between Jerusalemites, visitors from other parts of the country and international tourists, making it the 65th most visited museum in the world, according to museum director James Snyder.
It was no coincidence, therefore, that a recent press conference to launch the institution’s jubilee year was packed. There is a great deal of interest in the museum’s vision for the coming decade.
Designed by the modernist architect Alfred Mansfeld and the interior designer Dora Gad, the Israel Museum opened in 1965. It was an endeavor conceived around 1960 by various local and foreign culture enthusiasts with Teddy Kollek – then director-general of David Ben- Gurion’s Prime Minister’s Office and later the mayor of Jerusalem – as their main driving force.
A ZIONIST-spirited notion, their initiative combined the need to find a new home for the Bezalel Museum, a collection of art and Judaica attached to the Jerusalem-based Bezalel Art School since its foundation in the first decade of the 20th century, and the wish to establish a national museum for the young state.
The Israel Museum’s standing as a national museum remains apparent to this day, despite the fact that – as Lapidot points out – it has no such legal status. It is budgeted along the American model, rather than the European one, leaning heavily on private donations as opposed to public or government funds.
It is structured as an encyclopedic museum, one whose collections, exhibitions and research cover a variety of fields, both local and foreign. The museum has three curative wings: Archaeology, Jewish Art and Life, and Fine Arts.
It also includes external galleries such as The Shrine of the Book and two off-site locations, Ticho House and the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum. The latter, a British Mandatory institution from the 1930s, is located beyond the 1967 borders outside the Old City and was attached to the Israel Museum after Israel annexed East Jerusalem.
The Fine Arts wing is the most active of the three wings with 80 percent of the museum’s temporary exhibitions being held there. The wing consists of 10 departments as well as divisions of Asian, African, Oceanian and American arts.
The juxtaposition of the museum’s modern bedrock – so well represented in its architecture – combined with the gravitas derived from its nationalistic aspirations and the conservative approach rooted in the concept of encyclopedic museums makes for a unique blend.
This type of combination could lead to a museum that defies convention or one that solidly reaffirms them. Under the management of the charismatic Snyder, the museum sometimes tends to the latter, walking a carefully balanced and mainstream-minded political line. “For us, the museum is the antithesis to the geopolitical narrative that overtakes the world,” Snyder asserted when awarded the Guardian of Zion prize in 2013.
The museum’s broad reach enables it to create and present within the campus’s 80 dunams (20 acres), almost endless sets of exhibitions and presentations based on the 500,000 items in its collections. In the half century since its founding, the museum has successfully managed to add to the original Bezalel collection an extensive variety of donated and acquired artifacts, artworks and even complete collections.
An example of such inter-wing interaction is the ambitious centerpiece exhibition marking the museum’s 50th that will open in May featuring 12 pivotal objects from its collections. Under the title “A brief history of humankind” (after a best-selling book by historian Yuval Noah Harari), the exhibition will present items and artifacts representing turning points in the history of civilization. The exhibits will range from 800,000-year-old evidence of man-controlled fire to Einstein’s original manuscript of the theory of relativity. It will also present a 1998 installation titled “Evolution and Theory” by London-based, Yemen-born Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David.
Lapidot maintains that as chief curator of the Fine Arts wing one of her job’s greatest challenges is to make sure that the achievements of her predecessors are preserved. “I see this place as a miracle,” she explains.
“The Israel Museum was founded at a rare moment in history in which certain individuals – people who were at the same time incredibly skilled and immensely visionary – crossed paths.
“And not only did they make this miracle happen, but they also knew how to bring into being the outstanding place that it still is; with its superb architecture that never imposes itself because it maintains a human dimension; with a deep and precise understanding of what such a place should be, reflecting the correct proportions between the archaeological and the Jewish aspects, on the one hand, and the international and contemporary aspects, on the other; together with elegance and a lack of extravagance.”
Such qualities, she continues, “have already vanished from the Israeli public space.” These were preserved only because throughout the past decades the people who worked here invested so much effort and resolve to maintain these standards. So, I feel that there’s a huge obligation on my behalf to do the same. Destroying is so easy – one moment of losing grip and it all goes up in smoke,” she points out.
Lapidot was born and raised in Jerusalem.
Her parents, the late Prof. Edna Ullman-Margalit, and the Israel Prize laureate Prof. Avishai Margalit, are renowned scholars of philosophy. She studied art history and chemistry at the Hebrew University.
In 1997, while studying for a master’s degree, she began working at the Israel Museum as a guide in the Youth Wing. Later she worked as a curator under Suzanne Landau, the former chief curator of fine arts. She has lived in Tel Aviv since 1996, where she and her husband raise their three children.
LAPIDOT WAS named to the post of chief curator of fine arts in 2012 when Landau, under whom the section played a dominant part in the Israeli – and to an extent the international – art scene, left to direct the Tel Aviv Museum.
The exhibition that launched the anniversary year’s events, “6 artists/6 projects” dedicated entirely to new works by contemporary young Israeli artists, opened February 10 in the fine arts wing. Lapidot explains that the decision to present projects, which were still works-in-progress when selected, expresses the desire to project the here-and-now in Israeli art. It also echoes the museum’s initial inclination – from the day of its establishment – to introduce contemporary art to its visitors.
Lapidot stresses that another of her goals is to strengthen the fine arts collection and build an acquisitions strategy that would “reinforce its position as an increasingly significant factor on the international museum map.” The acquisitions, she notes, are carried out by regional purchase groups – that is, groups of donors who together purchase a specific work from a shortlist compiled by the museum’s curators. This method, brought to the museum by Landau, enables the donors to have an impact on what is eventually done with the money they donate, while reducing the prospects of unwanted influence or manipulation on the art market by interested parties.
That same wish to enhance the museum’s standing and turn it into a leading actor in the international art scene is also reflected by Lapidot’s declared intention to “display exhibitions that will be pioneering in their field.”
As an example, she mentions one of the highlights of the anniversary events – an exhibition due to open in September featuring three German Jewish graphic designers who fled the Nazis to Palestine and whose work – in Hebrew – in the new country laid the foundations for much of Israel’s present day typography and visual culture.
“The exhibition, and the catalogue,” she explains, “are groundbreaking in terms of extent and research on this topic, and followed extensive research about these three designers and typographers.”
Its importance, she notes, lies also in its juxtaposition with an exhibition of German avant-garde artists from the first half of the 20th century, which will be titled “Twilight over Berlin.” The avant-garde masterworks, lent to the museum by Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin will be shown for almost five months as a part of a large-scale collaboration between prominent Israeli and German art institutions to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
When I ask Lapidot if the museum confronts the painful issues faced by Israeli society or the region as a whole, she gently responds that it is not controversy she’s after.
“If what you’re looking for is an exhibition that deals in a direct manner with, let’s say, the Israeli treatment of asylum seekers, you will not find it here. We prefer other more subtle and sophisticated ways to approach the issue. The visitors to the museum do not want to be lectured to, all the more so over specific agendas, and I respect that,” she asserts.
Ironically, in recent years it was actually the museum’s attempt to avoid confrontation that eventually evoked some criticism.
A 2013 blockbuster archaeological exhibition on King Herod included loaned artifacts from the excavations run by Israeli archaeologists at Herodion, Herod’s palace site located near Bethlehem in the West Bank. Assertions by the Palestinian Authority, as well as Israeli and international archaeologists, that such loans infringe international law did not deter the audience though. The exhibition was so successful – it attracted more than 440,000 visitors – that it was extended for three additional months.
ANOTHER HIT, a 2012 exhibition about Hasidic culture titled “A world apart next door” made headlines in the Israeli press when it was revealed that, in order to draw ultra-Orthodox visitors, the museum planned to allow separate visiting times for men and women for private groups that would visit the exhibition while the institution was closed.
Though these exhibitions were not under the fine arts wing, Lapidot is fully aware of the challenges they set. She also acknowledges the importance of ensuring that the museum is an institution that reaches out to all the different publics in Israeli society.
“This is not to suggest that this museum should not have an opinion. Since being apolitical is just another form of being political.
But I believe that our stance, in its manner and volume, is quite different from the statements of museums that are strictly museums of art or in those that have specific political inclinations to begin with.”
However, within Israel’s complex reality, there is no way to entirely bypass controversy.
One element, for example, in Uri Gershuni’s fascinating set of photographs, which explores the photographic process and takes part in the “6 artists/6 projects” exhibition, is a work created using the artist’s sperm. Another work, “Gaza Dream” by photographer Roy Kuper, examines the blurred, unfocused and dissonant nature of the prevalent Israeli view of Gaza. It wouldn’t be a wild guess to assume that someone, at some point, will lash out at the museum for exhibiting them.
Another current exhibit is one of the fine arts wing’s newest purchases, “Wild flowers and insects in Israel,” by contemporary Israeli artist Eliezer Sonnenschein. While Sonnenschein’s catalogue of 59 beautiful compositions of flowers and insects may seem at first glance a very personal and intimate work, it is, in fact, also a bold and critical artwork that could be seen to undermine some conventions in the Zionist narrative. The images in Sonnenschein’s compositions are disassembled, then rearranged, and this, together with his insistence on adding the names of the flowers and insects in Arabic, alongside his handwritten notes in his catalogue create a multi-leveled reexamination of the manner with which actions such as classification and description interact with perceptions of affiliation and ownership.
“Like this work,” Lapidot suggests, “the museum, too, has many layers” and, she asserts, “it is up to the audience to choose which ones to relate to.”