Travel back in time as this seaside town displays Israeli works that epitomize the decade from 1958 to 1968
By LIAT COLLINSmuseum(photo credit: liat collins)
It is no secret that Ashdod, situated along a beautiful part of the Mediterranean coast, is attracting many new immigrants from France. Less well known, however, is the fact that the city houses a modern museum which immediately dispels stereotypes of provinciality.
In an architectural echo of the Louvre, entrance to the Ashdod Museum of Art-Monart Centre is through a glass pyramid. And although once inside there is no mistaking the museum for the fabled Parisian galleries, the Ashdod museum has nothing to be ashamed of, either.
Currently on exhibition is "The Birth of Now - Art in Israel in the 1960s." The show, which stands in its own right, is part of an unusual cooperative effort between six major museums in the country, each one dedicated to a different decade since the birth of the state 60 years ago. Each museum offers the public a chance to look at the growth of Israeli art (which naturally reflects Israeli life) in individually curated shows.
Ashdod's decade is, technically, from 1958 to 1968; but, as curator Yona Fischer told a recent press tour of the exhibition, art does not run neatly along the arbitrary lines of this year to that, and in this case, the pivotal year was 1959. That was when the New Horizons exhibition was held at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion in Tel Aviv, marking 10 years since the inception of the New Horizons group of artists. It was the high point of the abstract revolution in Israeli art, while, it has been said, simultaneously heralding its own decline.
The Ashdod exhibition looks back artistically, but should help put the museum on the cultural map, where it belongs. Containing scores of works in various media by 65 artists, the exhibition is built around three main themes - almost layers - as each one is set on a different level of the Ashdod Museum's three floors.
The trip back in time starts with a section entitled "Beyond the 'New Horizons.'" You don't need to be an art critic to recognize the artists, so many of them became household names in Israel.
While the New Horizons artists were dominated by "classic" abstract art, there was a clear generational transition to the more open, individualist channels of expression, confirmed, as cocurator Tamar Manor-Friedman noted, by the founding in 1965 of the "10+ group," led by Raffi Lavie - just one of the great names from the period. Lavie, Moshe Kupferman, Avigdor Stematsky, Arie Aroch, Avigdor Arikha, Yosl Bergner, Yossef Zaritsky and others active at this time created their own recognizable styles, with a personal signature (Igael Tumarkin's handprints are evident in some of his later works in the show).
In this section, there are many "untitled" works - something I always found intensely annoying, although Manor-Friedman pointed out it was to be expected when you considered the nature of the abstract.
Interestingly, the abstract landscape artists were drawn to the Negev perhaps because the desert is minimalist by its very nature.
The sculptors, too - Tumarkin and Dani Karavan, among others - built monuments intended to fit in with the desert environment. Photographer Micha Bar-Am captured an image of the shadow of a camel so striking, it is hard to see where the animal itself stands.
The second level of the exhibition, entitled "An art of encounters," was characterized by the use of collage and assemblage: Aroch and Tumarkin pioneered the Pop Art-like trend here, followed by Aika Brown, Yair Garbuz, Lavie, Uri Lifshitz and others on show here. By the end of the decade, Moshe Gershuni, David Avidan and other artists were combining diverse media in interesting ways. Today's visitor, however, can't help but wonder how some of the avant garde works of the Sixties caused such a fuss, when early in the third millennium they seem so tame.
The last layer, as it were, is devoted to the artist as the witness of historic event, focusing naturally on the 1967 Six Day War. "Bearing Witness," as this section is called, contains some of the most striking but most difficult works, although, as curator Fischer pointed out, art responds slowly to the influence of war and turbulence.
"Consider the greatly delayed reaction of Goya in his 'Disasters of War' series," he noted. Probably much of the influence of the lightning war, victory and aftermath were only felt after 1968. Perhaps the most immediate and obvious response was that of the photographers - and this section has some tremendous images by Bar-Am, Werner Braun and David Rubinger, whose picture of the paratroopers at the Western Wall became an icon.
Again, one is left wondering why one particular image became a cultural symbol as opposed to another. Why is it that every Israeli - and most Diaspora Jews - can instantly recognize the Rubinger picture while we are unfamiliar with Werner Braun's "Soldiers at the Western Wall," showing the troops dancing the hora at the Kotel on June 12, 1967?
To see what happened next - and what artistically preceded the Sixties - you'll have to visit the other participating museums: Ein Harod is dedicated to the first decade; Tel Aviv Museum of Art is "hosting" the Seventies; Haifa, Israeli art of the Eighties; Herzliya Museum: "'Eventually we'll die,' Young art in Israel in the Nineties"; and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem can bring you up to date with Real Time, art from 1998-2008.
The overall project is organized by Tsila Hayun of Hotam Cultural Projects under the auspices of the Science, Culture and Sport Ministry as part of the country's 60th anniversary celebrations - an opportunity to travel through time while traveling around the country.
The Birth of Now is running at the Ashdod Art Museum until December 15.
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