The Bezalel school was an art movement in Palestine in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods. Named for the Bezalel Art School, predecessor of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, it has been described as "a fusion of oriental art and Art Nouveau."[ citation needed ]
Although Jewish art in Mandatory Palestine has a history that reaches back to at least the mid-19th century, the commonly held view when the Bezalel Art School was founded generally dismissed earlier works as being of little value. One author wrote that "every historical survey of contemporary Israeli art must begin with Boris Schatz and with the establishment of the Bezalel School." Another commented that "Schatz was first among the pioneers who attempted to create a Jewish Art, indeed a Palestinian Art". Yona Fischer has said that Bezalel is not the beginning of Jewish art and craft in Israel but that it is, considered within the historical context of Zionism, a movement that "divides past and future" of an emerging Israel "searching its own definition". [1]
The Bezalel school artists blended varied strands of surroundings, tradition and innovation in paintings and craft objects that invoked biblical themes, Islamic design and European traditions in their effort to carve out a distinctive style of Jewish art for the new nation planned in the ancient Jewish homeland. [2] The works of art created by the group contributed significantly to the creation of a distinctive Israeli national culture. [3]
The founder of the school was Boris Schatz, who left his position as head of the Royal Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria, to make aliyah in 1906 and established an academy for Jewish arts in Jerusalem. The artists were Zionist immigrants from Europe and the Middle East, with all the psychological and social upheaval that this implies. [4] The movement developed a distinctive style combining Biblical and Zionist subjects with Art Nouveau, symbolism and traditional Persian and Syrian artistry. [5]
The Bezalel School produced decorative art objects in a wide range of materials: silver, leather, wood, brass and fabric. While the artists and designers were European-trained, the craftsmen who executed the works were often members of the Yemenite Jewish community, which had a long tradition of craftsmanship in precious metals, and began to make aliyah about 1880. In Yemen, filigree jewelry making was a respected profession among the Jews, with cultural as well as religious applications. Yemenite Jewish silversmiths worked primarily with silver, creating pieces by hand using traditional methods. [6] Yemenite immigrants wearing colorful traditional costumes were also frequent subjects of Bezalel School artists.
Leading members of the school were Boris Schatz, E. M. Lilien, Ya'akov Stark, Meir Gur-Aryeh, Ze'ev Raban, Jacob Eisenberg, Jacob Steinhardt, Shmuel Ben David, and Hermann Struck.
The artists produced not only paintings and etchings, but also objects sold as Judaica and souvenirs. [7] In 1915, The New York Times praised the “Exquisite examples of filigree work, copper inlay, carving in ivory and in wood,” in a touring exhibit. [8]
In the metalwork Moorish patterns predominated, and the damascene work, in particular, showed both artistic feeling and skill in execution. [9]
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is a public college of design and art located in Jerusalem. Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is Israel's oldest institution of higher education and is considered the most prestigious art school in the country. It is named for the Biblical figure Bezalel, son of Uri, who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle. The art created by Bezalel's students and professors in the early 1900s is considered the springboard for Israeli visual arts in the 20th century.
Cultural Zionism is a strain of Zionism that focused on creating a center in historic Palestine with its own secular Jewish culture and national history, including language and historical roots, rather than other Zionist ideas such as Political Zionism. The founder of Cultural Zionism is Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha'am. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Eretz Israel/Palestine, he confronted Theodor Herzl. Unlike Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, Ha'am strove for "a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews".
Zahara Schatz, was an Israeli artist and designer. She was the daughter of Boris Schatz, who founded the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She was best known for the six-branched menorah she designed for the entrance to the Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
Boris Schatz was a Lithuanian Jewish artist and sculptor who settled in Israel. Schatz was the founder of the Bezalel school and would be later known as the father of the Bezalel school movement in Israeli art, that waned in the 1920s following the introduction of modernism in Israel. After Schatz died, part of his art collection, including a famous self portrait by Dutch Master Jozef Israëls, given to him by the artist, eventually became the nucleus of the Israel Museum.
The First Aliyah, also known as the agriculture Aliyah, was a major wave of Jewish immigration (aliyah) to Ottoman Palestine between 1881 and 1903. Jews who migrated in this wave came mostly from Eastern Europe and from Yemen, stimulated by pogroms and violence against the Jewish communities in those areas. An estimated 25,000 Jews immigrated. Many of the European Jewish immigrants during the late 19th-early 20th century period gave up after a few months and went back to their country of origin, often suffering from hunger and disease.
Reuven Rubin was a Romanian-born Israeli painter and Israel's first ambassador to Romania.
Ze’ev Raban (22 September 1890 – 19 January 1970), born Wolf Rawicki (Ravitzki), was a leading painter, decorative artist, and industrial designer of the Bezalel school style, and was one of the founders of the Israeli art world.
Maurycy "Ephraim Moses" Lilien was a Polish-Jewish Art Nouveau illustrator and printmaker particularly noted for his art on Jewish themes and his influence on the Bezalel school art movement. He is sometimes called the "first Zionist artist."
Abel Pann (1883–1963) was a Russian-born Jewish painter and print-maker who settled in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in the early twentieth century and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art under Boris Schatz.
The Derfner Judaica Museum is a cultural and educational center that provides exhibitions relating to Jewish history and contemporary Jewish culture. The museum is located in the Jacob Reingold Pavilion on the grounds of The Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City.
Shmuel Ben David (1884–1927), born in Sofia, Bulgaria, was an illustrator, painter, typographer and designer affiliated with the Bezalel school, an art movement that developed in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century.
Eliezer Weishoff is an Israeli multidisciplinary artist who has designed many of the state's iconic images.
Baruch Agadati was a Russian Empire-born Israeli classical ballet dancer, choreographer, painter, and film producer and director.
Visual arts in Israel or Israeli art refers to visual art or plastic art created by Israeli artists or Jewish painters in the Yishuv. Visual art in Israel encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques, styles and themes reflecting a dialogue with Jewish art throughout the ages and attempts to formulate a national identity.
Shmuel Levi was an Israeli painter.
Israeli sculpture designates sculpture produced in the Land of Israel from 1906, the year the "Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts" was established. The process of crystallization of Israeli sculpture was influenced at every stage by international sculpture. In the early period of Israeli sculpture, most of its important sculptors were immigrants to the Land of Israel, and their art was a synthesis of the influence of European sculpture with the way in which the national artistic identity developed in the Land of Israel and later in the State of Israel.
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Ofakim Hadashim is an art movement started in Tel Aviv in 1942.
Israeli ceramics are ceramics designed either in Mandatory Palestine or Israel from the beginning of the 20th century. In additional to traditional pottery, in Israel there are artists whose works were created in an industrial environment. Until the late 1970s there existed in Israel a local tradition that emphasized the local values of nature as an expression of Zionist identity. From the 1980s artistic expressions that sought to undercut this tradition began to appear in the works of Israeli artists, who combined ceramics with other artistic media and with personal, critical agendas.
Israeli printmaking refers to printmaking by Jewish artists in the Land of Israel and the State of Israel beginning in the second half of the 19th century. The genre includes a variety of techniques, including woodcutting, etching and lithography.