Choosing 75 works of art to commemorate Israel’s 75th anniversary is daunting; Israel has a robust artistic scene that started well before the state’s founding. Early Zionists such as Martin Buber considered art a key element in the Jewish…
Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) was a well-established artist in his native Romania when he made aliyah in the 1920s. The light and atmosphere of the Land of Israel led to a striking change in his work…
This ceremonial chair in the collection of the Israel Museum, designed by Ze’ev Raban (1890-1970) and constructed over almost 10 years, epitomizes Bezalel‘s work with its eclectic combination of materials and techniques from its workshops:…
Boris Schatz (1866-1932) brought Yemenite silversmiths to Bezalel as part of his desire to incorporate traditional Jewish metalwork techniques in the workshops. The youngest, Yehiya Yemini (1896-1983), started at Bezalel as a young boy and…
Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) met Esther, an American Jew who had won a prize to visit the Land of Israel and later to be his betrothed, while on a ship bound for Jaffa. In this oil…
Bezalel founder Boris Schatz (1866-1932) was a visionary but lacked managerial skills. World War I forced Bezalel to close, and after it reopened in 1919 under the British administration, the school employed the same methods…
Abraham Melnikoff (1892-1960) was a well-known figure in the art scene of Mandatory Palestine, sculpting funerary stones, portrait busts and other works. This Galilee marble sculpture at Tel Hai commemorates the eight who died defending…
Batia Lishansky (1899-1992) was a pioneering Zionist sculptor, and this sculpture in the Hulda Forest was the first of several memorial sculptures for which she received commissions. The Hulda agricultural station was attacked during the…
Yitzhak Danziger (1917-1977) probed the Semitic roots of the Jewish people. Born in Germany but raised in Tel Aviv, Danziger was part of the Canaanite movement, which aspired to meld into a greater pre-Abrahamic people….
David Polus (1893-1975) emigrated from Poland to Palestine, where he spent his life as an itinerant artist. His figure of Alexander Zaid (1866-1938), the founder of HaShomer, a group dedicated to the self-defense of Jewish…
Idyllic kibbutz life was part of the romanticized founding ethos of Israel. The kibbutznikim were the elite, working the land. Sabbath, portrayed in this painting in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by Yohanan Simon…
In August 1946 the British established displaced-persons internment camps in Cyprus, a bitter affront to those who had just survived the concentration camps in Europe. Industrialist Pinhas Rutenberg set up a seminar to prepare the…
Menachem Shemi’s (1897-1951) son, Aharon, known as Jimmy (1926-1948), was a charismatic Palmach leader who was killed during a battle for the Jerusalem corridor in the War of Independence. He was buried at the military…
Marcel Janco (1894-1985) was a renowned Dadaist before making aliyah in response to the fascist, Nazi-sympathizing rule in Romania at the beginning of World War II. Once in Palestine, Janco worked as an architect and…
Eliahu Elath, Israel’s first ambassador to the United States, presented this Torah case to President Harry Truman in 1949. It is in the collection of the Truman Presidential Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri. The…
Arieh Navon (1909-1996) is well known for gently humorous caricatures that appeared for over 30 years in Davar, the newspaper of the Histadrut, beginning in 1933. In this work, based on the depiction on the…
In this oil painting on canvas in the Rubin Museum collection, Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) depicts a representative gathering of the new state. A Hasidic rabbi, Bukharan immigrants, kibbutznikim, Yemenites, a Palmach fighter, the artist and…
The desire to be part of the greater art world and adopt a more universal style and range of themes led Joseph Zaritsky (1891-1985) to found what became the New Horizons school of Israeli art….
Chana Orloff (1888-1968), born in Russia, immigrated with her parents to Petach Tikvah in 1905 and went to Paris in 1910 to study fashion design. She pursued a degree in art and over time became…
Nathan Rapoport (1911-1987), born and raised in Warsaw, survived World War II in a labor camp in Siberia. As a member of Hashomer Hatzair, he initiated the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was…
After the State of Israel was declared, the countries of the Middle East where Jews had lived for generations expelled them. Some 500,000 immigrants came in the first three years, severely straining the fledgling state’s…
This massive painting by Yosef Zaritsky (1891-1985) was given primacy of place at the First Decade Exhibit held at Binyanei HaUma, now known as Jerusualem’s International Convention Center. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was heard to…
The need for a new campus for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after the loss of Mount Scopus in 1948 led to a search for an indigenous architectural design. The Canaanite school, which glorified the…
This building is a mausoleum for those who lost their families in the Holocaust and who have no cemeteries to visit. Form and function join to create a powerful sculptural presence: outside, a brutalist concrete…
