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…
Using oil, oil pencil and scratching and considered a seminal work, Agripas Street by Arie Aroch (1908-1974) represents an important trend in Israeli art of the 1960s: the move away from the colorist abstractions of…
Moshe Castel (1909-1991), born in Jerusalem, developed an unusual style and technique in his later years, using ground-up basalt in his works. This basalt relief in the reception hall of the President’s Residence often serves…
The importance of Jerusalem in Israeli society receives prominence in this wall relief by Dani Karavan (1930-2021) right behind the podium of the Knesset Assembly Hall, made from Galilean stone. The title is taken from…
In his fanciful works, Yossl Bergner (1920-2017) often used objects to symbolize the human condition. In the foreground of this piece at the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, the top of an ancient…
Many are the war memorials in Israel; in 1966, the peace activist Abie Nathan decided there needed to be a monument to peace. A site was chosen (later home to the B’nai B’rith Bridge) opposite…
The charming works of Nahum Gutman (1898-1980) are best known from his book and newspaper illustrations. Gutman grew up in Little Old Tel Aviv, known as Ahuzat Bayit, which he also wrote about. The Shalom…
The reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 reverberated across Israeli society. For Mordechai Ardon (1896-1992), the repercussions had a mystical quality expressed in the both the subjects and colors of this triptych painted in oil on…
This concrete work in Be’er Sheva is probably Dani Karavan’s (1930-2021) first environmental sculpture, creating a space of memory that must be walked through to be appreciated. Elements of the work symbolize different stages of…
Raffi Lavie’s (1937-2007) works were influential on the Israeli art scene. A combination of collage, paint, scribbles and erasures on plywood, this work at the Israel Museum questions the role of art even as it…
Naftali Bezem’s (1924-2018) cast-aluminum wall sculpture at Yad Vashem is composed of four sections, moving sequentially from the crematoria of Auschwitz to the fallen ghetto fighters to the immigrants making their way to Israel and…
Shimon Peres, then the minister of communication, commissioned Abraham Ofek (1935-1990) to decorate the inside of the Mandate-era Central Post Office in Jerusalem in the spirit of using art for public edification. The mural he…
Igael Tumarkin (1933-2021) made this monument in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv of corten steel. It consists of two pyramids: a large one inverted and intersecting a smaller one below. The upper pyramid is the…
Michael Druks (1940-2022), born in Jerusalem, spent most of his artistic career in London. This iconic image, created through offset lithography and housed at the Israel Museum, depicts the artist’s head as a topographical map,…
Zelig Segal (1933-2015), born into an ultra-Orthodox family, became one of the first artists from that community accepted at Bezalel. A talented silversmith and producer of various kinds of metalwork, he is best known for…
Igael Tumarkin (1933-2021) undertook this difficult mixed-media work at the beginning of the First Lebanon War in 1982. Daily casualty announcements flooded the Israeli press; Tumarkin’s response was to fashion parts of an army stretcher…
The theme of the near-sacrifice of Isaac runs through Jewish literature and art from earliest times until today. Menashe Kadishman (1932-2015) made several works on this subject, some connected with his own son’s entering the…
Assem Abu Shakra (1961-1990) came from a family of artists in Umm El Fahm, near Hadera. His potted cactus, an oil painting in the Israel Museum, alludes to the metaphor for Israeli identity of the…
Driving on one of Israel’s main highways, it is impossible to miss Uri Lifschitz’s (1936-2011) imposing cut-out metal silhouette of Theodor Herzl atop a water tank at the Sira Intersection entering Herzliya. Based on an…
This work of acrylic paint on paper releases a burst of energy and pain while invoking the beginning of the traditional prayer for the dead, written in Moshe Gershuni’s (1936-2017) own handwriting. The image, imbued…
An impressive Jerusalem marble installation in the shape of a large rectangular box with an arched top, Bereshit has the first six letters of the Hebrew alphabet incised backward on its sides. A light within…
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