Tigist Yoseph Ron (b.1979), whose parents made aliyah from Ethiopia with their nine children, first settled in Atlit. The difficulty and displacement of those years are expressed in this powerful charcoal drawing in the collection…
Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov (b.1961) made aliyah as a teenager with her family, graduated from Bezalel, and lives and works in the Galilee. She made these two oil paintings simultaneously. One is the view from her…
This striking installation, part of The Burning Sea exhibit at the Israel Museum until June 2023, comes from an ongoing project by Sigalit Landau (b.1969) in which she immerses a variety of objects in the…
Letters of Light by Micha Ullman (b.1939), a Bezalel-trained sculptor, is an environmental work based on the Hebrew alphabet and inspired by Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), the oldest known Jewish mystical text. Set…
Landau is a Jerusalem-born artist who studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, then worked in the United States and United Kingdom. Her pieces are multimedia, including drawing, sculpture, video and performance. She…
Kiryat Gat native Nes is one of Israel’s most prominent photographers. He stages art photos to convey themes of masculinity and identity, often reflecting the influence of iconic artworks and his experiences growing up gay…
This carefully staged photograph by Adi Nes (b.1966) references Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper. These soldiers, caught in the vortex of a conflict over which they have no control, put their lives on the…
Naftali Bezem (1924-2018) won the Dizengoff Prize for this work, now housed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He painted it in response to the murder of citizens living in Kfar Kassem in the…
Israel’s first Holocaust memorial stands at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, associated with one of the youth movements that led the resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. The kibbutz members built the monument themselves under the guidance of…
Gerda Luft’s, “Cultural Life in Palestine,” is representative of the dozens of excellent analyses of Jewish life and politics in Palestine/Israel and the world located in the annual Palestine Yearbooks, later the Israel Yearbook, published from 1945 forward.
One of the first departments Boris Schatz (1866-1932) created at Bezalel was rug weaving. This rug, part of the collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, typifies that production with its unique design and…
Boris Schatz (1866-1932) is the father of Israeli art. Lithuanian born, he studied in Paris and was influenced by the Russian Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky. The drama and strength with which Schatz depicts the father…
Yaakov Farkash, known by the pen name Ze’ev and considered the father of Israeli political cartoons, dies at age 79 near Tel Aviv.
June 18, 1992 Mordecai Ardon, one of Israel’s best-known painters, dies at age 95 in Jerusalem. Born Max Bronstein in Galicia in 1896, he ran away from his religiously observant family at 13 and wandered…
Romanian born artist Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada art movement who made Aliyah in 1941, passes away at the age of 89.
June 23, 1944 Photojournalist Alex Levac, a 2005 winner of the Israel Prize, is born in Tel Aviv. A 1967 graduate of Tel Aviv University with a degree in philosophy and psychology, Levac completes his…
The first forty students, all women, enroll in the newly established Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.
December 31, 1898 Eliyahu Dobkin, a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the founder of the Israel Museum, is born in Bobruysk, Belarus. Dobkin is raised in a religious Zionist family. His father,…
Painter Nachum Gutman is born in a part of Russia that is now Moldova.
May 24, 1895 Marcel Janco, a founder of the Dada movement and a major influence on modern Israeli art, is born into a wealthy family outside the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, Romania. Trained at the…
Reuven Rubin (born Rubin Zelicovici), one of Israel’s most acclaimed painters, is born in Galatz, Romania. Rubin’s family was both very poor and religious.
September 1, 1891 Yosef Zaritsky, one of Israel’s most renowned painters, is born near Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Zaritsky studies at the Academy of Art in Kyiv and lives in Moscow before making aliyah…
August 22, 1891 Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whose final work, “The Tree of Life,” stands outside Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, is born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Lithuania. Though his father wants him to…
