Can Art Magazine - Museum - Schusterman Collection at Haifa Museum of Art

Schusterman Collection at Haifa Museum of Art

The selection presented in the exhibition, a generous gift from Ms. Lynn Schusterman to the Museum, spans mainly works from the first half of the 20th century, the formative period of Israeli art. This cluster adds a significant artistic and historical layer to the Museum's existing collection (on view in the nearby permanent exhibition), which focuses primarily on Israeli art from the 1950s onwards. It attests to the transformations that occurred in local art over the years, highlighting issues in Israeli culture that are still relevant decades later. Although they were created in different parts of the country, the scorching Israeli sun shines over all of the featured works.
The first gallery serves as a cabinet of curiosities, where early 20th century Bezalel works encounter a pair of photographs from the beginning of the 2000s. The establishment of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem in 1906, one of the major enterprises of the Zionist movement in Palestine, marked the onset of Israeli art. The school's founders regarded themselves as people of the West living in the East where the winds of the biblical past still blow, and strove to revive the Jewish spirit through arts and crafts. The traditional-Jewish version of Zionism formulated in Jerusalem is juxtaposed in the second gallery with works dating from the 1920s to the 1950s by Eretz Israel artists from Tel Aviv and the kibbutzim, who focused on the county's landscapes, life, and people. They described the na?vet? and simplicity of a life in tune with nature through a gaze at times romantic and oriental, and emphasized man's attachment to the sun-scorched earth as part of the pioneering ideology.
The exhibition's early works reveal a search for a Hebrew visual vocabulary and a desire to establish a belonging to the place via art based on Zionist consciousness. Observation of the contemporary works raises similar questions concerning the essence of the Israeli identity, which is still exploring its affinities with Jewish tradition and this land even today.
All works: Gift of the Lynn and Charles Schusterman Family Collection to Haifa Museum of Art

Curator: Limor Alpern Read more

סייבורג מחשבים - בניית אתרים