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Visual arts in Israel refers to plastic art created in the Land of Israel/Palestine region, from the latter part of the 19th century till today, or art created by Israeli artists. Visual art in Israel ranges from a variety of traditional local arts to "Fine Art" influenced by the Western art of Europe and the United States. Israeli art is rich in techniques, styles, means of expression, and varied themes reflecting attempts to formulate a national identity. Research on the history of art deals extensively with the complex relationship between Israeli art and both local and international characteristics, with its ties to Jewish art through the ages and, in recent years, even with its ties and attitudes towards Arabic culture in Israel.

Historical overview

"Beduin violin players" by Félix Bonfils

"Temple mount map and buildings" (late 19th century), embroidery, private collection.

"Hebron", homemade glazed tiles made at the ceramics workshop at Bezalel.

Historical Background - "Holy Land" Art in the 19th century

Attempts to find the local roots of the development of visual art in the Land of Israel in the 19th century are problematic for a number of reasons. First, most of the artists in the Land of Israel were lacking the national motif that is woven into the mainstream of art in the Land of Israel in the 20th century. Second, research on the history of art has failed to locate, either among the Jewish communities or the Arab residents of the Land of Israel, any tradition of artistic creativity that diverges from miniature art for local or religious customers.

According to the research literature, art of this period consisted mostly of decorative art of a religious nature (primarily Jewish or Christian), produced for religious pilgrims, but also for export and local consumption. These objects included decorated tablets, embossed soaps, rubber stamps, etc., most of which were decorated with motifs from graphic arts. In the Jewish settlements artists worked at gold smithing, silver smithing, and embroidery, producing their works in small crafts workshops. A portion of these works were intended to be amulets. One of the best known of these artists, Moshe Ben Yitzhak Mizrachi of Jerusalem made Shiviti (or Shivisi, in the Ashkenazic pronunciation, meditative plaques used in some Jewish communities for contemplation over God's name) on glass and amulets on parchments, with motifs such as the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Book of Esther, and views of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Objects of applied art were produced also at the "Torah ve-Melakhah" ("Torah and Work") school founded in 1882 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This school opened departments for the production of art objects in Neo-Classical and Baroque styles, produced by combining manual labor with modern machines.

A large body of artistic work was produced by European artists, primarily Christian painters, who came to document the sites and landscapes of the "Holy Land". The motive behind these works was orientalist and religious and focused on documentation – first of the painting and later of the photography – of the holy sites and the way of life in the Orient, and on the presentation of exotic images. Photographs of the Holy Land, which also served as the basis for paintings, focused on documenting structures and people in full daylight, due to the limitations of photography at that time. Therefore an ethnographic approach is in evidence in the photographs, which present a static and stereotypical image of the figures they depict. In the photographs of the French photographer Felix Bonfils such as, for example in his prominent photographs of the Holy Land in the last decades of the 19th century, we even see an artificial desert background, in front of which his figures are posed At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, local photographers began to appear, the most important of whom is Khalil Raad, who focused on an ethnographic description of the reality of the Holy Land, in large part colonialistic. In addition there were other photographers, many of them Armenian, who worked as commercial photographers in the Land of Israel and neighboring countries.

From the Art of the "Holy Land" to the Art of "The Land of Israel", 1906-1930

Bezalel

Until the beginning of the 20th century no tradition of fine arts existed in the Land of Israel although European artists came as visitors and painted the "Holy Land." Artists and craftsmen of Judaica objects and other applied arts made up the majority of artists working in the Land of Israel. Although the “Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts,” known simply as "Bezalel", was not the first art school established in the Jewish settlement, its importance in setting the boundaries of the tradition of modern art in the Land of Israel was very great indeed, and it is customary to view its establishment as the beginning of Israeli art. The school was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz with the support of heads of Jewish and Zionist institutions. At Bezalel emphasis was placed on objects of applied art with a metaphysical dimension.

At the art school the influence of European Art Nouveau was in evidence, in addition to other social movements such as the British "arts and crafts" movement. In the logo of the quarterly magazine "Yalkut Bezalel", designed by Ze'ev Raban, we see within the ornate frame cherubs with a painter and a sculptor on each side and a lamp maker and a rug weaver next to them. Under the illustration is the caption "Work is the fruit; art is the bud; art without a soul is like prayer without conviction."

Alongside the art school, within its different tracks, studios opened for studying the skills needed for various kinds of art; these produced jewelry, weavings, paintings, ritual articles, etc., intended for sale in different places near Bezalel, Schatz's vision included the idea of cross pollination between the various parts of the institution. "There is a practical side to the study of art," Schatz wrote, "The school always needs new drawings for the rugs and silver artifacts. Thus we need a series of artists who have absorbed the prevailing spirit of the school within their art, having studied with the expert teacher who embodies this spirit."

In the art created in Bezalel during this period Jewish and religious motifs dominate, for example, descriptions of the holy places, scenes from the Diaspora, etc. The works are decorative and heavily engraved in the "Eastern" style. The descriptions sought a connection between the Biblical period, the Return to Zion [from the Babylonian exile] and the Hasmonean Kingdom of Israel [140-37 BC], and the Zionist aspirations for the development of a Jewish settlement, driven by ideological and Zionist sentiments. The artists did this by borrowing historical motifs they perceived as "Jewish" motifs and designs they perceived as "Eastern." Typography occupied a central place in their designs. Sometimes the text even became the main element in their compositions.

The work of Schatz himself consisted mostly of small-scale sculptures of Jewish subjects, as well as reliefs and memorial plaques in honor of various Zionist leaders. His most famous sculpture is Mattathias (1894), which was influenced by Renaissance sculpture and in particular by the sculpture of Donatello. A different spirit entirely brought Samuel Hirszenberg (1865-1908), to the institution to join the Bezalel teaching staff. Hirszenberg brought European academic painting to Bezalel, and painted Jewish subjects within this framework. The artist Ze'ev Raban created many graphic works in the spirit of Art Nouveau, also known as "Jugendstil" ["Youth Style" in German]. The subjects of these works were "Orientalist" landscapes of the Holy Land and figures from the Bible drawn in the Neoclassical style. Among other well-known artists who taught at Bezalel were Ephraim Moses Lilien, Meir Gur-Arieh, Arnold (Aaron) Lachovsky, Erich (Arie) Goldberg, Adolph (Avraham) Berman, Shmuel Levy (Ophel), and others.

Due to financial difficulties and political infighting the school closed in 1929. The museum, which housed many works of art, remained in the Bezalel building. This collection eventually served as the basis for the Art Wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.