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PDF FormatIn the years that followed what became known as the “Betzalel Revolt” in 1927, the academy’s students led, by Menahem Shemi, shrugged off their keen awareness of Jewish history, faith and nationhood in favor of works more sympathetic to a new and local Jewish identity. This identity was connected less with the Jewish tradition, which was felt to be a part of the exile, than with the immediate physical locale and terrain—an increasingly materialistic view which closely paralleled the rise of Labor Zionism and the idea that agricultural labor on the land was itself the Jewish redemption. The foremost local Jewish painter of the 1920s and 1930s, Nachum Gutman, reflected many years later that the students of Betzalel were united by only one thing: “Love of the landscape.”6 As a result, the years after World War I saw a Jewish national art that came to be dominated by sweeping landscapes, such as Aryeh Lubin’s Landscape (1924; Fig. 2), and by depictions of heroic workers whose physical labor was the one human element that could transform the earth into a reclaimed Jewish land. Paintings such as Moshe Matus’ Building Tel Aviv (1931) showed beautiful, muscular men literally dragging the city out of the ground, while the idyllic life of country and kibbutz was portrayed by others such as Shemi and Gutman. These decades also witnessed the birth of massive memorial sculptures such as Abraham Melnikov’s Tel Hai Memorial (1926), a roaring lion in memory of the legendary Jewish fighter and settler Joseph Trumpeldor, who had fallen defending the farming settlement against Arab attack six years earlier.
Fig. 2. Aryeh Lublin, Landscape, 1924.
The new sensitivity to the land and its human redeemers brought with it an increased appreciation for the local cultural flavor. Orientalism and stylized depiction of Arabs and Arab themes began to invade the Jewish artistic consciousness. The artists attempted to assimilate the new influence in much the same way that many local pioneers began to adopt Arab habits and dress. While the artists continued to depict Jewish biblical heroes, they now preferred to employ the local Bedouin in their portrayal of the Jews of ancient Israel, the observable present reshaping the image of the Jewish past. Simultaneously, local Arabs began to figure prominently in their own right in works such as Nachum Gutman’s The Shepherd and Israel Paldi’s Jaffa Boatmen, both of 1926. The orientalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s constituted more of an attempt to harness local culture than an actual desire to merge with it, but it nevertheless marked the first time that non-Jewish elements began to invade what had once been an effort to create an entirely Jewish artistic consciousness. The deterioration of Betzalel’s founding ideology was already well under way when financial difficulties forced the school’s closure in 1929. Boris Schatz died in America three years later, while trying to find the resources to reopen his beloved school.
The tendency of Betzalel’s second generation to exalt a Jewishness which inclined toward the local and physical could well have been a constructive moment in the development of a vital Jewish national art, had it not been for two great forces emanating from outside Palestine. These two forces were, on the one hand, the immigration in the 1930s of large numbers of highly educated German Jews with only mixed sympathies for the earlier Jewish national effort; and on the other, the “export” of an increasing number of Palestinian Jewish artists to France, where they became exposed to a much larger art world with an agenda very different from their own—an agenda which they brought back with them to Palestine. Each of these influences was to have a permanent effect on the tiny community of artists in Palestine, at first radicalizing the already extant tendencies towards the local and material world, and eventually obliterating the Jewish nationalism from which these tendencies had originally grown.
In Jerusalem, where Schatz’s Betzalel had been founded, it was the rise of Hitler in 1933 which proved decisive. Central Europe’s descent into barbarism brought a flood of German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine, among them a large number of accomplished intellectuals and artists. But many of these came as refugees, and their relationship with any form of Judaism—let alone with the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement—was often questionable. Leaving their beloved Germany for fear of their lives, many of these Jews found in Palestine not the land of their dreams, but rather an uncultured backwater whose Jewish inhabitants, dominated by the often strident nationalist workers from Eastern Europe, they found to be untutored chauvinists. While the Germans found integration difficult in most areas of life in Palestine, their unquestioned credentials in the arts and sciences allowed them to attain hegemony in many of Jerusalem’s cultural institutions, including the Hebrew University and the reopened Betzalel.7
German artists arriving in Palestine at this time made Jerusalem their center, establishing galleries there and congregating in the city’s cafés. The graphic artist Anna Ticho, who had lived in Jerusalem since 1919 in relative obscurity, began to host regular meetings of Jerusalem’s German elite in her home. In these cultural strongholds, the few German Jews who had arrived earlier gained sudden prominence, their biting criticisms of the Zionist Organization, the local Russian-Jewish leadership, and the very idea of Jewish nationalism reinforced by the eager agreement of the newcomers. It was in this atmosphere that the Betzalel academy was reopened in 1935 under the tutelage of a German Jew, Joseph Budko. The new Betzalel had an overwhelmingly German faculty, the vast majority of its students were German,8 and German was the primary language of social and academic intercourse.
Upon Budko’s death in 1940, the German painter Mordechai Ardon became head of Betzalel. Ardon exemplified the universalism and impatience with Jewish nationalism which was the most enduring legacy of the German presence in Israeli art. Although he was enchanted by the idea of a Jewish cultural reawakening, Ardon never fully reconciled himself with the implications of Jewish statehood. The two Jewish elements which Ardon did employ were the symbolism of Jewish mysticism and prophecies regarding the eternal brotherhood of man. Typical of the utopian anti-nationalism of his work are the enormous stained-glass windows which he prepared for the National Library at Givat Ram in Jerusalem (completed 1983), which illustrate a historic process beginning with images of war between nations and destruction; progressing through an abstract Jerusalem to which many roads wind, each inscribed in a different language; and ending with a field on which the weapons of war are seen broken, symbolizing the ultimate eradication of national differences.
Yet the dominant feeling introduced by German Jewry was not the hope of a mystical redemption, but the darkness and cynicism of individuals fleeing a great country they had loved and arriving in a small one which offered little consolation. The German painter Meron Sima, who frequently painted refugees and refugee camps, said that he “came to a bright, joyous land, building in full force, people danced in the streets.... I was the only one who did not smile. My heart was heavy with recent events in Germany.”9 Anna Ticho and Mordechai Ardon produced bleak Jerusalem landscapes, with either very little color or else jarring and cacophonous colors. Leopold Krakauer drew thistles and writhing olive trees bearing an unsettling resemblance to human figures. In these works—described by Martin Buber as depicting “the anguish of solitude”10—the inspiring land of Zionist redemption simply disappears, replaced by a land of desolation, without meaning for the Jewish nation, or any nation.
In addition to the shift in emphasis to a land without Jewish meaning, the Germans also brought with them the shift of emphasis from a Jewish orientalism to an outright preoccupation with the Arabs themselves. A leading example is the work of Jakob Steinhardt, probably the most important German artist in Palestine of the 1930s, who opened a studio adjoining Betzalel and became one of the academy’s most popular and influential instructors. Although Steinhardt came to Palestine out of idealistic motives and devoted much of his work to biblical images, these images were mustered not for the exploration of national Jewish themes, but rather to express his anguished desire for reconciliation with the Arabs. Steinhardt’s biblical woodcuts thus included numerous representations of Jacob embracing his brother-turned-enemy, Esau; and these were outnumbered only by his treatments of the story of Hagar, mother of Ishmael and of the Arabs, banished to the wilderness by the Jewish patriarch Abraham.11 Throughout his life Steinhardt continued to use his art to agonize over the Jewish exercise of national power in the establishment of the state of Israel, executing portraits of biblical heroes gripped by remorse and regret. Of these, the most important are Saul (1956), who covers one eye—a probable reference to army chief-of-staff Moshe Dayan—to escape the sight of the enormities taking place at his behest, and the ensuing loss of his kingdom, and Moses on Mount Nebo (1965), depicting an ancient, distressed and exhausted Moses surveying the Promised Land he will never enter. Over his lengthy career, Steinhardt continued to express himself through the medium of the woodcut, working his ideas into dark, brooding reverse-prints filled with sorrow and angst over the results of Jewish settlement in Israel.
