Pride and Prejudice: Recurrent Patterns in Israeli Art Historiography

An Abstract

The article offers a critical review of the history of art in Israel since the 1950s to the present, and exposes the major patterns and prevailing ideologies that have guided its writers. The Zionist ideal that dominates this historiography is revealed initially in presenting Israeli art as having been born ex nihilo and having no past. In fact, this idea resonates nineteenth-century European views of the Jews as lacking aesthetic sensibility or artistic talent, ideas that often reflected anti-Semitic attitudes. Adopting such views as an explanation of the emergence of Israeli art as separate from and even superior to Jewish culture in the Diaspora is disturbing. Nonetheless it is still held by artists, writers and curators in Israel today.

Moreover, this presumed ‘absence’ of aesthetic interest in Jews was presented at times as some kind of quality and as such it was interpreted as the true identity of authentic Israeli art (most notably in the concept of ‘The Want of Matter’, the title of an influential exhibition held at the Tel Aviv museum in 1986) .

The story of the Zionist rebellion against the Jewish past reverberates throughout the story of visual art in Israel. This story is told as a series of artistic rebellions of the young and modernist against the old and traditionalist; and as a rivalry between the (new and mainly secular) city of Tel Aviv and the ancient Jerusalem. I

This is also the backbone of the binary model that dominates Israeli art discourse: the opposition of locality and universality. 

Quite surprisingly, these patterns are shared by writers of different political affiliations, including post-Zionist and postmodernist writers who continue to adopt the Zionist and modernist framework at the core of the discourse.