Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Tristan Tzara, Victor Brauner, Marcel Janco, M. H. Maxy, Arthur Segal, Jules Perahim, Paul Paun 

Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem 

Through February 18, 2012

This exhibition at Israel Museum traces the artistic development of seven Jewish artists from Romania – Tristan Tzara, Victor Brauner, Marcel Janco, M. H. Maxy, Arthur Segal, Jules Perahim, and Paul Paun – who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, took the art world by storm through their fearless experimentation. After a successful presentation at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania brings to Israel for the first time ninety works, created between 1910 and 1938, that explore the question of center and periphery, and illuminate the role of Jewish artists in the avant-garde movement.

Victor Brauner

To my beloved Saşa Pană, 1930

Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

During World War I, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco were central to the development of Dada in neutral Zurich, in venues such as Cabaret Voltaire. Back in Romania in the 1920s, Tzara and Janco, together with Victor Brauner, M. H. Maxy, and Arthur Segal, were involved in the publication of avant-garde magazines Contimporanul, 75 HP, Punct, and Integral, and organized the First International Art Exhibition of Contimporanul. The 1930s brought a younger generation of artists into the conversation, such as Jules Perahim and Paul Paun. New avant-garde magazines Unu and Alge were introduced, and Bucharest became a central point of activity in the Surrealist movement. Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania explores Segal’s Neo-Impressionist art, Tzara’s Dada experiments, Brauner’s Surrealist works, Janco’s masks, landscapes, and genre scenes, Maxy’s growing interest in social themes, and the involvement of Jules Perahim and Paul Paun at the forefront of Surrealism, shedding light on the central role these artists played in the history of European avant-garde art.

The Romanian art scene in the early twentieth century, and particularly the contributions of artists of Jewish origin, have previously received little serious study by art historians, due to the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the Eastern Bloc at the time and in the decades that followed. This exhibition underscores the long-neglected importance of Bucharest tin the development of the European avant-garde, and explores the relationship between Jewish identity and radical modernity.

Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania was organized by the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, and curated by Radu Stern and Edward van Voolen. At the Israel Museum, the exhibition is organized by Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, David Rockefeller Curator of the Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art.

Also on view at Israel Museum a selection of recent acquisitions in contemporary art (through April 30, 2012)

Israel Museum Web Site

Magic Lantern, Israel Museum: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art

Magic Lantern: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem 

Throught April 30, 2012

Israel Museum, Jerusalem, presents a selection of 18 recent acquisitions and gifts of international and Israeli contemporary art. Magic Lantern: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art brings together works in a range of mediums by an international cadre of artists, including Vahram Aghasyan, Ilit Azoulay, Luis Camnitzer, Isaac Julien, Jonathan Monk, Adrian Paci, Anila Rubiku, Yehudit Sasportas, Hiraki Sawa, Jan Tichy, and Maya Zak, among others, all of which explore the theme of enchantment. 

Whether in landscapes or interior scenes, the works in Magic Lantern invoke the world of legend, daydream, fantasy and illusion. Through imaginary journeys, blurred silhouettes in the mist, flickering flames and dark forest shadows, the real world assumes the diffuse contours of something magical. The exhibition features works in a range of mediums, including installation, photography, video and film.

Highlights include:

- VAHRAM AGHASYAN: photographic series Ghost City (2005-2007), showing the actual state of a utopian urban development—a housing project planned in Armenia by the Soviet regime but left unfinished when the USSR collapsed, and now overtaken by seemingly apocalyptic floodwaters. In his photography, Aghasyan investigates sites and structures that originated during the Soviet era but are non-functional, incomplete or irrelevant in their current socio-political environment.

- ILLIT AZOULAY: Tree for Too One, The Keys, Window (2010), a work composed of thousands of photographs of a variety of objects and people, taken from several angles and then pieced together. Shapes and sizes are reworked digitally and recast as a single image, creating a new photographic reality in which multiple layers of being, memory and association exist simultaneously in one coherent whole.

- JONATHAN MONK: Candle Film (2009), made up of eight 16 mm films of a candle filmed as it changes slowly over time. The 16 mm film and film projector require that the reels be changed on a regular basis —approximately once every hour— by a technician. 

- MAYA ZACK: Living Room (2009), which recreates the interior of an apartment in Berlin just before it was abandoned in 1938by means of computer visualization. Based on the artist's interview with Yair Noam and his description of his childhood home, the work addresses such questions as the limitations of memory, the imagination of the artist, and the impossibility of recapturing what has been lost.

Magic Lantern is curated by Suzanne Landau, Yulla and Jacques Lipchitz Chief Curator of the Fine Arts and Landeau Family Curator of Contemporary Art.

Israel Museum Web Site

Victor Brauner Centenary, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Victor Brauner Centenary

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

January 1 - July 31 2004

VICTOR BRAUNER

The Alchemist, 1956

Oil on canvas

The Vera and Arturo Schwarz

Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art

Courtesy Israel Museum

VICTOR BRAUNER (1903-1966), a Romanian/French artist of Jewish origin, was an early adherent of the Surrealist movement who actively explored the realm of dreams and the unconscious, and thrived on the occult and the mystical. The content and style of his art reflect a fertile fusion of wide-ranging world cultures, mythologies, and religious beliefs, from Egyptian to Aztec, Native American to Oceanic, Jewish to Hindu. Victor Brauner’s works often have a naive, folk quality, realized in boldly colored abstract shapes and decorative patterning. While focusing primarily on figuration - whether human, animal or mythological - the works create an intricate lexicon of symbolic forms. Despite Brauner's eclectic progression of styles, his art speaks in a distinctive and coherent voice, propelled by a search for a universal spirit.

Born in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Victor Brauner was exposed to a range of folkloric traditions, attending the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1921. A decade later Victor Brauner settled in Paris, where he was introduced to the Surrealists by Yves Tanguy, joining the group by 1933. Following the artist's first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934, which was not well received, Victor Brauner left Paris, returning only in 1938. Several months later he lost his left eye while trying to break up a fight between Oscar Dominguez and Estaban Frances in Dominguez's studio. Prophetically, several years earlier, Brauner began painting works featuring human figures with mutilated eyes, including a self-portrait with a bleeding eye.

At the outbreak of World War II, unable to obtain suitable painting materials, Victor Brauner improvised with candle wax and developed the encaustic technique, incising and coloring the wax, favoring organic coloring materials such as coffee or walnut. This technique proved particularly apt for articulating his esoteric visions, as seen in Woman, Mountain, and The Object Gives Life, displayed in this special exhibit. Victor Brauner focused on developing his personal style, incorporating elements from Near Eastern art, such as the flattening and heraldic figures in Oppression of the Object, Kabbala, Biblical magic and alchemy, and other mystical texts, such as Novalis in The Object Gives Life.

Special exhibit curated by Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Associate Curator, The Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art.

THE ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Chagall in Israel, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Chagall in Israel

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

September 10, 2002 - January 11, 2003

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem presents over 80 paintings and works on paper by Marc Chagall, drawn from the collections of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and private Israeli collections. Chagall in Israel represents a collaboration between the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in which the Israel Museum is lending approximately 50 works by Picasso from its collection to Tel Aviv, in exchange for the loan of 25 works by Chagall to Jerusalem. The exhibition highlights the trademark images that have made Chagall such an important figure in the history of modern art worldwide, with a particular emphasis on works inspired by his Jewish heritage and connection to Israel. 

While Chagall absorbed influences from many of the major movements of the early twentieth century, his art remained distinctively his own - a fusion of images of mysticism and realism, fantasy and nature, religion and secular life. The exhibition explores the rich and broad range of subjects which Chagall treated in his work, including self-portraits; the Jew and the Torah; the Jewish village; lovers and flowers; musicians and performers; and artworks tied to Israel. The section devoted to Chagall and Israel features paintings created during his visits; works influenced by the landscape and light of Israel; studies for projects created for Jerusalem institutions; and rarely exhibited photographs and ephemera relating to Chagall and his visits to Israel - from Israeli postage stamps bearing his images to illustrated book inscriptions highlighting his relationship with Israel Museum Founder, Teddy Kollek.

James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, remarks: "The exhibition demonstrates the strength of Israel's holdings in the work of this great 20th century master and his ties to Israel. It also highlights the collegiality between museums in Israel and the strength of the relationships between museums and private collections here. These are all valuable messages in Israel today."

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall acknowledged the importance of the State of Israel to the Jewish people, and he enjoyed friendships with Israeli artists, art historians, politicians, businessmen, and people from many walks of life. He made his first visit to Israel in 1931, prior to the founding of the State, on the occasion of a commission he received to complete a series of 100 illustrations of the Bible. His drawings, etchings, and lithographs illustrating the Bible and works he executed during his first visit to Israel, Interior of a Synagogue in Safed, 1931 and The Wailing Wall, 1931, are on view in this exhibition. After World War II, Chagall visited Israel seven more times. In 1951 he came for the openings of exhibitions of his works in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv and then again in 1957 following the publication of his Biblical illustrations. Chagall enjoyed close ties to the Israel Museum since its inception; Teddy Kollek gave him a personal tour of the construction of the nascent campus in 1963.

Chagall's imprint is most widely felt in Israel through the works commissioned for major institutions in Jerusalem, which are now national landmarks. In 1962, Chagall arrived in Israel for the inauguration of the twelve stained-glass windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School Center in Jerusalem. He returned to Israel shortly thereafter to discuss and execute tapestries commissioned for the new Knesset building. Chagall also completed mosaics for the gallery wall and floor of the Knesset, all of which were his gift to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Chagall made his last visit to Israel at the age of 90 in 1977, at which time he was honored by the City of Jerusalem and awarded an honorary doctorate by the Weizmann Institute. The Israel Museum honored him through a retrospective of his works held that year, which Chagall came to view with his wife Valentina.

Chagall in Israel is curated by Stephanie Rachum. 

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian-British Artist at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian-British Artist

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

May 31 - October 29, 2002 

The first mid-career retrospective of Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare premieres at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Organized by the Israel Museum, Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian/British Artist features over 20 works, including large-scale installations, paintings and photographs. By interweaving African and traditional English motifs and imagery, Shonibare addresses critical issues of inter-culturalism with both sensitivity and humor. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Israel Museum.

Drawing upon his own life experiences, Yinka Shonibare creates works that examine notions of identity and affiliation while challenging aesthetic and social structures and conventions. Born in London in 1962, Yinka Shonibare moved to Lagos, Nigeria with his family when he was a young boy. At seventeen he returned to England where he studied art at Goldsmiths College. His works are filled with both cultural collisions and confluences and often combine elements of "high" and "low" art.

A number of Yinka Shonibare's life-size installations recreate scenes from classical European paintings using mannequins dressed in Victorian costumes made of fabrics with African motifs. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without Their Heads (1998), for example, was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough's famous portrait of the British gentry, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748-49), and explores the relationship between British aristocracy and colonialism, suggesting that the wealth of the upper classes was often a result of the colonization of Africa.

One of the artist's central themes is the "dandy," and Yinka Shonibare often portrays himself as this aristocratic, witty, and decadent character. In many of his photographs, Shonibare also places himself in carefully staged scenes featuring iconic images of English high society. In his twelve-part photographic work Dorian Gray (2001), Yinka Shonibare assumes the role the namesake of Oscar Wilde's novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, inspired by scenes from the 1945 film version of the novel.

"Shonibare's exploration of identity and affiliation in diverse societies could not be more timely," stated James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. "The issues he addresses are affecting the social fabric of nations throughout the world, but are especially relevant to Jerusalem, whose history has been shaped by the confluence of so many cultures. The Israel Museum is a perfect venue for presenting the work of this important artist."

Yinka Shonibare's work is in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

"Shonibare's work is extremely powerful, intelligent and witty," noted Suzanne Landau, curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator of the Arts at the Israel Museum. "He captures the essence of our time by juxtaposing and combining disparate cultures and traditions, which makes his work so significant and meaningful today."

Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962. He grew up in Nigeria, his family's country of origin, and returned to England at the age of seventeen. This bicultural artist has created a significant body of critically acclaimed paintings, photographs, and installations that address issues of identity, class, and race. Using wit and humor, he uncovers the many layers of contemporary culture and its historical baggage.

In the early 1990s Yinka Shonibare began using faux-African cotton prints, fabrics that had become an expression of African identity, but were in fact products of colonial commerce and industry that originated elsewhere. At first he stretched the fabric across square frames, arranging them in a grid on the gallery wall; later he began to play with the fabrics in elaborate, nineteenth-century Victorian dresses and corsets. By the late 1990s his subject matter had expanded to include aliens and astronauts, along with spoofs of classic European high culture from Hogarth and Fragonard to Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde. New themes, such as the nuclear family, were introduced, and familiar themes were explored in new contexts, for example, the colonial aspects of space travel.

As his work evolved, Yinka Shonibare also began experimenting with a wider variety of media, including photography and digital imaging. This increased range of methods has allowed the artist to make pointed critiques across a spectrum of political, social, and cultural concerns, and it has given him the opportunity to situate the "African" prints in novel contexts, keeping the ironic incongruities fresh and sophisticated.

Although often linked to colonialism and identity, Yinka Shonibare's works are not defined by this connection. "I hate conclusive things," he insists. "I think once a piece is conclusive, it's dead. The mind should be allowed to travel and have fantasy and imagination. People's minds need to wander."

The exhibition is on view in the Nathan Cummings 20th Century Art Building. 

A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Michael Gross, Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Recent Works

Michael Gross: Recent Works

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Opening February 26, 2002

Born in Tiberias in 1920 as a sixth generation sabra, Michael Gross has emerged as one of Israel's leading painters and sculptors, his achievements culminating in his receipt of the Israel Prize for Sculpture in 2002. Gross's art expresses close identification with the geographical and biographical landscape of his childhood, responding to the hot climate and vistas of the Galilee and Jerusalem.

The exhibition includes over 25 paintings and two sculptures, drawn from the Museum's collections and from private sources, the majority of which have been created in the past ten years. A few of his earlier works will also be featured to allow for comparative study of his later works. The range of work spans from a 1949 sculpture of his mother, through to a painting completed in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States.

The tragedy of pain and loss are repeated themes in Gross's work. Over the years, he returned often to portraits of his late father, who in 1939 was stabbed to death by Arabs at his farm near the Sea of Galilee. This traumatic event left a permanent mark on Gross and provided the initial stimulus for his painting.

Michael Gross's desire to preserve and immortalize reflects both a representational and expressionist approach: the desire to capture a particular moment in reality together with a particular emotional state. The interplay of expression and representation lies at the heart of Gross's works, which are characterized by an unresolved tension between heroism and lyricism, asceticism and sensuality, loneliness and intimacy. Gross's paintings demand full concentration, as the viewer strives to decipher the enigmatic truth of a work and to understand its essence.

The exhibition, curated by Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-Large.

It is on view in the Ayala Zacks Abramov Pavilion for Israel Art, accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000 - Retrospective Exhibition at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Opening January 8, 2001

"Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000", the largest exhibition ever to be held of work by Israel Prize laureate Moshe Kupferman, launches a year celebrating Israeli Art at the Israel Museum. This exhibition, featuring over 150 paintings and works on paper from the 1960's to the present, opens a year of exhibitions recognizing the achievements of veteran Israeli artists Michael Gross, Raffi Lavie, and Mordecai Ardon.

Drawn from public and private collections in Israel, Europe, and the US, the exhibition traces Kupferman's artistic development from the time of the birth of the State of Israel until today. Born in Poland in 1926, Moshe Kupferman spent World War II in the Ural and Kazakhstan internment camps. The only member of his family to survive, he emigrated to Israel in 1948 and helped establish Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), where he continues to live and work today.

Largely self-taught, Moshe Kupferman began to paint at the kibbutz while working on its construction. His experience as a Holocaust survivor and his enduring association with the kibbutz both inform and shape his work, which is characterized by a contradiction between unbridled emotion and silent restraint. He creates powerful abstract images through painting and then wiping layers, thus creating dialectic between expressive drama and controlled introspection.

Moshe Kupferman held his first museum exhibition at the Israel Museum in 1969, which was followed by another in 1984. Major exhibitions of Kupferman's work have also been held at the Stedljik Musuem, Amsterdam (1984); the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1984); The North Carolina Museum of Art (1991); The Tel Aviv Museum (1998); The Jewish Museum of History and Art in Paris (1984); and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1999-2000). His work appears in the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the British Museum, London; the Musée national d'art, Paris; among others.

The exhibition displays Moshe Kupferman's body of works as an "open creation", deviating from the commonly accepted framework of a retrospective by breaking up the chronology of Kupferman's works so that they can be presented in groups according to their relationships--how they complement, complete, and contradict one another. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 300-page catalogue including over 100 color reproductions and new interpretations of Kupferman's work.

James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, states: "The Israel Museum is proud to begin 2002 with this retrospective exhibition of the work of Moshe Kupferman, inaugurating a year in which we celebrate significant achievements of Israeli Art through the works of several of the most important Israeli artists of our time. Especially in these times, it is vital to recognize Israel's continuing artistic and creative strength."

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Dada and Surrealist Art from Arturo Schwarz Collection at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Dreaming with Open Eyes
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
December 22, 2000 - June 2001

On december 2000, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem presented its first comprehensive exhibition of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art.

Dreaming with Open Eyes includes over 300 works by leading artists including Duchamp, Man Ray, Ernst, Breton, and Goya. Donated in 1998, this unique collection of over 750 works of art by some 200 artists were on view at the Israel Museum from December 22, 2000 through June 2001.

The gift of the Arturo Schwarz Collection, together with a library of over one thousand related books, pamphlets and artifacts donated in 1991, has transformed the Israel Museum into the largest repository in the world of Dada and Surrealist art and a global center for the study and display of these movements. "Dreaming with Open Eyes" takes advantage of Schwarz's scholarly insight to reveal the importance of the works on view, and incorporates his personal approach to the material in the exhibition. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, ready-mades, photographs and prints are complemented by unique items from the Museum's Dada and Surrealist library of art periodicals, documents, letters, and artists' books.

The presentation in Jerusalem will be followed by a major international tour. The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, February - April 2002; the Art Gallery of Ontario, June - September 2002; and a third North American venue; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and conclude with two venues in Japan. James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum states: "Our Museum has a long history of important holdings in Modern Art and particularly in the fields of Surrealism and Dada. The Arturo Schwarz gift in 1998, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the State of Israel, consolidates our position as a world center for these two movements, so central to the aesthetic and intellectual progress of the 20th century. We are proud that, in "Dreaming with Open Eyes", we are able to expose the full riches of these holdings and then to share them on tour in North America and in Japan."

Dada
The Dada movement emerged in Europe and the United States in reaction to the horrors of World War I. This enclave of artists rebelled against artistic convention and sought to subvert the existing social and political order. Artists such as Marcel Janco, Raoul Hausmann, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia represent this movement through works exemplify the key tenants of Dada: the accidental, the absurd, protest, and criticism.

Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray
The revolutionary work of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray had a profound influence on Dada and Surrealist artists and was central to later trends in twentieth-century art. Duchamp and Man Ray met in New York in 1915, and from that time on were active, both independently and jointly, in avant-garde circles in New York and Paris. Arturo Schwarz met the two artists in the 1950's and demonstrated his appreciation for their work by arranging exhibitions, acquiring dozens of works, and composing scholarship on them. Seventy works by Man Ray and Duchamp reflect their fertile imaginations, and their preoccupation with humor, playfulness, and eroticism.

Forerunners of Surrealism
The Arturo Schwarz collection includes a sizable body of pre-Surrealist work, which, like the Surrealist movement that would follow, demonstrates a timeless interest in dreams, the supernatural, and the irrational. This portion of the collection includes paintings, prints, and drawings from the 16th through the 20th centuries by artists such as Durer, Goya, Moreau, and Redon, along with tribal masks and artifacts from Africa, Oceania, and North America. Surrealism The works of dozens of Surrealist artists from the 1920's to the 1980's are arranged in the exhibition according to visual and thematic criteria. The ideological platform of the Surrealist movement, formulated by Andre Breton in the 1920's, called for a new way of seeing. Disappointed by modern Western culture, many artists and writers had been inspired by Dada and had adopted a nihilist or anarchic stance. But Surrealism did not simply advocate subversion, it called for a change in values. The movement sought to stimulate the imagination, to expand the limits of awareness, and to tap into a non-rational, subconscious psychological realm, like that revealed in dreams and madness. Among the artists represented are some of the members of the original circle of the Surrealist movement in the 1920's and 1930's, such as Andre Breton, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst. Women artists including Claude Cahun, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning are prominently featured among the Surrealist group on display, many of which achieved central standing in the canon of 20th century art history.

The Library
The final component of the exhibition is drawn from the Museum's extensive library of Dada and Surrealist materials, including a display of portraits of Surrealist artists and writers immortalized by their photographer and painter colleagues, as well as a selection of original Dada and Surrealist literary documents. The collaboration between artists revealed through these portraits and publications demonstrates the spiritual bond that existed among members of the movement.

About Arturo Schwarz
Scholar and collector Arturo Schwarz was born in 1924 in Alexandria, Egypt to Jewish parents. In his youth he was very active in clandestine political circles and was arrested a number of times prior to his expulsion from Egypt in 1949. Settling in Milan in the early 1950's, he opened a publishing house and a bookstore that evolved into the Schwarz Gallery, which closed in 1975. The gallery held exhibitions of the best Dada and Surrealist artists and of contemporary artists from throughout the world. Simultaneously, Schwarz wrote poetry, published scholarly books including a catalogue raisonne of the works of Marcel Duchamp, gave lectures, and organized international Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. His intense involvement in the Surrealist movement and his personal acquaintance with many of its members has made him a leading authority on its history. "Dreaming with Open Eyes" is curated by Tamar Manor-Friedman and is accompanied by a comprehensive 250-page catalogue, which includes an illustrated inventory of the works in the Arturo Schwarz collection in the Israel Museum.

Yoko Ono Retrospective, Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Yoko Ono

Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000

Yoko Ono is one of the true pioneers of conceptual art and a prolific and influential innovator in forms ranging from installation to film. The full range of Ono’s originality and influence is apparent in “Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a major retrospective of Ono’s work at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Covering Ono’s career from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and installations as well as works in photography, video, and conceptual art. 

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono studied opera and classical music from an early age. As a girl, she moved with her family to the US, returning to Japan during World War II. She later studied music and philosophy in Japan and in the US. 

In the 1960s in New York she helped found the avant-garde Fluxus movement, a loose group of artists, musicians and poets whose works were inspired by the Dada movement and by Marcel Duchamp as well as by John Cage’s radical musical experiments. Key avant-garde figures with whom Ono collaborated included John Cage himself, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas. Throughout the 1960s, Ono traveled between New York, Tokyo, and London, exerting a major influence on the avant-garde art scene and pioneering conceptual art with works involving the participation of the viewer through mental or physical interaction. At her first exhibition in London in 1966, Ono met John Lennon, who would remain her partner and collaborator until his death in 1980. In 1967, her controversial film Bottoms, showing a series of naked buttocks, was promptly banned after its London premiere. Although ignored and even scorned by the art establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, Yoko Ono continued to work steadily. 

Many of her works reflect the influence of Zen Buddhism, to which she was exposed from an early age, while more recent work focuses on the complex interactions between women and male centers of authority. “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?” displays a range of Yoko Ono’s conceptual works, including: Ceiling Painting, which frames the word "yes” on a piece of paper; and The Wishing Tree, on which viewers are invited to write their wishes, echoing a tradition from Japanese temples. Half a Room, one of the most striking installations from Ono’s London period, displays the interior of a room whose objects and furniture have been cut in half and painted white. Portrait of Nora, a more recent work, presents the blurred, pixelized face of Ono herself and underscores her connection with the struggle for liberation from male dominance as experienced by Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll House. 

The exhibition also includes screenings of Bottoms and other early Ono films, including Fly, Rape, and rarely seen short “FluxFilms.” “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a touring exhibition of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in England, arrives in Jerusalem from Helsinki. Ono’s outdoor installation Ex-It, on display at the Museum since May, remains on view. 

James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states: “At the turn of the millennium the Israel Museum is honored to host one of the great creative artists of our time, who is only now receiving the recognition she deserves. We are grateful to Ms. Ono for sharing her vision with the people of Israel, and we hope that her presence in Jerusalem will promote the causes of peace and understanding to which she has dedicated much of her career.”

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

Ruppin Boulevard 11, Jerusalem

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Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction, Exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

September 1 - December 31, 1999

The threshold of a new millennium invites reflection. For the Israel Museum, this means gathering influential works by one of the century's most important artists for a retrospective survey of one of the great movements of early modern art. "Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction," at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, offers visitors a first focused presentation in Israel of the master of abstract art, tracing the revolutionary course he charted at the start of the twentieth century art. Selected from key collections around the world - including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and the Lenbachhaus, Munich - this survey includes key works in Kandinsky's oeuvre, among them Composition VII, 1913, considered the most ambitious and perhaps most important work by the artist. 

The exhibition also includes an introductory installation of proto-modernist paintings, on loan and from the Museum's own collection, of artists in Kandinsky's circle, including Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941); Heinrich Campendonk (1889-1962); Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964); and Gabriele Monter (1877-1962), Wassily Kandinsky's longtime companion.

Born in Moscow to a prosperous, educated family, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was drawn to the notion of abstraction and to the connection between the experiences of color and sound as a young adult. Inspired by both Monet and Wagner, Kandinsky went to study art in Munich, then one of Europe's foremost cultural centers, and achieved early prominence in the city's artistic life. In 1906-7, living in France, Kandinsky came under the influence of the Fauve painters, and began to paint in a freer style, with colors and forms which displayed an increasingly remote connection with the representation of real objects.

Early in 1910, a chance encounter with one of his own works lying on its side in his studio became the turning point for Kandinsky. Urged on by a new belief that the identification of subjects actually presented obstacles to a truly uplifting artistic experience, he began to draw freely, swiftly-executed contours and patches of color to create a network of images only vaguely connected to the real world. With this step, he had embarked on a voyage that would make him a pioneer of abstraction in modern art and one of the most important painters of all time.

As Kandinsky went on to develop a mature abstract style - as founder of the important Blue Rider group in Germany, in his homeland from World War I until after the Russian Revolution, and as a teacher at the Bauhaus School in Weimar from 1921-1933 - he never entirely banished representation from his paintings. Hints of realistic figures, Russian and other folk images, and particularly religious symbols remained, even as Kandinsky added geometric motifs and organic-biomorphic shapes to his paintings later in his career. Kandinsky also remained an outspoken proponent of the messianic belief that art could bring about spiritual transformation; seeing himself as a prophet, he strove to create an art that, rather than describing nature, would elevate people to a spiritual plane detached from reality.

Composition VII, 1913, on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and rarely seen outside of Russia, is regarded as a perfect distillation of Kandinsky's artistic vision and perhaps the most artistic achievement of his career. Achieving a level of abstraction not seen in his earlier paintings, Composition VII presents suggestions of apocalyptic imagery through a tapestry of colors and forms. Preparatory studies for the painting make it possible to identify some of his hidden motifs, among them yellow trumpets, signaling the apocalyptic call.

James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states, "Following our presentation of 'The Joy of Color' one year ago, in which the work of Wassily Kandinsky held a central place, we are pleased to have this opportunity to show for the first time in Israel a focused presentation of this most influential master of early 20th century painting. A survey of Kandinsky's work offers a beautiful and important lesson in the history and origins of abstract art."

"Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction" is curated by Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-large at the Israel Museum. 

A color catalogue in Hebrew with a summarized text in English is available.

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il