The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has reconstructed an “Exhibition of Jewish Artists,” which opened in Berlin in 1907. The original show featured over 200 works of painting and sculpture, and Judaica objects. Among the noted artists represented in the exhibition were Jozef Israëls, Lesser Ury, Camille Pissarro, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg, and more. A café area in the Tel Aviv exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the period with letters from the artists to the 1907 exhibition committee, local press reviews and even satiric jokes and anti-Semitic broadsheets of the period. Exhibition open through September, 2009.
The Berlin show sought to answer questions such as: Do the Jews have an artistic talent? Do their works have something in common stemming from their “race”? Is a “specific Jewish art” gaining ground? In the opinion of the organizers of the exhibition, only a group exhibition of Jewish artists from different countries could provide an answer to these questions to impartial art historians.
The present exhibition in Tel Aviv, entitled “Fragmented Mirror,” has some 100 works of art by the same artists, and many of the same works exhibited in Berlin in 1907. More than half of the artworks are from the collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The Tel Aviv exhibition provides a rare opportunity for the public to view works otherwise hidden away in the storerooms.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel’s main art museum, first opened to the public in 1932 in the home of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Museum quickly became the cultural center of the Tel Aviv, presenting local and foreign artists. In addition to its steadily growing collections, the museum serves as a platform for free-thinking cultural and artistic exchanges.
The Museum hosts more than half a million visitors per year with a dynamic program of changing and permanent exhibitions, and exciting cultural programs of classical and jazz music, performance arts, lecture series, special events, children’s programs, dance, and cinema.
www.tamuseum.com
Image: Eugen Spiro, Susi Kate and Lotte 1910
