On the Walls

Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected]

Lisa Reihana’s acclaimed video projection in Pursuit of Venus [infected] was inspired by a 19th-century French scenic wallpaper that envisioned the Pacific islands as an exotic paradise. Taking this product of European fantasy as her framework, Reihana reimagines the past. Against the wallpaper, digitally rendered and reinterpreted, she presents a new narrative weaving together historical and invented episodes.
Her story grows out of the renowned voyages of Captain James Cook, who 250 years ago was the first European to reach distant areas of the southern hemisphere and have contact with the peoples who lived there. The title in Pursuit of Venus [infected] suggests a quest, while referring to Cook’s orders from the Admiralty: to record the transit of Venus across the sun and also to expand England’s knowledge of the world and sphere of influence. (The word infected suggests another outcome of his mission – the introduction of European diseases to the region.)
Reihana shifts the power balance and colonial stereotypes reflected in Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, the French wallpaper that was her point of departure. The indigenous actors filmed in her work represent the region’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Thus the New Zealand–born artist – whose father’s Māori roots can be traced back at least seven generations – seeks to restore the voices and worldviews of the previously marginalized peoples of the Pacific. As she puts it, she allowed the actors, “embodiments of their own ancestors . . . to speak back through time and through space.” After filming the many vignettes, Reihana inserted them in the background she extracted from the wallpaper. To this technological tour-de-force, some ten years in the making, was added an intricate soundscape created by her collaborator James Pinker.
Reihana addresses issues of post-colonialism, injustice, transnational relationships, and indigenous autonomy. She says that the work aims to “indicate a level of complexity, to elicit some kind of empathy and alert people.” The impact of colonialism is not unique to the Pacific or relegated to the past. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] raises questions relevant to any contemporary society wanting to learn from its mistakes.
Sponsored by Ella B. Snyder and Bernard Snyder Memorial Lecture.

Curator: Dorit Shafir
Designer: Rona Cernica
Artwork © Lisa Reihana

The Israeli Art galleries

The Israeli Art galleries present the works of artists from the beginning of the twentieth century until today. Israeli art has always found itself pulled in two conflicting directions; the need to address what was happening outside, and the desire to focus on the autonomous concerns of art itself, of material, method, and definition. Moreover, it has always developed in a complex context of socio-political tension, war, and bloodshed, a context in which it is impossible to separate everyday individual life from the historical and the mythical.
Art’s response to this loaded reality is complex. Initially, in the first decades of the 20th century, many Jewish artists were unable to see or unwilling to portray that complexity; instead, they painted an idealistic, optimistic, and often naïve picture that reflected their hopeful vision of the future. Reuven Rubin’s famous painting First Fruits is a good example. Rubin drew the land as an Oriental paradise, a place of harmony and fertility – the perfect setting for the birth of a new kind of Jew and the shaping of a native Israeli identity.
Alongside these artists, others expressed social and political engagement through their art, depicting a more sober reality in an attempt to bring about change. Naftali Bezem’s To the Aid of the Seamen refers to the seamen’s strike which broke out in 1951 and triggered heated debates on Israel’s kibbutzim over whether or not to support the strike.
The commitment to art for art’s sake was a powerful force, with many artists devoting themselves to composition, line, color, and material in an attempt to define the relationship between visible reality and a creative act that articulates the artist’s innermost spirit. Yosef Zaritsky’s Yehiam is a good example. The indistinct human figures he inserted in the composition resemble patches of vegetation, and they communicate a tension between the natural and the human, between figuration and abstraction.
Many artists straddled both camps. Their multilayered work combines personal and collective concerns. Such is Larry Abramson, who drew on newspapers from June 1967, the time of the Six-Day War, a black square, a skull, outlines of plants and planks, cracks and fragments. The motifs have been staple of his work for many years alongside images referencing art history – such as Malevich’s avant-garde black square and the skull which symbolizes human mortality, take on new meaning when read against a chronicle of national events that would forever change the face of Israel.

Curator: Amitai Mendelsohn
Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner

A Modern Love: Remarkable Photographs from the Israel Museum

Although photography was already recognized as an independent art form towards the end of the 19th century (some 50 years after its invention), the desire to collect photographs as art objects is relatively new. In most cases, it emerged alongside the creation of museum photography departments and the gradual development of academic scholarship on the subject, beginning around the late 1970s. The passion of photography’s collectors in the late 20th century mirrors the passion of its avant-garde modernist practitioners from the beginning of the same century: a profound desire to approach the world with new visual explanations. The unusual points of view adopted by those modernist cameras would – for example – serve ideological agendas, blur the distinction between abstraction and realism, or simply challenge the truth of photographs.
From the broad scope of the Israel Museum’s photography holdings, this chronological display of photographs created between 1900 and 1945 presents the various facets of modernism through a flow of powerful images, together with a few focal points devoted to a single artist or phenomenon. Brief introductory notes appear at six stops along the gallery, and use of the exhibition’s audio-guide is recommended, since it offers in-depth analysis for many of the photographs. And as you take a close look at these images, perhaps ask yourself: what can a century-old photograph tell me about my own time?
A Modern Love presents gifts at the core of the Museum’s holdings, notably the private collection of the late Noel and Harriette Levine, which includes some of the most renowned works by American and European camera artists. Other works have arrived very recently, among them rare photographs by female avant-garde artists active in interwar Europe, gifted by Gary B. Sokol as a key addition to our collection. Such gems are now offered in a wider context of masterworks from the same period previously donated to the Museum and only rarely put on display.

Curator: Noam Gal
Designers: Alexandra Topaz and Shirly Yahalomi
Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Laura Lachman

Impressionist Art gallery

The changing face of 19th century France, following the revolution, the growing city, and the rise of bourgeoisie in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, brought about many changes in French art. The Symbolists fused influences from various sources into personal visions. The Romantics sought inspiration in distant lands and exotic places. The Realists, led by Courbet, painted village life, its inhabitants and its natural environment, and the Barbizon School – Jean Baptiste Camille Corot among them – were the first to go outdoors to paint landscape. These new art movements acted outside of the artistic establishment, basing their art on personal observation; heralding the arrival of Impressionists.
The Impressionists got their name in 1874, on the occasion of their first exhibition. One of the critics described their art contemptuously as “a mere impression”, and the artists adopted the term as their movement’s name. Undeniably their painting conveyed the image as seen by the “innocent” eye as opposed depicting the subject as an “all-knowing artist”.
The Impressionists researched color, light and its reflection. They used varying brushstrokes and placed complementary colors side by side. They painted series describing the same subjects at different times of the day and through different seasons. In order to draw The Water Lilies in his garden, Claude Monet left his studio and went outdoors. There he tried to paint what meets the eye without distinguishing between significant, and minor objects, or between reality and its reflections in the water.
Impressionists also described the city and city life. Camille Pissarro positioned himself at the window of a room on the top floor of a hotel, from where he could see the bustling city. He recreated the scene as he saw it, accentuating the steep angle, with the light of a specific time of day – he painted fourteen views at different times throughout the day – rendering the bustle of the street with its individual people disappearing into the crowd, as they filled the city streets and the parks.
Post-Impressionists were influenced by Impressionism, but developed their personal style, each one in a different direction. 20th century art was deeply influenced by the approaches of the following three artists:
Paul Gauguin traveled the non-Western world, in search of innocence and purity which he expected to find there. In Upa Upa (The Fire Dance) he liberated color and shape from the inhibiting Western objective gaze, and filling them with spiritual and mysterious qualities.
Vincent van Gogh’s art was inseparable from his life. He expressed his feelings and emotional turmoil through his color and turbulent brushstrokes. The stalks that fall to the reaper’s scythe, in Harvest in Provence become an allegory for human life and the cycle of life and death.
Paul Cézanne declared that “a painting is not a window,” and the artist should not attempt to copy nature, but rather, to translate it into the language of art, which seeks form, color, structure, and organization. The artist has to bear in mind that all these are laid out on a flat canvas, to which landscapes and three-dimensional forms have to adapt. In this painting Country House by a River, the reflections in the river are so completely vertical that the water resembles a wall.

Jacques Lipchitz Collection

Jacques Lipchitz’s rich collection is presented in a way that evokes the “wonder chamber” of the past – eclectic cabinets of curiosities; filled with all kinds of objects from different cultures. The artist was born in Lithuania in 1891 and moved to Paris as a young man to study art. There he met the important artists of the time, and the art of the early 20th century. Lipchitz was exposed to the principles of Cubism, and was one of the first to apply Cubist principles in three-dimensional form. With the outbreak of World War II Lipchitz fled to New York, where he continued to work up until his death in 1973.
Like many avant-garde artists of his time, Lipchitz was drawn to ancient and non-Western cultures. He sought to enrich his own creativity by exploring their motifs, techniques, and ways of expression. His collection reflects a fascination with human imagination and artisanship and exemplifies what he called “encounters”, similarities among objects made in very different periods and places.
The rich and diverse display brings together Lipchitz – the collector and Lipchitz – the artist. The encounter of the various collection objects with sculptures of the artist creates a dialogue between the two components of the creative personality displayed side by side. It is not always clear whether the sculpture was inspired by a collection object, or the object was added to the collection because it reminded the artist of one of his art works.
Head from 1914 – which Lipchitz later cited as a developed example of his application of Cubist principles to three-dimensional art – manifests a move toward simplification and purity of form. Similar rigid geometric lines of the nose, mouth, and forehead can be found in a Coptic mask in his collection.
Lipchitz’s bronze Standing Figure, 1929, retains the feel of the clay original, together with the artist’s fingerprints. When he made it, Lipchitz was examining the potentialities of cast metal, and even at the stage of modeling in clay, bore in mind the effect his figure would have in bronze. With its spontaneous, gestural expressiveness, the work is highly characteristic of his oeuvre; at the same time, its twisted pose and unconstrained roughness recall the mid-nineteenth-century Maquette for Venus and Cupid by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
During the 1920s, Lipchitz became preoccupied with open forms and the interpretation of solids and voids. His exploration of negative sculptural space in Head: Maquette No. 1, 1932, produced an interaction between inner and outer. The massive exterior form opening into an interior void echoes the same counterbalance in a seventeenth-century European decorative iron helmet found in the collection.
This rich, resonant display also gives us a glimpse into the artist’s actual studio, allowing us to share in some measure what Lipchitz himself experienced: “I look at all that surrounds me, and feel the whole of humanity with me. I am never alone, never lost, and given, with a sense of humility, the courage for my every day’s work.”