From ‘Spirit of Stone’ to ‘Forsaken Zone’: Is there a Jerusalem School of Art?

“Bezalel was the dream of Professor Boris Schatz, a well-known sculptor from Lithuania, who convinced the Zionist Congress to establish an art school in Jerusalem where students could learn to integrate their Jewish tradition with modern artistic expression. The school also offered classes in various practical crafts that would give the graduates a source of income.”

“The artists coming from Europe” noted Kobo, “found themselves in an Ottoman city, and latterly under the British Mandate. Jerusalem was then a very primitive and poor city. In addition to the shift into an Oriental environment, these artists were shocked by the light and the weather. It was very different from Europe.”

An early film, circa 1911, shows the teachers and students partying together, with Boris Schatz and painter Abel Pann prominent among the dancing, celebrating crowd who hail from a variety of backgrounds, although mainly Ashkenazi. In 1921, an Artists Association was founded, based around graduates of Bezalel.

One of the British governors of Jerusalem in the Mandate period (1917-1948) was Ronald Storrs who, along with Charles Ashbee, turned the David Citadel from an army barracks, which it had been in Ottoman times, into a cultural center. It was here, in 1924, that Reuven Rubin returned from the US and exhibited his work – his first exhibition – one of which is on display here.

“This is very significant for us,” said Kobo, “for this was the first exhibition here in honor of the early artists who had come to Jerusalem and really established Israeli art.”

Unlike most of the artists at the time who depicted landscapes of pre-state Israel, Rubin depicted a family of Jerusalem residents. For him, this was the real Jerusalem. Later artists, coming from Germany in the fifth aliyah, were heavily influenced by German expressionism, which in some ways helped them adjust to the new environment. Steinhart, for example, produced woodcuts where the sharp distinction of light and dark were reflected in his black-and-white prints.

Here, he is represented somewhat atypically by a painting.

Works by Ludwig Blum, Joseph Zaritsky, Pinhas Litvinovsky, and others are also on display, as are the works of women artists such as Elsa Lasker-Schuler and Anna Ticho, whose drawings of the natural landscape in and around Jerusalem are prominent (even in reproduction) in houses throughout Israel. Another female artist, Grete Krakauer, drew portraits of many of her famous contemporaries, such as Martin Buber and Arthur Ruppin, who frequented the family salon of Grete and her reputed architect husband, Leopold Krakauer. She also wanted to work with children and so created puppets, which appeared in Jerusalem’s first theater in 1935. The large puppets are featured here for the first time outside the theater.

Also on display are samples of tourist posters advertising the Land of Israel. The graphics department of Bezalel created the lettering for the posters in English and Hebrew. More Hebrew lettering is shown here, emphasizing its graphic qualities and its Arabesque style, as opposed to its traditional use in religious books.

These early examples of the Jerusalem School end in the 1950s and, in a way, lead into an entirely new concept of art that is on display at the HaMiffal Cultural Center. In fact, a more distinct display of art could hardly be imagined. Whereas the exhibition in David’s Tower shows the power of the Zionist idea and how it impacted the arts so that it became a celebration of the return to the land and expressed itself in highly positive images of the old-new land – even before the

Declaration of the Independence in 1948 – the later artists show themselves highly critical of much of Zionist Israel. What brings them together is the search for identity as artists, Israelis, Jews.

Partially, this could be explained by social and economic factors. As Elad Yaron, curator of the exhibition, explained: “The artists in Tel Aviv tend to be homogeneous. In Jerusalem, the artists come from a wide variety of places and social classes: Ashkenazi and Sephardi, rich and poor, religious and secular. Many of the artists were engaged in protest art, either social or political. They were also engaged in performance art. In addition, artists in Jerusalem tend to work outside the commercial galleries, which goes together with the protest aspect of their work.”

HaMiffal has novelty written all over it. According to its director, Neta Meisels, it is the first participatory cultural center in Israel. From being an empty 19th-century mansion, it was transformed in 2016 into a home for artists and “a shared creative space” where artists and others can meet, work in one of the studios, and make contacts with fellow creators, professional and amateur. The emphasis is on the visual arts but not exclusively. When we visited, there were a number of poets in the coffee bar discussing their latest work.

Artistic expression

An early example of this protest art sits in the middle of one of the corridors. It is “the holy ark of the covenant,” built like an empty metal frame by Guy David Briller and others. A video, made in 2010, shows the group taking the “ark” from the Israel Museum to the Knesset and from there to the Supreme Court.

“In a way,” explained Yaron, “the work became even more relevant recently. The artists were prophets in Jerusalem. They were taking this ark in a live video broadcast with one of the pioneers of broadcasting in Israel. They had a Zeppelin photographing it from the air. I think that all of these artists were non-religious; but inside Jerusalem, the Holy City, their ark represents something about the spirituality of the place. What we can see here is the ark after many years. Having been exhibited in many places throughout Israel, it is now broken and lies sideways as if it had been in an accident. But we have kept it that way. Its very brokenness gives it more power.”

Unusual for Israeli art are several religious artists. One of them, Yael Shimoni, painted the doors of a local synagogue in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem called the Shtiblach. She shows a door within the door and adds a red blood-colored stripe, strongly hinting at the Passover sacrifice. In the context of today, it is loaded with meaning.

An earlier exhibition called “No Man’s Land” focused on a historic border between Israel and Jordan, which existed prior to 1967. Two of the artists are shown here. Noa Arad Yair sculpted the head of a man sunk into a wall. Like many of the exhibits here, its meaning bears even more significance after October 7.

The source of this earlier exhibition was a house where artists actually resided in the historic no man’s land between Israel and Jordan until 1967. These artists received the house for free because the army was not allowed to be there.

They told the army that they would be guarding the perimeter and, as such, they received a permit to stay. The house, situated in Abu Tor, included artists such as Zvi Tolkofsky and Arik Kilemnick, all of whom went on to become major figures in Jerusalem’s art landscape.

It has to be remembered that behind all these developments and protests were many different groups.

One of them was The Black Panthers, a Sephardi group based in the Musrara neighborhood, whose protests were based on the fact that they felt discrimination by the Ashkenazim. Their protests began in response to the post-Yom Kippur War and the War of Attrition. The Black Panthers started protesting that they weren’t considered part of the established art world. They used methods from the art world. One night, they stole all the milk bottles from an upscale neighborhood and placed the bottles on the doorsteps of a poor neighborhood. They then wrote to the rich neighborhood to thank them for giving up milk for their dogs and cats for one day, and giving it to the poor people.

Golda Meir was furious, but they had achieved something. She said famously, “They are not nice,” a phrase that the Panthers used in their publicity.

One exhibit, which has a stone in the middle of a room, is by Shlomo Vazana, who was working in a poor neighborhood in the Katamonim. “A contractor left a huge pile of rocks in the middle of the neighborhood, and the artists painted them, renovated them, and moved them to another spot, which was adopted as a place for social gathering and singing. They took what was meant to be garbage and recreated it as art,” Yaron explained.

Two other artists, Gabriel Klasmer and Sharon Keren, came back broken from the wars of 1970 and 1973 and realized that they could not act in the same way as previous artists. You have people who had been in the war and needed to process their experience. One of the signs of this was what happened at Bezalel itself. At one point, the two artists were asked to put on an art show. So they took smoke grenades and blew them up in the middle of the classroom.

Subsequently, at a ceremony awarding medals to war heroes, the two artists showed up covered with bandages and medals. It was all very provocative and emotional. For his final work at Bezalel, 1974, Keren tried to change his name to Fatma Chalad. This was not a political act but one that expressed his notion of freedom of speech. As such, he was pressed by the authorities to explain why he wanted to change his name to that of an Arab woman. He remains an enigma.

Later, in 1986, Keren was one of the artists to initiate the Zik Group of performance art, probably the most prominent Jerusalemite contemporary art group, which, as its name in Hebrew suggests, used fire as a metaphor. In Hebrew, zik means “spark of fire.” Active until at least 2018, the group built huge structures and burned them publicly. The group’s work was literally meant to be a burning issue, where the creativity was destructive.

One of the issues that the exhibition tries to address is that of Arab Jerusalemites, given that the Arab community consists of well over one-third of the city’s population. Yaron explained the problem from the immediate war situation:

“An Arab artist I was working with apologized when the war broke out, saying that he could not work with me anymore. There are so few Arab artists who will work in this situation,” he said. “If they did, no one would talk to them. It’s very sad. Not including the Arab voice in Jerusalem was the hardest thing for me. Although in this case, he called me later and said he would put in a work called Present Absence, but without his name on it. However, we do have the work of a female Arab artist, Hanan Abu Hussein. Her work is based on a story told to her about the Shin Bet secret services who made a young Arab resident confess to a crime by using his father as bait. She made this work out of building material, which is a symbol of both building and destruction.”

Yaron connected these two apparently disparate parts of the exhibition by observing that both sets of artists, foreign born and native Israeli, are searching for their identity. What does it means to be living in Jerusalem? What does it mean to be born here?

“We need to answer these questions. If there is any connection between the two exhibits, it is related to this. Why are we here, and why are we staying? This is what connects the two sides of the exhibits. After so many wars and so much grief, there is still a need to address this issue,” he said.

The exhibition at the Tower of David Jerusalem will run throughout the summer of 2024.■