“Art is national. We can have great art if we are rooted in the soil,” Menachem Ussishkin stated in a 1926 response to the growing number of modern-art exhibitions in Jerusalem. His words echoed the Zionist sentiment about the important role art played in constructing the Jewish national homeland in Eretz Yisrael. While Jewish political, economic, and military institutions laid the foundation for eventual statehood, artists explored avenues of modernism that would give authentic representation to the “New Hebrew” in the land.
The exhibition “Jerusalem School: Spirit of Stone,” through July 15 at the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, surveys Jerusalem’s Old City as a motif for national regeneration in modern art from the twilight of the Ottoman Empire (1906–18) to the time of the British Mandate (1918–48).
The rebirth of Jewish art in the Holy Land came in 1906 when the Russian immigrant Boris Schatz opened the Bezalel Arts and Crafts School in Jerusalem. Schatz envisioned an artistic language incorporating biblical and Judaic motifs with Art Nouveau embellishments and oriental patterns, as seen in the exhibition’s Marbadiah rugs from the school’s weaving workshop. These hand-woven rugs depict romanticized cityscapes with the Dome of the Rock framed by serpentine foliage, arabesque ornament, and stylized menorahs and Stars of David.
The Romanian painter Reuven Rubin spent a year at Bezalel in 1912 and described Jerusalem as a “sleepy, backwater, almost medieval, Turkish town,” echoing Mark Twain’s description from 1867 of a town that had “lost all its grandeur . . . a pauper village.” By the outbreak of World War I, however, Bezalel had reignited Jerusalem’s latent cultural embers, and its European students and sponsors birthed a new cosmopolitan character that later flourished in the 1920s and ’30s.
The artistic scene and the city dramatically changed after the British expelled the Ottoman authorities from the Holy Land in 1918. New immigrants, who had been members of the avant-garde salons of Europe, formed the Union of Hebrew Artists (UHA) in 1921 and waged war against the outmoded Arts and Crafts methods and archaic Judaica of Bezalel with post-impressionist idioms. This period of “cultural strife,” as it is called in the literature, played out in the 1920s through numerous exhibitions held at the Tower of David citadel, an ancient fortress renovated as an exhibition venue under Sir Ronald Storrs and the architect C. R. Ashbee’s Pro-Jerusalem Society. According to one reporter for the Doar Hayom,the days before a new exhibition made for a scene worthy of the Left Bank of Paris as artists trekked across town carrying works from the Bezalel workshops and private studios to the citadel.
Representing the UHA in “Spirit of Stone” were Shmuel Levy Ophel, Reuven Rubin—whose signature primitivist handling of human figures and landscapes earned him the moniker “Palestine’s Gauguin”—and Ludwig Blum, whose pictorial obsession with the Old City was of a piece with Cézanne’s obsession with Mont Sainte-Victoire. For Blum, the city was an object of spiritual desire and aesthetic discovery, which he portrayed, through works such as Damascus Gate (1928), with thick applications of paint that imbued a windswept and dreamlike aura. Of the many rare works that make this exhibition exceptional, however, none is more striking than Ophel’s Figures in Jerusalem (1920s). Kept in a private collection, and rarely, if ever, attributed to Ophel, this haunting image abandons the traditional panorama perspective and invites the viewer into the city’s narrow and cavernous alleyways, conveyed in bold contours and cloaked in vibrant fauvist color.
After Bezalel closed its doors in 1929, the Jerusalem art scene embraced the modernist lexicon as it equally embraced new immigrants fleeing the rise of anti-Semitism in Central Europe. The abstract buildings and walls of the ancient cityscape in Jakob Steinhardt’s series View of Jerusalem (1935 and 1940) emerge from a washed-out backdrop in terse but thick brush strokes. Common residential homes and a giant olive tree in Miron Sima’s View in the Old City (1945) appear colorful and Mediterranean in a subjective manner reminiscent of work from the painter’s days consorting with the Expressionists in Dresden.
Notable female artists such as Anna Ticho, Grete Wolf Krakauer, and the poet Else Lasker-Schüler also attracted considerable attention in Jerusalem’s intellectual circles. Lively pencil drawings and sketches by Lasker-Schüler in the 1940s documented her daily encounters and misadventures in the city. One drawing, Yusef in Thebes (1920s), builds on an earlier vignette from the 1920s starring Lasker-Schüler’s comical alter-ego “Prince Yusef,” who peers contemplatively from a balcony in an ambiguous Middle Eastern city. That this later rendition could be reinterpreted as “Yusef in Jerusalem” is owed to the presence of the word “Shalom”(although misspelled) under the balcony. Yusuf and Lasker-Schüler together, it seemed, had finally found a homeland that accepted their eccentric antics.
“Spirit of Stone” excels at displaying lesser-known works by some of the most important artists of the pre-state era and succeeds in directing a spotlight on Jerusalem as a significant motif throughout the evolution of modern art in Eretz Yisrael. The new art’s effectiveness in giving visual expression to the Zionist ethos, however, rested not exclusively on stylistic representations of the Holy City. The UHA artists’ new symbolism, for example, alluding to labor, agriculture, urban development, and immigration—the key elements to constructing a homeland—had, by the late 1920s, effectively replaced archaic biblical motifs and Judaic symbols reminiscent of the “Wandering Jew.” This new symbolic content, alongside the reverential status of Jerusalem, as conveyed in the exhibition, constituted the appropriate iconography for the New Hebrew “rooted in the soil” of the national homeland.