The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art

Abstract

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish–Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist–Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism.

1. Introduction

The canon of Israeli art is narrow. The causes of this are many: a relative lack of historicity, Israeli art’s inherent complexity and a dearth of critical scholarship are major contributing factors. The canon, such as it is, was formed during the first decades after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and little has been done to reexamine it since. Its formation was in accordance with the opinions prevailing among a handful of museum curators, art critics and educators. A majority of this cultural elite adhered to a Zionist political agenda, refuted political attachments to the Jewish diaspora (in the Zionist lexicon, this is referred to as Shlilat Ha’Galut—the “negation of the diaspora”), and relied heavily on modern and Western paradigms of artistic practice (Manor 2010b).1 Examining the writings of these intellectuals, it becomes clear that the canonical narrative in post-statehood Israeli art is encapsulated in the myth of the Tel Aviv New Horizons’ group (1948–63). With Joseph Zaritsky as its leading figure, this movement’s doctrine revolved around abstraction, modernism, and the idea of “art for art’s sake”. In its seeming rejection of localism in the arts, its aspiration for a “universal” art practice, the New Horizon’s work was related to artistic developments in Paris and New York after World War Two (the CoBrA group and New York-based Abstract Expressionism were its main influences in this regard). Professedly at least, the group was apolitical. New Horizons was succeeded by Rafi Lavie’s Ten Plus group, another Tel Aviv art entity, which dominated the local scene between 1965 and 1970. Like its predecessor, the creative efforts of Ten Plus also foregrounded Western modern formalism, as articulated by the influential critic Clement Greenberg. And like New Horizons, Ten Plus denied the inherent connections between art and politics (Kalev 2008). In a seminal essay titled “Yosef Zaritsky and Raffi Lavie: Artists as Leaders”, Dalia Manor presents the two eponymous artists as key figures in the establishment of the Israeli art canon. Zaritsky and Lavie pulled no punches, she suggests, in their attempt to marginalize artistic practices that did not match their personal taste: their influence on the forms of inclusion and exclusion that shaped the story of Israeli art was vital. Although other artists certainly held central public positions, Manor explains how the history of Israeli art was filtered through the influence of these two artists (Manor 2009).

Much of this article focuses on German artists who emigrated to Jerusalem, who would form the New Bezalel School. Unlike the New Horizons or Ten Plus groups, these artists are hardly mentioned in the canonical narrative of Israeli art. This is underlined by the Israeli art surveys published every twenty years or so. The latest edition, 100 Years of Israeli Art, devotes an entire chapter to New Horizons. Artists working in Jerusalem from the 1930s to the 1960s, however, are covered in barely two pages. Whereas Mordecai Ardon, arguably the most influential figure among these artists, is treated to just one page, the New Horizon’s Zaritsky is mentioned repeatedly throughout the book.2 Its author, Yigal Zalmona, regarded the Jerusalemite artists as adhering too closely to their diasporic roots, having emigrated hurriedly from Nazi Germany (Zalmona 2010, p. 102). Zalmona also casts their social realism as the ultimate rival of abstract art.

This dominant narrative, according to which the abstraction promoted by New Horizons has dominated the Israeli canon, was entrenched in a number of landmark books (Tammuz 1963; 1980; Jewish Museum 1981; Ofrat 1998). These include Art in Israel (1963), The Story of Israeli Art (1980), Artists of Israel: 1920–1980 (1981) and One Hundred Years of Art in Israel (1998). Each of these books placed New Horizons front and center in Israeli art of the period. In Training for Art: Critique of Museal Economy (1999), Ariella Azoulay questions the group’s triumph: “Who was included in Israeli art hegemony, and why were the Jerusalem artists rejected from it despite having accepted the same principles followed by the Tel Aviv artists?” (Azoulay 1999, p. 150). These “same principles” refer to a set of approaches including formalism and socio-political engagement. Although both of these are distinctly modern concerns, formalism has been valued especially highly in modern Israeli art. Azoulay shows how, in the discourse of Israeli art, the center of artistic creation was always located in Tel Aviv, while Jerusalem was left to languish on the sidelines. Liah Greenfeld’s study of the field of Israeli art uses quantitative methods to establish how power and attention have indeed been channeled toward Tel Aviv and abstract artists at the expense of other centers, artists, and practices (Greenfeld 1989, p. 164). Taking up Azoulay’s questions, I also mean to ask why Jerusalemite artists have been excluded from the canonical narrative. Whereas Azoulay uses sociological methods to address this problem, and focuses on Israeli art during the 1970s, I will address the topic by means of historiographical analysis. Furthermore, in “Facing the Diaspora: Jewish Art Discourse in 1930s Eretz Israel” (2015), Dalia Manor examines the art of the 1930s and its relation to Jewish art and artists from the diaspora, linking this decade’s canonic exclusion with the later dominant Zionist ideology (Manor 2015). To grasp the dynamics of canon formation in Israeli art in the period following 1948, I, like Manor, delve into the marginalized Jewish trajectory in Israeli art. However, I will broaden the perspective by reading texts and images through the lens of migratory aesthetics.

This article takes in four decades, running from the 1930s to the 1960s. I begin by analyzing the fifth wave of immigration to Palestine (1933–39), which saw the arrival of German Jews, often referred to as “Yekkes”. Through an analysis of the life and work of Mordecai Ardon, the first part of the article compares this complex immigrant identity with the hegemonic Zionist identity. My study of immigrant art practice is informed by the theoretical discourse on diaspora and migration put forward by Ranajit Guha and Saloni Mathur. The writings of Sara Chinski serve to position this body of work in relation to the wider context of Jewish–Israeli culture.

Moving into the second part of the article, I focus on two institutions founded in Jerusalem by German-Jewish artists. Having settled in Jerusalem, these immigrant artists opened the New Bezalel School in 1935 and ran it until the late 1960s. In 1949, they founded the Jerusalem Artists’ Society and its exhibition venue, the Jerusalem Artists’ House. The artistic tastes and values articulated through these institutions played important roles in the Zionist project. Zionism’s mission was to establish a national home for all Jewish people in Zion (Palestine). Many adherents to this cause believed that art had an integral role in the nation-building process. Analyzing the Bezalel School and Jerusalem Artists’ House serves to expose the aesthetic values at stake in nation-building projects, as embodied in the image of Jerusalem and Zion, conceptual themes also used in the diaspora; nation-building, I argue, is an especially prominent theme in the aesthetics of Jerusalem’s immigrant artists of the period. Much has been written on the influence of European modernism on this group of artists, as well as on how Zionism appropriated their diasporic Jewish imagery for negative purposes (for example, contrasting the image of the Jew in the diaspora to the Jew in Palestine). In contrast to the existing work, this article undertakes a positive reading of diasporic imagery in these artists’ work.

It is important to be clear that in using the term “diasporic imagery”, I mean to refer to images and motifs derived from the visual cultures of diasporic communities. These cultures are characteristically hybrid in that they are influenced by both home and host countries. Diasporic imagery is a visual manifestation of diasporic identities. Often, such imagery migrates with immigrants who choose to leave their diaspora, whether for the homeland or another diaspora. In traveling with immigrants, a given instance of “diasporic imagery” might equally be called “migratory imagery”. I shall refer to “diasporic and migratory aesthetics” as the catch-all term for these imageries as a whole.

Approaching Jerusalem’s arts scene through the prism of diasporic and/or migratory aesthetics allows me to challenge received dynamics of canon formation in Israeli art. Whereas the dominant narratives of Israeli art practice have revolved around European and Zionist influences, I put forward the possibility of incorporating art from, or inspired by, the Jewish diaspora. Indeed, although the art made in Jerusalem was national, it was laden with diasporic imagery. It employed modern diasporic Jewish identities as central points of reference in the creation of a Jewish–Israeli national art. In fact, juxtaposing diasporic identities with Zionist commitments and German modernist influences gave rise to a unique modern strand of artistic production. The artists were inspired by Jerusalem, glorifying its modern, Jewish and Zionist culture. They created art that was specific to the city, art meant to unify the Jewish people, and support the Zionist project. Moreover, the Jerusalemite artists believed that art should communicate with its audience, make an impact on society, and actively take part in the nation-building endeavor.

Although instances of these values can be found throughout Western modern art, the art produced in Jerusalem was excluded from the Israeli modern art canon. Instead, Tel Aviv’s abstraction prevailed, erasing the diasporic dimension from the story of Israeli art.3 What are the possible reasons for this exclusion? In this article, I reflect on this question by recalling three other examples of exclusions in canon building from the history of Western modern art. Jerusalem-based art, I claim, figures just one episode in the larger exclusionary dynamics of canon formation in Western art in general. Having illuminated the connections between artistic canon formation and modern nationalism in my set of examples, I argue that, in the Israeli case, the German Jews’ art practice and its diasporic imagery could not participate in the national modern art canon.

2. Immigrant Artists of Jerusalem: Modernist, Jewish and Zionist

In the 1930s, Jerusalem received a wave of Jewish artists who, having emigrated from Nazi Germany, ultimately settled in the city. They included Mordecai Ardon (1896–1992), Jacob Steinhardt (1887–1968), Miron Sima (1902–1999), Joseph Budko (1888–1940) and Isidor Aschheim (1891–1968), to name just a few. These artists were part of the fifth Aliyah (the Hebrew term for a wave of immigration) to Palestine. Lasting from 1933 to 1939, this Aliyah resulted directly from the rise of the Nazi regime. It differed from former periods of immigration in that it did not share their Zionist, pioneering character. Unlike former waves of Zionist immigration, German Jews came to Palestine in search of sanctuary. In general, Palestine was a second—if not last—resort. Before 1933, only 2000 Jews had migrated to Palestine from the German diaspora (Weinbaum and McPherson 2000, p. 25). For most of these immigrants, Germany, not Palestine, was their motherland—the new Zion. To many, their Jewishness was only a cultural aspect of their identity; in terms of nationality, they perceived themselves as Germans. This was also true for immigrants born in Eastern Europe (for the most part, Poland and the Russian Empire), who had settled in Germany as young people before arriving in Palestine in the 1930s (ibid.).4

Indeed, the fifth Aliyah comprised many immigrants who had already undertaken migrations within Europe. As children living in Poland or the Russian Empire, they grew up among the Ostjuden (East European Jewry), which profoundly shaped their personal identity. In her groundbreaking study of colonial and post-colonial identity in the field of Israeli art, Sara Chinski shows how the Ostjuden, who were often committed to living traditional Jewish lives, differed significantly from the German Jewish diaspora. Consider the prominence of the shtetl (a type of small Jewish town or village in Eastern Europe) in the traditional Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe, encompassing religious tales, painted synagogues, and Jewish communal engagements such as weddings and holidays. German Jews, however, wished to assimilate into Germany and modernize Jewish culture.5 In her analysis, Chinski introduces the Bund movement of the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire—Zionism’s key ideological competitor. Bundism, Chinski explains, fostered a distinct Jewish identity, which differed significantly from that inculcated under Zionism (Chinski 2015, pp. 221–23). As Zionism attained hegemony in Israel, Bundism was largely erased from the Israeli–Zionist collective memory.

Officially named the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (in Yiddish:אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין ליטע פוילין און רוסלאַנד and German: Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Litah, Poyln un Rusland), the Bund was founded in Vilnius in 1897 (the same year of the First Zionist Congress). As a secular Jewish socialist party, it was profoundly influenced by Marxism. Unlike the Zionist movement, the Bund did not see the establishment of a nation state for the Jewish people in Zion as a solution for modern Jews. By attracting Eastern European Jews to the fledgling Russian revolutionary movement, they hoped to secure national and cultural autonomy for Jews within a socialist democratic republic of Russia (Blatman 2010). One of the ways in which Bundists pursued this goal was by reviving and modernizing traditional Jewish culture. This was to be achieved by disseminating the Yiddish language and prioritizing art (Chinski 2015, pp. 221–23).6 The Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Germany before eventually finding themselves in Palestine must have been greatly influenced by this movement. Indeed, it was the largest and best-organized Jewish political party in Eastern Europe and posed a significant challenge to Zionism (Blatman 2010). Accordingly, identities in the German-Jewish diaspora were various, complex, and contested.

In “The Migrant’s Time” (1998), a seminal article in diaspora and migration studies (then an emerging field), Ranajit Guhu reflects on the possibility of identifying a unique diasporic identity whereby one would “belong to a diaspora” (Guha 1998, p. 155). In scrutinizing the issue, he espies a dialectic between migration and belonging. Saloni Mathur takes up this notion in the cultural sphere, asking how this dialectic is manifested in the visual arts (Mathur 2011). What had issued from the spatial mobility of people and images in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What kinds of hybrid, multicultural identities are formed and presented in and through the visual arts? Continuing this line of questioning in the context of this article, did Jewish-German artists (leading figures among whom hailed from Eastern Europe) see themselves as Germans, Osterjudes, or as belonging to a Jewish diaspora in Germany? Did they see themselves as Zionists or as Jews seeking to establish autonomy within German culture in a Bundish fashion? To what extent did they feel they belonged? Through which images did they express this sense of belonging? In what way was their imagery diasporic and/or migratory? Finally, how might this imagery have found its way into a national art canon?

The life and artistic practice of Mordecai Ardon serves as a striking example of the (im)possibility of a diasporic imaginary being assimilated into a national artistic canon. Mobility—whether Ardon’s own mobility from a young age or that of the images that surrounded him and shaped his work—is a central theme that runs through his work. He was born in Galicia in 1896 as Mordecai Eliezer Bronstein. Raised by a religious, conservative family, he joined the Socialist Workers Party at a young age (Vishny 1974, pp. 12–14). Michele Vishny describes how he “became [the party’s] youngest member, and during the evening would entertain his comrades by reciting from Yiddish literature, especially Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman” (ibid., p. 14). This story is retold in the comprehensive catalogue of Ardon’s work published in 2019, written and edited by Dalia Ardon Ish-Shalom (the artist’s granddaughter). This extensive publication adds new and interesting information on the artist while also citing a number of earlier biographical sketches and stories from past publications. As in past research about the artist, some stories have been verified, others have not. Although accounts of Ardon’s life often mention the Marxist–Jewish influence (as does Ish-Shalom’s recent account), it is always seen as marginal as compared with the Zionist conversion he underwent upon arriving in Palestine.7 Ardon never explicitly defined himself as a Bundist. Nevertheless, considering Bundism’s prevalence and his early commitment to Marxism, it seems reasonable to assume that he was influenced by this movement. Leaving his Eastern European home and the traditional Jewish life, the young man arrived in Germany in 1919. Once there, he changed his name to Max Bronstein, eager to belong to a modern Jewish diaspora in a republican state.

Whatever his early political engagements, Ardon’s life was always intertwined with art. In Galicia, he was influenced by Jewish religious paintings. In Germany, he studied at the Bauhaus Academy in Weimar, where he proved a promising student, inspired by the “great masters” of German expressionism: Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger. Given that he was simultaneously active in politics, most of his art was engaged with the relations between art and society. After fourteen years balancing his membership of the Jewish Socialist Party and fledgling artistic ambitions, he was forced to flee Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1933, Palestine being his last resort (Vishny 1974, pp. 15–23). Although Zionism was far from the young immigrant’s mind at this stage, records of the artist in Israeli art history center on this aspect of his life in Palestine. He is described as undergoing an almost mystical conversion to Zionism. In 1950, he eventually took the name Mordecai Ardon (Ardon being the biblical name), thereby completing his transformation, first from Osterjuden to German Jew, and then from German Jew to Israeli.8

The Jewish trajectory in the work of Jewish-German immigrant artists in general, and Ardon’s practice in particular, has never been fully researched. Still, much has been said about the influence of German expressionism and modern Western art history on these artists.9 In The Migrant’s Time, Mathur underscores the point that it is not only people that move around and influence art creation. The images that surround them, too, migrate and participate in cultural change (Mathur 2011). Indeed, the images of modern and Jewish life that migrated to Palestine with the artists of the fifth Aliyah are crucial in understanding their art practices, yet historic texts always emphasize these artists’ public Zionist activities (Ardon, for example, worked as an art teacher, lecturer, and school director in the service of the Zionist nation-building project). In this way, although the Jewish elements in these artists’ work are never overlooked, they were read through the prism of Zionism. At the same time, these Western, modern, and Zionist artists were excluded from the canon of Israeli art on the paradoxical grounds that they were both too Zionist and too diasporic (Zalmona 2010, p. 203).

One of Ardon’s early works reveals the influence of Jewish diasporic imagery. Narrated through a Zionist prism, biographies of the artist suggest that it was only upon arriving in Palestine that he became a “Jewish artist,” that is, found his modern Jewish identity and expressed it artistically. In this Zionist hagiography, he is portrayed as a Jewish–Zionist artist who reconnected with his Jewish roots. Zion is presented as the only possible site in which this “reunion” might take place. Ardon’s Zionism only further burnished his reputation as a Western and modern artist who had trained among the great German expressionists. But records of his early work tell another story: Judaism had been present in his work from the very beginning, irrespective of his migration to Palestine. In Steeple at Midnight (Figure 1) from 1920, the work that reputedly secured his admission into the Bauhaus Academy, Ardon combined the Jewish kabbalistic myth and tradition of Tikun Chatzot (Midnight Rectification) with recollections of his childhood in a traditional Jewish shtetl. The crayon drawing is rendered in a cubist and surrealist style. It portrays a crowing cock, cats wandering at night, the crucified figure of Jesus, and a mysterious, probably Jewish, man. These visual motifs are significant in Jewish iconography. What is more, the choice to set the scene at midnight resonates with Ardon’s wider life story—indeed, midnight is mentioned twice in his early biography entries in latest catalogue of his work (Ardon Ish-Shalom 2019, pp. 10–13). This might reflect the artist’s experience as a devout young Jew in Poland, where he would wake to pray at this hour. In the work, then, Ardon has conveyed the Jewish experience through art.

Materiesstudie from 1921 (Figure 2) is another striking example. For a student assignment at the Bauhaus, Ardon was asked to explore the nature of materials and relations among them by creating a three-dimensional composition. Besides materials, such as nylon and industrialized straws, he also chose to study traditional Jewish symbols, such as the palm branch (the Lulav, one of the four species of plants mentioned in the Torah), the Star of David, a key, a watch, and “all sort of things I brought from home”, as the artist recollected (Ardon Ish-Shalom 2019, p. 14; Vishny 1974, p. 16). Here, Jewish symbolism, derived from the artist’s own cultural experience, overlaps with modern German expressionism without Zionist sentiment. Might these two examples be read as artistic renditions of diasporic imagery? To what extent was this imagery derived from his complex diasporic identity as a modern, socialist, and secular Jew with a traditional religious background, striving to belong to modern Germany without abandoning his culture? Why has this early imagery been overlooked in favor of his later Zionist works? The historiographical neglect of this early diasporic voice in Ardon’s work—which, though Jewish, was resolutely pre-Zionist—is unsurprising. Indeed, it figures just one specific instance of a silence that runs throughout the canon and history of modern Israeli art, both of which were deeply affected by modern nationalism. The absence is that of the Jewish voice.

In her book Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine, Dalia Manor explains that the connection between art and nationalism goes back to the writings of the nineteenth-century German romantic philosopher J.G. Herder. A nation’s spirit and culture, urged Herder, is expressed in its creative forces, that is, its language, literature, and art (Manor 2010a, p. 15). Accordingly, many national movements sought to establish a national art, including Zionism and Bundism.10 However, the project of establishing a Jewish national art faced significant challenges. Jewish people neither occupied a single territory nor spoke a common language. Furthermore, Jewish literature and art were intertwined with the cultures of host countries across the global diaspora. Without a modern Jewish nation, can there be a Jewish national art? Does Jewish art even exist? Furthermore, Margaret Olin claims that the history of art as a discipline has always been intertwined with nationalism and defined in nationalist terms (Olin 1999). In approaching Jewish national art, she investigated the idea of the Jews as a “nation without art” (Olin 2001). Jewish art practice only emerged as a recognized strand in the history of art, she argues, through the use of anti-Semitic stereotypes (ibid.). As a result, even if the Jewish nationality was acknowledged, Jewish art was excluded from the Western art canon. These two narratives—according to which Jewishness was either seen as not being national or viewed as national but lacking art—also permeated Zionism. With Jews returning to Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, Jewishness secured both a territory and a language. Zionists viewed this as the answer to their artistic and existential “problem”. In returning to the promised land and building a modern nation, the Jews could create a national Israeli art style, “from scratch”.

What were the “acceptable” sources for this art? Which artworks would be canonized? Could Jewish diasporic imagery participate in the building of an Israeli art? The canon of Israeli art, I claim, is but a local instance of the larger dynamics of canon formation in Western art, for which Jewish art does not exist. The exclusion of distinctively Jewish imagery from the Israeli canon, then, would seem to suggest that Jewishness had no place in Israel’s national style. Indeed, as I have previously discussed, later Israeli curators and art historians have completely overlooked the early Jewish elements in Ardon’s work. So, what was his place—indeed, the place of Jewish German artists in general—in Israel’s national canon? On what imagery was the national art style built? How was the national art affected by diaspora and migration? I will address these questions in the next section.

3. Zion and Jerusalem as Diasporic and/or National Images

Like Ardon, many of the artists that arrived in Palestine during the fifth wave of immigration were in the prime of their careers and had promising futures. By and large, they had been influenced by German expressionism, which, as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, they often combined with Jewish diasporic imagery. In Jerusalem, they constituted an unofficial group that was perceived as the “German clique”, or “German Jews”. A new group of Eastern and Central European diasporic Jews, they brought with them a hybrid visual art that matched their migratory condition. These are the migratory aesthetics explored by Saloni Mathur. Many of these artists became enthusiastic and influential Zionists, for which Jewish nationality should belong only in Zion. Nevertheless, their Zionist art retained diasporic Jewish elements. Paradoxically, they were seen as being both too Zionist and too diasporic. Ultimately, they were marginalized in relation to the canon of modern Israeli art and, in some cases, excluded.

Among these immigrant artists’ undervalued institutional contributions to Israeli art, they founded two Israeli art establishments in Jerusalem, both of which are still active today. Working in interaction with one another, together these institutions formed the core values of Jerusalem’s artistic community. The first institution is the New Bezalel, an arts and crafts school built on Bauhaus ideals that opened in 1935. Ardon was the school’s headmaster from 1940 to 1952. The second is the Jerusalem Artists’ Society, established in 1949 with help from the Jerusalem municipality. Its membership comprised largely of German immigrants, including Ardon. I wish to show how founding this art school helped new immigrant artists situate themselves in the local art community, in which they became a dominant voice. As custodians of the only professional art and crafts school in Palestine, the German-Jewish artistic community in Jerusalem acquired national status. Indeed, many artists in pre-state Israel studied in Jerusalem under immigrant tutors.11 This work was further consolidated in 1949 with the establishment of the Jerusalem Artists’ Society and its Artists’ House venue.

3.1. New Bezalel

Before the establishment of the New Bezalel and Jerusalem Artists’ Society, Jerusalem suffered from an artistic vacuum of sorts. This state of affairs lasted from 1929 to 1935. Having been founded in 1906, Boris Shatz’s Bezalel School for Artistic Crafts closed in 1929, while the Hebrew Artists’ Society, which had been set up in Jerusalem in 1920, relocated to Tel Aviv in 1926. It was against this backdrop that the new immigrant artists opened the New Bezalel in 1935 using the infrastructure of the former Bezalel School. Indeed, it occupied the very same building as the old Bezalel. Although both institutions used the name Bezalel, their ideologies differed. Truly, both valued art’s role in society. However, whereas Shatz openly abhorred modernism, the New Bezalel unequivocally affirmed it (Mishory 2013, p. 58). Furthermore, whereas the old Bezalel was largely Eastern European, the new school was staffed and attended by people who had arrived in the fifth Aliyah. Half of the students were German immigrants in the early days, as were their teachers (Ofrat 1987).

The New Bezalel played a key role in the pre-state phase of Israeli art. The Bauhaus principles adhered to by its teachers (led by Ardon) were adjusted to fit the needs of the so-called “old settlement” (Yishuv), that is, the Jewish communities who lived in Palestine before the establishment of a distinct state.12 In this phase of Israeli history, the teaching of practical professions was a primary goal. This was reflected in the New Bezalel’s range of departments: practical graphics, typography, metalwork, and weaving. The school prided itself on training “working” artists and craftsmen who, upon graduation, were immediately employed in the service of nation-building projects (Gamzu 1942). Having said this, the “Arts and Crafts” were equally highly valued among Bauhaus graduates. The headmasters and many teachers working at the New Bezalel had left Europe as venerated artists. At heart, they were artists. For these reasons, the New Bezalel remained resolutely committed to the arts alongside its focus on professional craft (Ofrat 1987, p. 14). The school sought to produce modern Jewish artists (and future Israeli art, as Ardon would have seen it) of international caliber. “Our efforts to consolidate a monastic, simple and new artistic form”, Ardon explains in an 1948 interview, “were admired by connoisseurs of the art world” (Ben-Ami 1948).

In the same interview, Ardon went on to underscore the importance of the connection between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Indeed, Jerusalemite, Zionist, and diasporic Jewish imagery recurred throughout the fine and applied art produced by the school’s teachers and students. The paintings that Ardon made in his first years in Palestine, for example, reveal his interest in the landscape surrounding Jerusalem. Engaging with the landscape, it seems, was one way in which a Jewish artist might unite with, and be transformed by, their motherland. Ardon’s transformation has been described in an almost mystical register. Take Ardon’s personal account of his Kidron Valley series (Figure 3)—highly expressionist paintings of landscapes that had scarcely been depicted before:

It will happen that the Jewish artist, at first, will go naively beyond the wall of ancient Jerusalem, without premeditation or any special expectation. And suddenly the view of Kidron Valley will be revealed to his eyes—revealed in all its primal state. And sometimes the artist will stand overwhelmed, almost afraid, will stand as though petrified… A first meeting takes place between the two—and it is primal.

(Vishny 1974, p. 28)

Immigrant artists used views of Jerusalem in their teaching practice at the New Bezalel. It provided a common symbol for the Jewish people’s return to their motherland. Such landscapes, it was thought, could connect Jews from the diaspora to the promised land. They often combined aspects of Jerusalem’s scenery, landscapes, biblical past, and political present with diasporic Jewish types and traditions. By and large, they were depicted in German expressionist style. This return to the landscape of Zion, exemplified here by Ardon’s work, was immersed in the diasporic Jewish conception of Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem known to every orthodox Jew. To Jews living in exile in the diaspora, the Midrash explains as follows: “Said God: I will not enter heavenly Jerusalem until I enter earthly Jerusalem” (Midrash Ps. 122). German-Jewish artists, having arrived in Palestine, stayed connected to the Jewish traditions of their diaspora (whether those be German or Ostjuden). Jewish national art, they seem to have believed, should draw upon diasporic imagery. This cuts against mainstream Zionism, which urged the “negation of the diaspora”. The era of Jewish diaspora, this view suggests, is not only over but unworthy of remembrance. The Israeli art community embraced this perspective, creating an artistic canon which, in foregrounding the influence of French expressionism and abstraction, remained oblivious to visual expressions of the diaspora.

Joseph Zaritsky’s painting Yechiam (Kibbutz Life), 1951 (Figure 4) is an excellent example of the kind of French-influenced abstract art style that was canonized in this period. This work is the culmination, rendered in oil, of a series of watercolor drawings that Zaritsky had made in Kibbutz Yechiam between 1948 and 1951. Whereas his early watercolors depict Kibbutz life in a semi-figurative manner, this oil painting is almost entirely abstract. Although it stemmed from a desire to represent the new Zionist and socialist ideology of the Kibbutz, the work responds to the formalist idea of “art for art’s sake” (Zalmona 2010, pp. 179–80). This series of Zaritsky’s works was exhibited in the first shows of the New Horizons group in Tel Aviv. Accounts of the New Horizons’ artistic practice emphasizes the French expressionist origins of its style as well as its goal of establishing abstraction in Israeli art (Ballas 2014, pp. 12–14).

Alongside the French influence on Israeli abstraction, however, abstraction drawing on diasporic imageries and German influence was prevalent in the work of German-Jewish artists. This is evident in Ardon’s Kidron Valley series. Why did French abstraction triumph over its German equivalent in the Israeli case? In addressing this question, it is instructive to reflect on the tension between French and German expressionism (whether abstract or figurative) in the canon of Western art. Despite the fact that both styles emerged in the same period and were unequivocally modernist, Robin Reisenfeld claims that French expressionism overtook German expressionism. This is due, she argues, to the latter being German and thus associated with the Nazi regime in the aftermath of the Second World War. In short, German expressionism was seen as bound up with the nationalism that had led to Nazism (Reisenfeld 1999). Indeed, following a long and complex process through which French culture came to be identified especially closely with Western modernism, the center of Western art field migrated from Paris to New York. The significance of German art was downplayed in this passing of the baton, the importance of the near-past German expressionist artists often being diminished in relation to their French counterparts. In a somewhat similar way, German expressionism’s influence on modern Israeli art was undermined by a complex bias in favor of the French style. So much is clear in my comparison of the reception of works by Ardon and Zaritsky. While French expressionism was affirmed and canonized through the prominence accorded to Tel Aviv’s New Horizons group, Jerusalem’s German-influenced artistic scene was marginalized and undervalued.

The New Bezalel School met with great success between 1935 and 1955. Many Israeli artists trained there, before dedicating their talents to the Zionist cause. Between 1955 and 1970, the school continued under new management. Still, it maintained its prestige thanks to the memory of its glory days under German–Jewish artists (Avron Barak 2015, pp. 32–44). Nevertheless, the negligible significance it is accorded in the French-oriented Israeli art canon of this period is in no way commensurate with its actual impact. To reiterate my central claim, this is indicative of the dynamics of Western canon formation, as replicated in Israel.

3.2. The Jerusalem Artists Society

As a key training ground for young artists, the New Bezalel possessed a great deal of symbolic capital. The school’s staff leveraged this prestige so as to establish the Jerusalem Artists’ Society.13 Initially dominated by a select group of immigrant German artists, the Jerusalem Artists’ Society was established in 1949. Among its founding members were Mordecai Ardon, Jacob Steinhardt, Miron Sima, Jacob Pins, Anna Ticho, Isidor Ascheim, Ludwig Blum, Mordechai Levanon, and Leopold Krakauer (Ofrat 1987, p. 68). Supported by the Jerusalem municipality, members of the fledgling Society were granted use of the former British Officers’ club, known as “the Shack”. There, they held their first exhibition and began operating as a formal organization. The founding members and other participants in the first exhibition (totaling 46 artists) were mostly German immigrants, many affiliated with the New Bezalel in one way or another.

The opening remarks to the Society’s first catalog indicate the reciprocal relationship between the Society and the Jerusalem municipality, a center of local Zionism. They also provide a glimpse of the artistic task the German immigrant artists (now officially associated) took upon themselves:

from now on—courtesy of the Jerusalem City Council—this shall be the residence of the Artist’s Club … we pray that the radiant light beams of Zion and Jerusalem will shatter the darkness and gather all shimmers of Jewish art and Jewish artists from the diaspora, bringing them to Zion.

… may the Jerusalem scenery and unique grandeur surrounding this city find its expression in the skilled hands of these artists who must not only produce a material manifestation of its spirit, but act as guides to the public in order for it to enjoy the glory of its spirit.

… we all wish to give Jerusalem its prestige of yore, we all labor for it, and our artists can and must spearhead the glorification of Jerusalem.14

Significantly, these excerpts were repeated eighteen years later at the opening of the new Artists’ House in 1967. This reveals that, between 1949 and 1967, various members of the Society were entrusted with a number of duties: first and foremost, that of glorifying Jerusalem through their art. Jerusalem was presented not only as a unique and authentic theme for a national art, but as an opportunity to bridge Jewish art with the burgeoning Israeli art of the time. As a political concept and source of aesthetic inspiration, the city was seen as capable of entrenching Zionism among Jewish art and artists. What is more, the catalog quoted above casts the Jewish diasporic art and artists as mere “shimmers” immersed in “darkness”, thus needing to be brought to Zion for enhancement and/or redemption. The suggestion here is that, in committing to Zionism, and adopting its ideology of diasporic negation, artists should leave behind their diasporic baggage in favor of a new kind of art, locally inspired by Jerusalem. Indeed, the artists of Jerusalem were openly expected to forget their past and subsume themselves in the Zionist nation-building project through their artistic production. As Ardon’s work indicates, however, diasporic Jewish imagery was not only deeply embedded in German-Jewish artists’ output, but took on a special form in Palestine. Ardon’s late work provides examples of this. At the Gates of Jerusalem, a monumental modernist triptych (Figure 5), was created amid the euphoria following the Six-Day War of 1967. In this work, the artist (then aged 70) combined abstract and figurative form to depict Jerusalem’s mystical character. Kabbalistic signs and images of ladders and rocks relating to Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem figure centrally in the work. The Sign (the left panel of the triptych) contains depictions of Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (א); a Hebrew scroll; a Kabalistic diagram named the Tree of Life; and a Kabalistic metaphorical representation of the Five Worlds with the Ten Sefirot. In the work, Ardon combines Kabalistic and Zionist imagery. The power of the Hebrew language, having been revived as the national language of Israel, is juxtaposed with the ancient Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah. The tryptic’s right panel represents the Rock, which is ascribed to Earthly Jerusalem. However, Amishai-Maisels also connects it to the Foundation Stone believed to have been thrown by God. Having landed in the Moriah mountains, where a Jewish temple was built, it is now thought to reside in the Dome of the Rock. The triptych’s central panel is full of ladders, which link Earthly Jerusalem with its Heavenly counterpart. When read from right to left, Ardon’s triptych invites viewers to ascend from Earthly Jerusalem to Heavenly Jerusalem. Now that the war is over, its gates stand open. However, this triptych can also be read from left to right, according to which Heavenly Jerusalem seems to unite with the earthly city by way of the ladders. Jewish tradition suggests that this will happen in the End of Days (Amishai-Maisels 1985). Whichever direction the triptych is read, here Ardon has melded Jewish imagery from both the diaspora and Zionism without contradiction. Indeed, the work can be read through the prism of either tradition.

Interestingly, this work belongs to the collection of the Israel Museum. Zalmona even included it in his last book surveying Israeli art (Zalmona 2010, pp. 203–5). One might regard it as canonized. If so, it stands as the sole representative of an alternative strand of Jewish-German artists working in Israel, who remain marginal in relation to the mainstream canon. Despite mentioning At the Gates of Jerusalem, Zalmona emphasizes the gap between Ardon’s work (and, I would add, the wider artistic community to which he belonged) and that of Zaritsky and the New Horizons group. The New Horizons group is presented as encapsulating modern, abstract Israeli art at its peak. Seemingly apolitical and universal, the New Horizons art was not (or at least not explicitly) Zionist. The German-Jewish artists, in contrast, were both seen as lacking modernist credentials on account of their political affiliation with Zionism and deemed too diasporic (and thus implicitly not Zionist enough) in their ideology.

In this article, I have demonstrated that the opposite is in fact the case. Although German-Jewish artists did indeed draw heavily on diasporic imagery, they also played an active role in the national Zionist project (though this has since been marginalized from its histories). This combination amounts to nothing less than an alternative national artistic style. How was this style distinct in relation to dominant artist practice in Tel Aviv? In some regards, it is not. Ardon and Zaritsky, to name my two prominent examples, both used abstraction in their work, and both were secular Jewish, Zionist, and modern. They both strove to establish a national artistic style. Unlike Zaritsky, however, Ardon enrolled Jewish diasporic imagery in the Zionist cause. As such, he has been judged as both too diasporic in his Zionism and too Zionist in his modernism.

Furthermore, I believe that the valorization of the New Horizons abstraction as the flower of modern Israeli art furnishes yet another example of the dynamics of Western canon formation. Indeed, this process of canonization mythologizes abstraction’s detachment from political and national ideology, presenting it as a universal artistic language. As such, abstraction is taken to embody the principle of “art for art’s sake”. Writing specifically in connection with North American art, Serge Guilbaut goes so far as to say that “New York and its abstract expressionism stole the idea of modern art” (Guilbaut 1985). The victory of abstract expressionism, Guilbaut claims, has to do with capitalism and bourgeois life in the United States. In a specific form of abstraction, US society found a mirror with which to reflect its conditions and values back to itself (ibid.). This hints at the strength of the connection between abstraction and nationalism, which the discourse of “art for art’s sake” has masked for so long.

Here, it is worth glancing briefly at the diasporic and migratory aspects of the art of the United States, a nation state established by immigrants, some of whom adhered to socialism. Against this backdrop, one might view the increasing centrality of abstraction in the formation of the US artistic canon as a way in which former diasporic imagery was erased and nationhood established. Was social realism—abstract expressionism’s ultimate rival—marginalized because its socialist ideology did not befit this quintessentially capitalist state? Did the images and influences migrating alongside human immigrants remain uncanonized on account of their diasporic (and perhaps socialist) character? Although these questions fall outside the scope of this article, three points pertaining to the Israeli case should be taken into account. First, in her book Between Nationalism and Art, Graciela Trajtenberg shows how the triumph of the New Horizons’ abstraction related to elements of nationalism in Israeli art (Trajtenberg 2005). These might include, for example, the use of abstraction to avoid dealing with competing national narratives regarding the land. This resonates with the prominence of abstract expressionism in US art as an alternative “capitalist” style to social realism. Second, the canonization of Tel Aviv abstraction as the only modern Israeli art of its time might represent one specific instance of abstract expressionism “stealing” the concept of modern art, as in Guilbaut’s influential narrative. Third, I claim that the trend towards abstraction in Israeli art, which trampled other artistic styles along the way, might relate to the perceived challenge that diasporic cultures posed to Zionism. In wishing to unite a country of immigrants, Zionist ideology excluded diasporic imagery from the artistic style of the emergent nation, just as I have suggested might have occurred in the United States. Compare Zaritsky’s Yechiam with Ardon’s practice once more. Whereas Ardon combined abstraction with past diasporic imagery, Zaritsky transformed life in a Kibbutz (a Zionist national motif) into abstraction. Accordingly, Ardon’s work has remained marginal in relation to the canon; Zaritsky, in contrast, stands firmly at its center.

4. Conclusions

This article has explored the marginalization of German-Jewish immigrant artists (and their distinctive imagery) in Palestine–Israel, taking Mordecai Ardon as a specific example. These artists’ identities and art practice were profoundly affected by their former lives in, and migration from, European Jewish diasporas. An integral part of their creative output, I claim, is a distinct admixture of traditional diasporic Jewish imagery and modernist forms and styles, largely derived from German modern art. This, I propose, is diasporic and migratory aesthetics.

In discussing the two institutions that this group founded and led in Jerusalem (the New Bezalel School and Jerusalem Artists’ Society), I have shown how they participated in the Zionist nation-building project and sought to integrate their rich Jewish diasporic imagery into the emergent Israeli national art style. Their art practice was both diasporic and Zionist, Jewish and modern. Still, I have also indicated the palpable gap that obtains between these artists’ contribution to the Zionist cause and Israeli art, and the minor place that they are accorded in the canon of Israeli modern art.

This breach, I claim, arises from the general dynamics of Western canon formation, the Israeli artistic canon being one instance of these broad tendencies. By discussing comparable cases of canonization in Western modern art, and relating them back to the Israeli case, I have explained the exclusion of German-Jewish artists’ diasporic imagery, whether abstract or figurative. The canon of Israeli art is young and highly influenced by modern binaries, such as nation versus diaspora, local versus universal, and abstract versus figurative. However, by historically simplifying three highly nuanced and long-lasting historical canonization processes, I was afforded a better understanding of why the German immigrants and their diasporic imagery could not take part in the Israeli canon.

I have highlighted three case studies of canon formation processes: in analyzing Ardon’s early work I discussed the absence of Jewish voices in Western art canons; when comparing New Horizons’ canonical status to New Bezalel’s place in the Israeli canon, I pointed at the tension between German and French expressionism and abstraction as a national, not universal, style. Each of these test-cases, I have tried to show, relate to modern nationalism, in which the visual arts play central roles. Furthermore, in tracing these three examples, I have revealed connections among artistic canon formation processes and politics, particularly the way in which abstract art has helped to create univocal national narratives. It has also helped me to construct accounts of the local paradigms, premised upon a specific set of perceptions of modern art and nationalism, that formed the canon of Israeli art. Indeed, the specifically Israeli iteration of Western canon formation has excluded German-Jewish diasporic imagery from national modern art. The Tel Aviv artists, in contrast, were positioned centrally in the canon because their art was seen as Zionist, lacking Jewish sentiment, French-oriented, and abstract (and therefore modern).

This article has undertaken a historiographical analysis of the Israeli art canon, viewed through the prism of diaspora, migration and belonging in the art practice of German-Jewish immigrants. The canon of Israeli national art, I argue, has rejected narratives centered on the Jewish diaspora and its imagery, so as to maintain the connection between art and modern nationalism. In Israel, imagery representing immigrants’ diasporic experience and migratory identities has had little to no place in the national canon. This prompts us to reflect on the capacities in which diasporic communities might participate in the national art canon. Might the Israeli case also offer valuable insights that apply to canon formation in other young immigrant states and nations? I will leave that question to future research on other local artistic practices.