Tower of David Period

The “Tower of David Period” is the nickname which describes Israeli art during the 1920s. The nickname was coined as a result of the exhibition that took place in the Tower of David during that period. Instead of one artistic direction, this period was characterized by artistic works of conflicting styles, reflecting the worldview of the artists with regard to the social, political, and artistic reality within the Land of Israel and outside of it. Alongside the art created at “Bezalel”, which was characterized by decorative motifs and the influence of ars nova, the young Land-of-israel artists produced works of art that reflected a variety of modernist influences.

Background: The Land of Israel at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Tower of David in late 1920s

Tel Aviv in the 1920s

The variety of expressions and styles in the Land of Israel in the "Tower of David Period" reflects the historic and decisive division in the history of the Jewish people which preceded this period and continued through the days of the Yishuv, the body of Jewish residents in Palestine, before the establishment of the State of Israel, under the British Mandate.

The Yishuv community had been caught up in an accelerated process of change since the First Aliyah in 1881. The aspiration of the elite groups of new immigrants was not just to settle the Holy Land and to implement an emotional and spiritual awakening there, like most of their predecessors from the “Old Yishuv”, but also to fashion it in their own image and identity; this included, according to their own consciousness, both old and traditional elements and new and revolutionary elements, intertwined in a unique ideological treatise.

From the beginning of the 20th century, people of the Second Aliyah worked to change the status and situation of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel. The decisive compensation for their efforts came with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the events that followed in its wake: in 1917 the Russian Revolution took place and the Bolsheviks seized the government; the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires dissolved into individual nations; and even the victorious Colonial powers, headed by Britain and France, began in effect a process of convergence. After the signing of the peace agreements, and as a result of them, a new world order prevailed; and in the Land of Israel, the British Mandate government slowly took root, beginning with the Balfour Declaration and the entry of the army into the Land of Israel, effecting a gradual occupation in 1918, the beginning of the military government, and later the civil government in 1920, and ending in the publication of the first “White Book” in 1922. The British in fact expressed support for the Zionist leadership, when they allowed delegations of the Zionist Commission and Hadassah to come to the Land of Israel and found the basis for declaring future Jewish sovereignty there; on the other hand they hampered aliyah to the Land of Israel and disbanded the Jewish Legion, which they had recruited during World War I, and in whom they had instilled with grand Zionist hopes.

A mixture of voices could be heard in the years after World War I in the various Jewish communities, particularly in the battle among the militant members of the Zionist Movement. Advocates of religiosity and traditionalism, nationalism and modernism, liberalism and Communism all made use of the movement. All these streams found a place in the small Yishuv society in the 1920s, and the different utterances and artist directions were combined in them and influenced by them.

The people of the Third Aliyah, from 1918 to 1923, were imbued with a wide-ranging revolutionary spirit, and they were engaged in a constant interchange with the Yishuv environment. However their influence was also a result of their numbers (by the end of the war the Yishuv numbered 56,000 people, and an estimate of the number of the many new Jewish immigrants, balancing out those who left, stood at 35,000) [1] and in addition, to a large extent, because of the broad spectrum of new ideas they brought with them to the Land of Israel. Most of the new immigrants were from Eastern Europe, young, and with a belief in Zionism in all its varieties. Many of them, particularly the young and inventive among them, underwent a redesign of how they perceived their new Jewish and Hebrew world during the 1920s, while they were involved in Zionist labor like building roads and erecting buildings, and were undergoing the considerable suffering brought about by poverty, hunger, and the constant illnesses resulting from them. At the same time they were structuring their own personal identity, they also influenced the long-time residents of the Land of Israel who had preceded them: people who had come on the First and Second Aliyah and were members of the “Old Yishuv”.

The Tower of David Exhibition: “The First Culture War” in Israeli Art”

The opening of exhibitions in the Tower of David in April 1921, expressed the aspirations toward founding a center for art in the Land of Israel. In spite of the fact that the exhibitions were supposed to include a representation of all the art being created in the Land of Israel, in reality the art of the Arab, Muslim, and Christian residents were presented primarily in a historical-archaeological framework. The Jewish artists, on the other hand, sought to present art that drew its inspiration not just from the Jewish historical past ,but also from the movement of art and handicrafts that was grew out of European Modernism. This was most noticeable among the artists of “The Jewish Artists Association”, who attempted to develop a “Jewish ethic”. This group, most of whom were students of “Bezalel”, organized exhibitions in the Tower of David. A number of exhibitions were organized, both in the Tower of David and outside of it, and most of the works exhibited in these exhibitions were influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Expressionists.

Reuven Rubin paints "Fruit of the Land" (central panel from the triptych "First Fruits"), 1923)

One of the most important exhibitions was that of the works by Reuven Rubin, who mounted an exhibition in the Tower in 1924. Rubin exhibited new works that showed the transition from the influence of the Christian tradition to paintings brimming with the symbolism of the Land of Israel.[4] Among the works that drew attention was the triptych “First Fruits” (1924) , which received enthusiastic reviews by critics from various fields of culture such as Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Samuel (Schmuel) Hugo Bergman, etc. However the perception of Modernist painting that Rubin presented was not shared by all of the population. His album of woodcuts, “The Godseekers (1923)”, which he sent to the High Commissioner, was rejected because the High Commissioner did not “have any liking for that population of art objects”. [5] Views like those held by Rubin kept spreading among the young artists during the first half of the decade. At the same time "Bezalel" art continued to honor the values of Classicism, Jugendstil (Art Noveau), and eastern European Realism. [6] The works of the “Bezalel” artists existed primarily within the space of applied arts, and they were characterized by the introduction of noncanonical branches of art – such as decoration and design – into high art in order to create a style.”[7]

But first and foremost the young artists began to be aware of the growing gap between “Bezalel” and the international art world. One attempt to reject totally the world of Modernism can be seen in Boris Schatz’s closure of the Bezalel library because he was afraid the students would be negatively influenced by it.[8] In a critical article published in 1928, Agan wrote that as opposed to the people of “Bezalel”, Modernist artists “draw the land of Israel with love and a desire to understand and grasp its colors and lines in accordance with the dominant trends in the modern art world.”[9]

By the end of the decade the principles on which Bezalel based its work had become irrelevant, because they were no longer suitable to the political and ideological conditions of Eretz Israel. Besides the criticism of the varying quality of the results of the “Bezalel” workshops, the strengthening of left-wing elements in the Yishuv, increased the criticism of the use of national and religious symbols as the virtually exclusive expression of Jewish nationality. In 1929, the school closed after the Zionist organizations refused to support its activities any longer.

Yigal Zalmona presented the confrontation between the “Bezalel” people and the “rebel” artists as a confrontation between the the “immigrant” point of view and the the “native” point of view. The “old-timer” generation of “Bezalel” insisted on creating a national art, which focused on the symbols of its Judeo-European past. In this way the artists expressed their wish to be integrated into the world of European art. The “Bezalel” artists enjoyed the support of the European Jewish middle classes, and many of the orders for the art coming out of its workshops came from the Conservative and Reform Jews of the United States. The generation of modern students, on the other hand, saw the creation of a local Jewish culture as a central need, a point of view which coincided with spirit of Israel’s Labor Movement. Many of them were influenced by the European vanguard, to whom they had been exposed in various frameworks, particularly in France. These artists, Tsalmona contended, wanted to create the reality of the Land of Israel of their time within the framework of the creative activity this vanguard. [10]