Israeli printmaking
The first printing press in the Land of Israel, and all of Western Asia, was established in Safed in 1577 by partners Eliezer and Abraham ben Isaac Ashkenazi (apparently no relation).
[2] In 1842, Bak received the printing presses nicknamed "Massat Moshe and Yehudit" (he: משאת משה ויהודית) from Moses Montefiore.
[3] The first book printed by Beck in Jerusalem was "Seder Avodat Hakodesh" (he: סדר עבודת הקודש) by Chaim Yosef David Azulai.The title page is decorated with a hybrid wood engraving technique.
[9] Their decision to import the technique to Israel probably stemmed from their desire to serve as an alternative to the printing house of Back, which for 20 years had held a monopoly in the field of Jewish printmaking.
The printing house began operating with a hand press and in 1894 brought an automatic machine from Europe that could produce about 1,000 pages per hour.
Among other things, it created prints of up to half a sheet (50x70 cm),[10] from the works of artists such as Rozin, Moshe Ben Yitzhak Mizrachi, and others, who also began to make use of photographs created using the lithographic technique,[11] The photographs were converted to lithographs in a process that included the use of the technique of etching and transfer paper (Decalcomania).
[citation needed] With the establishment of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts, Ephraim Moses Lilien, one of the leading illustrators in Europe, arrived in Jerusalem.
His artistic style derived from the European "Jugendstil" and his work expressed the main Zionist national outlook at the time.
"[14] In addition to the artistic endeavors, the department also did commercial work such as printing textbooks and other materials, such as lottery cards designed by Shmuel Haruvi.
Late recognition was given to the series "Gray Tura" (1924; he: טורא אפורה) created by Arieh Allweil in Europe, which was displayed in Israel only in the 1990s.
These artists, persecuted by their countries of origin in Germany and Austria, sought to continue the spirit of European modernism in general and the heritage of German art movements such as Bauhaus and Expressionism in particular.
The dictionary of Narkis, dedicated to Hermann Struck on the occasion of his 60th birthday, was based on the German language, whose terms are "most common among the graphic artists living in Israel.
The curriculum of the school aspired to raise the artistic level of design in Israel, while providing practical opportunities for students to earn a living.
[25] Jacob Steinhardt, who immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1933 opened, in what had been the home of Boris Schatz, a painting and printing studio that was a kind of opposition to the "New Bezalel", which was directed by Yosef Budko.
In the prints of these artists, such as Miron Sima, Isidor Aschheim, and Jakob Eisenscher, as well as in the works of artists who worked independently of this group, such as Arieh Allweil, Paul Conrad Henich, Abraham Goldberg, Leo Roth and others, we see an attempt to combine European style with characteristics of the local Eretz Israeli reality and Zionist motifs and themes.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 does not constitute a significant historical point in the history of Israeli art, apart from several expressions of nationalism and the development of iconography around the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Many of the youngsters who came to Eretz Israel after the Holocaust either under the auspices of Youth Aliyah, or with their families, such as Jacob Pins, Avraham Ofek, Avigdor Arikha, Yehuda Bacon, Moshe Hoffman, among others, became prominent Israeli artists in the 1950s and 1960s.
A large group of artists were influenced by his approach to art, that combined animal images in a "primitive" style with a modernist ethos of creativity.
[38] In 1965, the printing workshop of the Artists House Tel Aviv opened under the auspices of the Israel Painters and Sculptors Association and was managed by Tuvia Beeri.
[39] David (Dedi) Ben Shaul, printed using lithograph technique, and Avishai Eyal, who worked primarily in the medium of etching, set up a separate studio in Jerusalem.
[42] An example of the rising popularity of the medium could be found in the activity of the Israeli Graphotek, which in 1978 had not yet opened its doors to the public, but had already collected about 1300 works by 105 different artists.
In the works of Menashe Kadishman (1983), the artist reconstructed his sculptural activities and converted them into the print media, creating a confrontation between nature and culture.
However, an early example of artistic use of the medium can be found in the book The Jerusalem Hills and all the Anguish (1967) by Malachi Beit-Arie published by Tarshish.
"[56] However, his works in this technique, including "Avinu Malkeinu" [Our Father, Our King] (1984), "Justice and Charity" (1984), and others, enjoyed both artistic and commercial success.
The works of artists such as Raanan Levy, Ofer Lellouche, Tamara Rickman, David Ben-Shaul, were drawings, created using traditional techniques as etching and aquatint.
The plates were combined in a collage, cut and twisted to give them an expressive character and to create negative spaces in the composition.
Artists such as Ivan Schwebel, Asaph Ben Menachem and Avraham Eilat, used this expressionism as an expression of symbolism or metaphysical content.
In the famous series "Kaddish" (1984), for example, Moshe Gershuni created a tangle of symbols and images that expressed a complex position toward Judaism and the Jewish God.
Among other things, the workshops of the Faculty of Arts - Hamidrasha at Beit Berl College were closed, and Bezalel's work was greatly reduced.
Among the best known are Thirteen Etchings for Poems by Haim Nachman Bialik (1987) by Moshe Gershuni, and in 1989 the workshop created a series of 9 artists’ books in an edition of 40 copies each.
