Israeli sculpture

In research conducted by Yitzhak Einhorn, Haviva Peled, and Yona Fischer, artistic traditions of this period were identified, which include ornamental art of a religious (Jewish and Christian) nature, which was created for pilgrims and, therefore, for both export and local needs.

The reasons were the variety of European influences on Israeli sculpture, and the relatively small number of sculptors in Israel, most of whom had worked for long periods in Europe.

His work "Matthew the Hasmoneum" (1894), for example, depicted the Jewish national hero Mattathias ben Johanan grasping a sword with his foot on the body of a Greek soldier.

In a memo issued in June 1924, Schatz outlined all of the major fields of activity of Bezalel, among them stone sculpture, which was founded primarily by students of the school within the framework of the "Jewish Legion" and the workshop on woodcarving.

In 1912 Ze'ev Raban immigrated to the Land of Israel at Schatz's invitation and served as an instructor in sculpture, sheet copper work, and anatomy at Bezalel.

Melnikoff himself initiated the building of the monument, and funding for the project was attained jointly by the Histadrut ha-Clalit, the Jewish National Council, and Alfred Mond (Lord Melchett).

In his monumental work 1940 "Alexander Zeid Memorial", which was cast in concrete at "Sheik Abreik" and stands near the Beit She'arim National Park, Polus represents the man known as "The Watchman" as a horseman looking out over the view of the Jezreel Valley.

The symbolic baggage of both their content and their style showed up as well in the work of Israeli artists, such as Moses Sternschuss, Raphael Chamizer, Moshe Ziffer, Joseph Constant (Constantinovsky), and Dov Feigin, most of whom studied sculpture in France.

Artists such as Jacob Brandenburg, Trude Chaim, and Lili Gompretz-Beatus, and George Leshnitzer produced figurative sculpture, primarily portraiture, designed in a style that wavered between impressionism and moderate expressionism.

The figures that Lehmann created showed the influence of expressionism in the gross design of the body, which emphasized the material from which the sculpture was made and the way the sculptor worked on it.

In spite of the overall appreciation of his work, Lehmann's primary importance was as a teacher of the methods of classical sculpture, in stone and wood, to a large number of Israeli artists.

In Tel Aviv Danziger founded a sculpture studio in the courtyard of his father's hospital, and there he critiqued and taught young sculptors such as Benjamin Tammuz, Kosso Eloul, Yechiel Shemi, Mordechai Gumpel, and others.

"[17] The first showing of the sculpture in the "General Exhibition of the Young People of Eretz Israel", in Habima Theatre in May, 1942[18] engendered the persistent argument over the "Canaanite" movement.

Yona Fisher speculated, in his research on art in the 1960s, that the interest of sculptors in the "magic of the desert" arose not just from a romantic yearning for nature, but also from an attempt to inculcate in Israel an environment of "Culture" rather than "Civilization".

In 2020, as part of the protests against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli artist Itay Zalait erected a 5.5-meter bronze statue entitled "Hero of Israel" at Paris Square in Jerusalem.

[31] Yitzhak Danziger, whose works had begun portraying the local landscape several years earlier, expressed the conceptual aspect in a style he developed as a distinctive Israeli variation of Land Art.

The work was composed of hanging fabric on which was a mixture of colors, plastic emulsion, cellulose fibers, and chemical fertilizer, on which Danziger was growing grass using a system of artificial light and irrigation.

Like Danziger, Tumarkin also related in these works to the life forms of popular culture, particularly in Arab and Bedouin villages, and created from them a sort of artistic-morphological language, using "impoverished" bricolage methods.

In one series of his works Ofek used mirrors to project Hebrew letters, words with religious or cabbalistic significance, and other images onto soil or man-made structures.

At the end of this decade, in works such as "Aqueduct" (1968–1970) or "Segments" (1969), Kadishman combined pieces of glass separating chunks of stone with a tension of form between the different parts of the sculpture.

"[45] Another artist, Efrat Natan, created a number of performances dealing with the dissolution of the connection between the viewer and the work of art, at the same time criticizing Israeli militarism after the Six Day War.

"[50] The group of sculptors who called themselves "Drawing Lessons," from the middle of the decade, and other works, such as "Ursa Major (with eclipse)" (1984) and "Jemmain" (1986) created a variety of points of view, disorder, and spatial disorientation, which "demonstrate the subject's loss of stability in the postmodernist world.

In the era following the "political revolution" which resulted from the 1977 election, this was expressed in the establishment of the "identity discussion," in which parts of society that up to now had not usually been represented in the main Israeli discourse were included.

In the works of the "second generation" there began to appear figures taken from World War II, combined with an attempt to establish a personal identity as an Israeli and as a Jew.

A large group of works was created by Igael Tumarkin, who combined in his monumental creations dialectical images representing the horrors of the Holocaust with the world of European culture in which it occurred.

The public was invited to participate in the meal prepared by chef Tsachi Bukshester and watch what was going on under the table on monitors placed under the transparent glass dinner plates.

Among these artists can be found Ohad Meromi and Michal Rovner, who creates video installations in which human activities are converted into ornamental designs of texts.

At Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem (1971), Rapoport created a relief entitled “The Last March”, which depicts a group of Jews holding a Torah scroll.

However, the epitome of this trend toward avoidance of figurative images stands our starkly in the “Monument to the Negev Brigade” (1963–1968) which Dani Karavan created on the outskirts of the city of Beersheva.

Igael Tumarkin, creator of the sculpture, used elements that created the symbolic form of an inverted pyramid made of metal, concrete, and glass.