Tower of David Period

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 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.

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.

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”.

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.

[2] 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.

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.

[6] 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”.

[7] 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.

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.

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.

A witness to this can be seen in the 1927 letter of Mordechai Narkis to Boris Schatz, in which he reports that Land of Israeli newspapers have eradicated the name of the Bezalel school from their articles.

[9] Parallel to Bezalel, at the beginning of the 1920s a group of independent artists who sought to cut all ties with the old establishment began to be active in Jerusalem.

According to Yona Fischer, the exhibit of modern paintings mounted in the School for Boys in Jerusalem in 1926 marked the end of the competition between these two centers.

[11] One of the first signs of artistic activity in Tel Aviv was the opening of a school of painting and architecture in 1923 in the home of Joseph Berlin on Gruzenberg Street.

[12] During this decade most of the major artists moved to Tel Aviv, especially those who returned from studying art in France and other places in Europe.

One of the major donors to the visual arts in Tel Aviv was Yaakov Pereman, who was the entrepreneur behind the founding of the artists’ cooperative “Ha-Tomer”.

Only a small minority of the artists immigrated to the Land of Israel from Eastern Europe with a previous exposure to European avant-garde art.

The general mood demanded that they express the realistic experience of life in the Land of Israel, combining East and West in their work.

In the works of Chana Orloff and Arieh Lubin, perhaps more than in any other artists of the period, we can see the influence of synthetic Cubism and of the tendency toward the use of geometric forms.

Tower of David in late 1920s
Tel Aviv in the 1920s
Reuven Rubin paints "Fruit of the Land" (central panel from the triptych "First Fruits"), 1923)
The Bezalel Buildings, Jerusalem, 1909
Exhibition of "Modern Artists" in the Ohel Theatre in Tel Aviv