A People Builds Its Land; Israeli History As Reflected In Art

vii, [1], 96 pages. Illustrations (some in color). List of Paintings and Drawings. Cover has some wear and soiling. Presentation copy inscribed by the curator in Hebrew. Text is in Hebrew and Introduction is in English, but the paintings and drawings speak from themselves. The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art is contemporary art museum. The museum was established in 1965 in Herzeliya, Israel. The museum's main focus is on Israeli and international contemporary art. The museum building was designed by the architect Yaakov Rechter. The museum hosts painting, sculpture, installation, photography and architecture exhibitions, as well as digital media exhibitions. The museum is known for promotion of collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian artists by showing group exhibitions and organizing meetings and workshops for artists to work together. Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art also exhibits art from different continents, showing works of artists who acclaimed in their countries but are not known well to the Western World. This is an Exhibition Catalogue. The purpose of this exhibition was to document the history of the new Eretz-Israel in painting and sculpture, as well as show how the visual arts have during the preceding century reflected the creation of a Jewish existence, primarily in Eretz-Israel and--subsequently--the State of Israel. The various periods in the history of painting, as well as artistic schools and styles, have no doubt played a central role in the above development, and they too can be recognized in the paintings displayed in the exhibition. This exhibition attempts to document the history of Israeli painting as a reflection of the Jewish national revival in Eretz-Israel, as a part of the new Hebrew culture. As such, this exhibition had three dimensions, or strata, which do not necessarily overlap with the history of the Israeli painting in the send of historical schools and currents. The first dimension covers purely historical paintings--painters and paintings recording concrete historical incidents and events. The second dimension of the paintings shown in this exhibition dealt with the documentation and reconstruction of social and cultural developments and existence: the routine of everyday life. The third dimension consists of paintings expressing the basic values of the national movement: its world-view, its relation to history, its outlook on nature, the landscape and the human existence as well as the way society interpreted--through paintings and painterly tools--the nature of the East, the quality of Eretz-Israel and its relationship to its historical past, and the Jewish heritage and tradition.…