WestviewPress is proud to announce a landmark publication in honor of Israel’s 50th Anniversary Celebration…One Hundred Years of Art in Israel brings the rich legacy of Israeli art to a Western audience for the first time. Gideon Ofrat, Israel’s preeminent curator, art critic, and art historian, traces the complete history of art in Israel, from the nineteenth-century Jewish folk art in Ottoman Palestine to the kaleidoscopic postmodern patterns of Israeli art today.Gathered together here for the first time is the definitive collection of Israeli masterpieces—ranging from traditional paintings and sculpture to war memorials and environmental installations—reproduced beautifully in this handsome volume. With over 350 illustrations, including 185 in full color, this collection will long be the authoritative guide to art in Israel and the perfect gift for the collector or the curious.Ofrat’s expert commentary accompanies the collection, as he weaves his knowledge of every major movement and artist in Israel—including previously under-recognized works—into an engrossing narrative of themes, styles, trends, and influences.Readers will discover how Israeli artists have mixed outside influences with the atmosphere of the times—often ideologically charged—to create works of freshness and ingenuity characteristic of the national ethos. In the early part of this century, it took dedicated Zionists to protect and nurture what few expressions of native Jewish folk art existed in Palestine. In the 1930s the school of Paris exercised a strong influence among the growing artistic community. After the birth of the Israeli state in 1948, a wave of optimistic social realism swept through many artists’ works. And the 1970s saw an outpouring of radical, politically charged pieces. Only in One Hundred Years of Art in Israel do we learn how Israeli art has grown and will continue to evolve.Published in cooperation with the Mizel Museum of Judaica, this book is a priceless testament to the outstanding brand of cultural expression that has emerged from a unique land and a unique state.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In this overview of Israel's half century of existence, Hohenberg draws on newspaper accounts, memoirs of major players in Middle East politics and standard historical works, as well as a personal cache of memories, letters, notes and diaries, to teach a lesson in the intricacies of international diplomacy. Although he reflects the rather miraculous circumstances of the Israel's creation, he also gives a dutiful and dispassionate record of the failures as well as the successes of Israel's political leaders. For example, Hohenberg is brave enough to recount how quickly the afterglow of the Six-Day War subsided following the debacle of the Yom Kippur War. The writing is clear and, at times, crisp. However, this historical survey of Israel is hardly comprehensive, leaning too heavily on the traditional treatment of Israeli history as a series of Arab-Israeli wars. Economic matters, social issues and movements, and religious factionalism receive too little attention. Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of this study is Hohenberg's focus on the United Nations' role in Israel's development. As one of several histories out on the occasion of Israel's 50th anniversary, Hohenberg's study holds up well though it will not lead the pack. (May) FYI: In May, Westview will release Gideon Ofrat's One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, with 200 color and 150 b&w illustrations. ($75 400p ISBN 0-8133-3377-6)
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Ofrat, an Israeli art critic, breaks new ground in this history of Israeli art. He begins his survey with the religious and folk art of nineteenth-century Palestine, the foundation on which Israel is built, then strides into the twentieth century and the emergence of the first phase of socially conscious art, the Bezalel school and its utopian Zionist images. With the rise in European immigration, seeds of the avant-garde art of Paris arrived in Palestine, where they flourished not in the sacred city of Jerusalem but in the more secular and receptive city of Tel Aviv. Those cities have become emblematic of the two poles of Israel's highly politicized art: the faction that has valued art not as forms of personal expression but as manifestations of the Jewish experience and the collective community, paving the way for kibbutz realism, and its opposite, seen most clearly in the postwar "lyrical abstract" movement. Ofrat's chronicle of the evolution of Israeli art is a means of tracing the conception and birth of the nation itself. Donna Seaman
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This review is from: One Hundred Years Of Art In Israel (Hardcover)
No one knows the world of Israel Art better than Gideon Ofrat. In this survey work he traces the story from the beginning of the great Jewish return to the land, up and through the present.
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