Dalia Manor, Art in Zion: the Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine

Dalia Manor, Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. 260 pp., $125.00 (cloth).

The title Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National ethnic awareness. She speculates that Boris Schatz Art in Jewish Palestine may seem to herald a heroic had before him a Russian example involving the narrative of nationalist self-discovery. In fact, this collection of Jewish folk arts and mystical tales. book, fueled by studies of nationalism and alter- If Bezalel is less original than previously thought, native histories of Zionism, is conceived as a so, on the other hand, are the “moderns” who corrective to just such a narrative. The widely opposed it. Indeed, the moderns used many of accepted account of art history in Jewish Palestine Bezalel’s ideas to create “authentic” art, an unsur- centers on two key episodes. One is the trajectory prising fact if one considers that many of them of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. Founded had studied at the school, as did some of the other in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1905, it is said to artists who inspired them, including, according to have been the first Jewish artistic endeavor in a footnote, even the dancer Baruch Agadati, an Palestine, which struggled and ultimately failed inspiration for artists of the 1920s and the subject because of its rigid old-fashioned academic ways, of some of their most distinctive pictures. As for- its academic style, and its pursuit of the tourist mer students, many of these artists may have and overseas markets for nostalgic Jewish trinkets, exaggerated their differences from their teachers. finally closing in 1929, only to reopen, in 1935, Nahum Gutman, in his memoirs, cast one of his as the dramatically altered “New Bezalel.” The teachers, Abel Pann, as an important influence, other episode in the canonical story is that of rev- pitting him against the rest of Bezalel. While Pann’s olutionary modernists in Tel Aviv in the 1920s, pastel colors might have liberated his students from who replaced Bezalel as the creators of a national the “misery” of Jewish painting, however, Pann art. Their stylistic innovations and total rejection was loyal to Bezalel, returning to teach there after of Bezalel is thought to have created the ground- a sojourn, during World War One, in Europe and work for a truly national style, while Tel Aviv the United States. replaced Jerusalem as the cultural center of the Manor’s approach is primarily iconographical. Yeshuv. Other groups, she maintains, neglect references to Such a myth, if it ever existed in a pure state, contemporary Zionist developments in favor of is surely overdue for revision in a post-national evoking an idealized Palestine of the past. Bezalel’s era that has debunked many a founding national past was biblical, concentrating on individual motifs myth, and which recognizes the interdependence used decoratively, rather than in the form of pas- of most “national” cultures. Such stories of heroes toral landscapes, as preferred by the moderns, making a clean sweep of dusty academicism and whose pictures either were unpopulated or included philistine mercantile interests are the stuff of heroic idealized Arab dwellers. Further, both groups exoti- modernism. The task of the book under review is cized the inhabitants of Palestine in a manner that to show that Bezalel was not first, that the “mod- most contemporary scholars would characterize as erns” did not wipe the slate clean, and that both “Orientalist.”1 Bezalel treated as exotic Orientals movements derived from outside influences. the Sephardic, mostly Yemenite, Jews whom it Manor unseats Bezalel from its claim to prior- used as models and workers, while the moderns ity by revealing the existence of previous schools preferred to represent the Arab population as an that also concentrated on teaching crafts to the exotic part of the landscape, thus comparing their inhabitants of Jerusalem in an effort to procure physical claim to the land to the spiritual claim for them gainful employment. Bezalel added to attributed to the Jews. In both cases, the artists these earlier efforts its Zionist impetus and its focus borrowed formal devices and ideas from peoples on creating a national style. Manor places Bezalel’s whom they regarded as more primitive than them- early efforts in the context of European Arts and selves, thus appropriating their perceived closeness Crafts movements and early Jewish movements of to the land.

1 Manor prefers to conﬁne the term “Orientalism” to by many nineteenth century painters of Orientalist subject a stylistic concept associated with the academic style used matter.

In opposition to the purism at the heart of The revival of the handcrafts often went hand in Zionism, which, like other nationalisms, tends to hand with services for immigrant populations. A discourage the examination of its non-Jewish roots, productive comparison could be made, for exam- Manor illuminates the foreign roots of the so-called ple, between Bezalel and the activities of such “moderns” of the 1920s. In her most interesting figures as Ellen Gates Starr, who, influenced by argument, which relies on Romy Golan’s impor- the ideas of C.R. Ashbee, helped found Hull tant contributions to the study of French art House in Chicago, the Chicago Arts and Crafts between the wars, she shows how the “moderns” Society, and a craftsmen’s guild and school.5 Boris appropriated a conservative modernist landscape Schatz’s prior experience in the nationalist move- art from Paris in the 1920s to signify nationalism.2 ment in Bulgaria, where he honed many of his This argument shows how a stylistic mode can be ideas, could also be brought usefully into the dis- associated with a political stance. More significantly, course.6 it demonstrates the appropriation of non-Jewish, Along with economic ties, Bezalel also culti- even anti-Semitic ideas for Jewish nationalism. vated stylistic ties to the Arts and Crafts movement, Inspired by these insights, the reader is tempted and in its best work, even more to the movements to go further, to reattach iconography to style, and of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. While its contin- consider the theory associated with both. One ued ties to these movements in the 1920s wishes to know, for example, during an illumi- contributed to decline of Bezalel’s fortunes, it must nating analysis of Reuvin Rubin’s relation to have seemed relatively fresh and new in its early Ferdinand Hodler and other artists, what such days, in 1904, for example, when Boris Schatz concepts as “finding” oneself, or “identifying” with met with Herzl in Vienna. The piecemeal, orna- one’s country, might mean. It is further tempting mental use of motifs, which differentiates Bezalel’s to consider the moderns’ landscapes in terms of approach to the land from that of the artists of studies of the gaze, or witnessing. Manor observes the twenties, extends from its roots in the arts and that some of the compositional choices of the mod- crafts, which frequently used animal and plant ernists’ landscapes, the high viewpoint, and the motifs as individual, even repeatable ornaments, fact that the figures in the landscape are viewed making them decorative and symbolic, rather than from the back, seem to exclude the viewer from illusionistic. The rejection of Bezalel by the mod- the land. But the existence of a viewer remains erns stems from their rejection of ornament and the guiding assumption. The fiction of these paint- the applied arts. It would be interesting to give ings, however, as with other works using these these roots their due, and to subject the highly formats, may be that there is no viewer. This decorative work of Ze’ev Raban, an artist at least fiction, associated with Michael Fried’s notion of as identified with the style of Bezalel as Boris “absorption,” and applied to landscapes, might Schatz himself, to the kind of analysis accorded suggest the idea of an unoccupied, pristine land, to Reuvin Ruben. in which the Arab figures would count only as Indeed, in Manor’s treatment of Bezalel’s style, part of the landscape.3 The very completeness of vestiges of the prejudices she is trying to eradicate the landscapes, as opposed to the piecemeal col- remain. Manor writes: “It is generally agreed that lection of ornaments formed by Bezalel, supports in spite of the declared efforts to create a unique this fiction of a “landscape without a witness” that artistic expression, stylistically most of Bezalel works leaves the land seemingly open for colonization.4 are characterized by a mixture of influences of The expansion beyond the world of Jewish art Eastern and Western styles” (72). If one has rejected would do a great service to the study of Bezalel. purism as a method of analysis, it is perhaps time

2 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in of the Wilderness,” in W.J.T Mitchell, ed. Landscape and Power, France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 1995). 5 Ellen Gates Starr, On Art, Labor, and Religion, ed. Mary Jo 3 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder Deegan and Ana-Maria Wahl (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, Publishers, 2003). 1980). 6 See Margaret Olin, A Nation Without Art: Examining Modern 4 The phrase “Landscape Without a Witness” is Jonathan Discourses in Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2001), Bordo’s. See, for example, “Picture and Witness at the Site 37–40.