我還沒弄懂以色列首都的一些美術館。
We hope they would be more accepting of the Henry Moore sculptures in our Sculpture Park. Apparently, this isn't an April Fool's joke.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Hebrew: מוזיאון תל אביב לאמנות Muze'on Tel Aviv Lamanut) is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was established in 1932 in a building that was the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. The museum moved to its current location on King Saul Avenue in 1971. Another wing was added in 1999 and the Lola Beer Ebner Sculpture Garden was established.[1] The museum also contains "The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Art Education Center", opened since 1988.[2]
The museum houses a comprehensive collection of classical and contemporary art, especially Israeli art, a sculpture garden and a youth wing.
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[hide]Inside the Renovated Israel Museum
The new galleries of expressionist art include works by such artists as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso.
JERUSALEM — The director of the Israel Museum was leading a visitor to see a provocative contemporary sculpture of a naked African youth when, stepping over protective cloths and around an exhibit of late Canaanite sarcophagi, he nearly ran into four workmen carrying the million-year-old horns of a wild bull.
The horns are the oldest items in the museum’s collection, and something about the juxtaposition of contemporary social consciousness, ancient ceremony and prehistoric beast summed up the museum’s refocused mission as it completes a three-year, $100 million renewal. As described by the director, James S. Snyder, the museum offers a series of unexpected aesthetic links across cultures and their histories, like the way 2,000-year-old carved ritual cups that are on view in the museum near the Dead Sea Scrolls are somehow evocative of Brancusi.
For the last 45 years, the Israel Museum has been both the crown jewel of this country’s cultural heritage and a bit of a mess. It has the most extensive holdings of land-of-Israel archaeology anywhere (including a heel bone pierced by an iron nail with wood fragments, the world’s only physical evidence of crucifixion), an encyclopedic collection of Judaica and an exceptional group of Modernist artworks. It sits on a 20-acre campus atop a hill at Jerusalem’s western entrance, holding pride of place along with the architectural and national landmarks that surround it, including the Knesset, or parliament, and the Supreme Court.
But as any past visitor can attest, finding one’s way around the museum’s art and archaeology has not been easy. Visits have begun with an uphill trek from a parking lot exposed to the hot sun and, inside the galleries, a feeling of being overwhelmed by quantity and mildly perplexed about substance.
That is about to change. On Monday the museum opens new galleries and public spaces. There will be far fewer objects on display, with twice the space to view them, as well as richer links and explanations. In some of the new spaces soft light enters through filtered glass walls, the Jerusalem landscape a dreamy background presence. And a climate-controlled path leads to a central concourse from which the works can be reached.
The idea is not simply to make the museum easier to navigate but also to suggest interesting connections among objects and between the particular and the universal. That is never an easy task in this city of stones, where each culture has long sought dominance and where the interplay between preservation and transformation causes endless heartache.
And today, here in the capital of the Jewish state, there is a tendency to see the world purely through Jewish history and culture. That is precisely what Mr. Snyder, an American Jew who spent 22 years at the Museum of Modern Art, has sought to avoid. Rather, he has emphasized the commonalities of cultures and tried to place Jewish history and practices in a broader and clearer context.
One example is a new display that focuses on the Byzantine era. On one side is a restored synagogue; next to it are a church and the prayer niche of a mosque. Roughly contemporary structures, they are placed in a way that highlights both their distinctiveness and their commonality.
Meanwhile, the sections that used to be devoted to Judaica and Jewish ethnography are now merged into “Jewish Art and Life,” connecting the secular with the religious. The Judaica gallery used to feed inexplicably into French Impressionism. Now it sits near costumes and jewelry of the Jewish world and the early sources for modern art in Israel. A narrative arc takes shape.
“A lot of Israelis consider Tel Aviv to be the center of the country’s culture, but Jerusalem is the center of the world,” Mr. Snyder said. “It’s a bridge that connects Africa, Asia and Europe, a multicultural city, and I feel the power of that every day.”
As part of the renovation, the museum commissioned a sculpture by the Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor that stands at the top of the campus. A 16-foot-tall polished-steel hourglass called “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,” it reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum’s landscape, a likely reference to the city’s duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane.
When Mr. Snyder arrived in 1996 to consider becoming the museum’s director, he had never been here before. He was stunned at the power of the museum’s site, built like a modular Mediterranean village in an intensely Modernist style. But he felt it was an unrealized vision and set himself the task of finishing it during his tenure. In his 13 years on the job, he has added a huge and hugely popular outdoor model of how Jerusalem is thought to have looked 2,000 years ago and has groomed and expanded the campus and its celebrated Billy Rose Art Garden, a Middle Eastern hillside with Western works by Rodin, Picasso, Henry Moore and Claes Oldenberg. The Shrine of the Book, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving copies of biblical documents, sits next to it.
The renewal has been led by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects of Tel Aviv, and their goal has been to respect the architecture originally designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad in the late 1950s.
Mr. Snyder raised the money around the world and has added important pieces and collections. And now he has completed, on time and on budget, the biggest cultural development project in the country’s history.
To some here, that makes him a local hero. But Mr. Snyder, 58, is also an anomaly, and many people do not know what to make of him. He has never acquired Israeli citizenship or learned more than basic Hebrew. In a country where dressing up often means donning a clean T-shirt, he has kept the look of an Ivy League professor of a generation ago: tortoiseshell glasses, perfectly knotted knit tie, herringbone jacket and a crown of coiffed silver hair.
In a society built on the idea that Jews here have come home, Mr. Snyder has caused some consternation. He says his contribution to Israel is to help build a world-class institution and to urge the society to look toward the universal rather than the provincial.
He has also reached out to Israeli Arabs, recruiting the first Arab member to the executive committee of the museum’s Israeli Friends group and extending educational projects to Arab school groups beyond Jerusalem, including sponsoring a Jewish-Arab sculpture project among the youth of Umm al Fahm, one of Israel’s largest Arab cities. He plans to do similar work in Nazareth next year.
In the newly expanded museum, there is much more room for temporary exhibits. For the rest of the year, three of those galleries have been given over to Zvi Goldstein, Yinka Shonibare and Susan Hiller — an Israeli, a British-Nigerian and a London-based American — with each asked to do an installation using anything in the museum’s collection of some 500,000 pieces.
The other day, as Mr. Snyder was avoiding the ancient bull horns, Mr. Goldstein was hard at work in his room. He had been filling it for 18 months, he said, and the objects he was mounting included drills and spears, furniture, paintings and a urinal. He selected 600 pieces for his installation.
“The goal is to show how pieces of material culture shift in meaning over time,” he said, “how they can make surprising connections.”
Mr. Snyder could not have said it better himself.
Cleaning Up Intersection of Ancient and Modern
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 20, 2010
JERUSALEM — The director of the Israel Museum was leading a visitor to see a provocative contemporary sculpture of a naked African youth when, stepping over protective cloths and around an exhibit of late Canaanite sarcophagi, he nearly ran into four workmen carrying the million-year-old horns of a wild bull.
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Anish Kapoor’s sculpture at the Israel Museum. More Photos »
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For the last 45 years, the Israel Museum has been both the crown jewel of this country’s cultural heritage and a bit of a mess. It has the most extensive holdings of land-of-Israel archaeology anywhere (including a heel bone pierced by an iron nail with wood fragments, the world’s only physical evidence of crucifixion), an encyclopedic collection of Judaica and an exceptional group of Modernist artworks. It sits on a 20-acre campus atop a hill at Jerusalem’s western entrance, holding pride of place along with the architectural and national landmarks that surround it, including the Knesset, or parliament, and the Supreme Court.
But as any past visitor can attest, finding one’s way around the museum’s art and archaeology has not been easy. Visits have begun with an uphill trek from a parking lot exposed to the hot sun and, inside the galleries, a feeling of being overwhelmed by quantity and mildly perplexed about substance.
That is about to change. On Monday the museum opens new galleries and public spaces. There will be far fewer objects on display, with twice the space to view them, as well as richer links and explanations. In some of the new spaces soft light enters through filtered glass walls, the Jerusalem landscape a dreamy background presence. And a climate-controlled path leads to a central concourse from which the works can be reached.
The idea is not simply to make the museum easier to navigate but also to suggest interesting connections among objects and between the particular and the universal. That is never an easy task in this city of stones, where each culture has long sought dominance and where the interplay between preservation and transformation causes endless heartache.
And today, here in the capital of the Jewish state, there is a tendency to see the world purely through Jewish history and culture. That is precisely what Mr. Snyder, an American Jew who spent 22 years at the Museum of Modern Art, has sought to avoid. Rather, he has emphasized the commonalities of cultures and tried to place Jewish history and practices in a broader and clearer context.
One example is a new display that focuses on the Byzantine era. On one side is a restored synagogue; next to it are a church and the prayer niche of a mosque. Roughly contemporary structures, they are placed in a way that highlights both their distinctiveness and their commonality.
Meanwhile, the sections that used to be devoted to Judaica and Jewish ethnography are now merged into “Jewish Art and Life,” connecting the secular with the religious. The Judaica gallery used to feed inexplicably into French Impressionism. Now it sits near costumes and jewelry of the Jewish world and the early sources for modern art in Israel. A narrative arc takes shape.
“A lot of Israelis consider Tel Aviv to be the center of the country’s culture, but Jerusalem is the center of the world,” Mr. Snyder said. “It’s a bridge that connects Africa, Asia and Europe, a multicultural city, and I feel the power of that every day.”
As part of the renovation, the museum commissioned a sculpture by the Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor that stands at the top of the campus. A 16-foot-tall polished-steel hourglass called “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,” it reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum’s landscape, a likely reference to the city’s duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane.
When Mr. Snyder arrived in 1996 to consider becoming the museum’s director, he had never been here before. He was stunned at the power of the museum’s site, built like a modular Mediterranean village in an intensely Modernist style. But he felt it was an unrealized vision and set himself the task of finishing it during his tenure. In his 13 years on the job, he has added a huge and hugely popular outdoor model of how Jerusalem is thought to have looked 2,000 years ago and has groomed and expanded the campus and its celebrated Billy Rose Art Garden, a Middle Eastern hillside with Western works by Rodin, Picasso, Henry Moore and Claes Oldenberg. The Shrine of the Book, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving copies of biblical documents, sits next to it.
The renewal has been led by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects of Tel Aviv, and their goal has been to respect the architecture originally designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad in the late 1950s.
Mr. Snyder raised the money around the world and has added important pieces and collections. And now he has completed, on time and on budget, the biggest cultural development project in the country’s history.
To some here, that makes him a local hero. But Mr. Snyder, 58, is also an anomaly, and many people do not know what to make of him. He has never acquired Israeli citizenship or learned more than basic Hebrew. In a country where dressing up often means donning a clean T-shirt, he has kept the look of an Ivy League professor of a generation ago: tortoiseshell glasses, perfectly knotted knit tie, herringbone jacket and a crown of coiffed silver hair.
In a society built on the idea that Jews here have come home, Mr. Snyder has caused some consternation. He says his contribution to Israel is to help build a world-class institution and to urge the society to look toward the universal rather than the provincial.
He has also reached out to Israeli Arabs, recruiting the first Arab member to the executive committee of the museum’s Israeli Friends group and extending educational projects to Arab school groups beyond Jerusalem, including sponsoring a Jewish-Arab sculpture project among the youth of Umm al Fahm, one of Israel’s largest Arab cities. He plans to do similar work in Nazareth next year.
In the newly expanded museum, there is much more room for temporary exhibits. For the rest of the year, three of those galleries have been given over to Zvi Goldstein, Yinka Shonibare and Susan Hiller — an Israeli, a British-Nigerian and a London-based American — with each asked to do an installation using anything in the museum’s collection of some 500,000 pieces.
The other day, as Mr. Snyder was avoiding the ancient bull horns, Mr. Goldstein was hard at work in his room. He had been filling it for 18 months, he said, and the objects he was mounting included drills and spears, furniture, paintings and a urinal. He selected 600 pieces for his installation.
“The goal is to show how pieces of material culture shift in meaning over time,” he said, “how they can make surprising connections.”
Mr. Snyder could not have said it better himself.
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