The First Decade: Hegemony and Plurality

Gideon Ofrat: Abstracts

This chapter examines the dialectical tensions that existed in the Israeli art of the ’50s despite the hegemony of the “New Horizons” abstractionist group, which was founded in 1948 under the leadership of Yosef Zaritsky and (with inspiration from Paris) championed international formal values while negating “literariness” and local images...

...The dialectical mosaic discussed here reveals that this was a decade marked by the simultaneous existence of a plurality and a hegemony. The more the art of the time became involved in life – in designing walls, in fashion (“Maskit”), practical objects (the “Ya’ad” group), posters (by graduates of the New Bezalel School of Art and Crafts, Jerusalem, and others), designing hotels (the Accadia, for example), passenger ships (the Jerusalem, the Theodor Herzl, and others), and national exhibitions (“The Conquest of the Wilderness” “The First Decade Exhibition”) – the more it exacerbated this dialectic and also enriched the mosaic.

Galia Bar Or: Foreword

...On the face of it, the division by decades forces an arbitrary constraint of historical periodization, connecting a foreign meaning to deep processes that are by their nature dynamic and long-term. In our case, however, this division made it possible to deviate from the prevalent framework of a narrative that crosses decades – the familiar hegemonic narrative, which became established in the first decade and described the history of Israeli art as a “progress” towards a distilled modernist utterance. It seems now that the synchronic focus on a single decade has enabled us to actually explore the lateral plurality, the diversity of orientations that were suppressed, ignored or forgotten in the teleological trajectory which became enshrined in the Israeli art discourse. The central place in this narrative was taken by the “New Horizons” group, which was founded in 1948 and attained to an influential position for several decades; the synchronic perspective, however, illuminates not one exclusive position but a network of reciprocal relations, orientations that took shape in relation to one another as an inseparable part of a rich and diverse cultural complex.