In mid-2008, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel, six museums mounted nearly simultaneous exhibits, each devoted to a different decade in Israeli art. From Ein Harod to Ashdod, the walls, corridors, and halls of the country's major art institutions were filled with scores of drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, ready-mades, installations, video art, environmental art, and other materials relating to the increasingly frenetic and varied enterprise that is Israeli art. The canon of work and critical catalogues that emerged from this impressive, collaborative project––produced by a team of leading curators and scholars—constitutes “the guts,” if you will, of Yigal Zalmona's magisterial new doorstop of a book, A Century of Israeli Art.

Readers may do the math and ask: from whence the extra forty years? What exactly is at stake in proclaiming a century of art for a state with far fewer years? Is this a gambit on the part of the local cultural establishment to join (yet again) the international pantheon? One sensed this anxiety in the Tel Aviv Musuem of Art's recent expansion––the celebrated addition of a costly “starchitect”-designed wing. And perhaps also with the Israel Museum's newish director, James Snyder, who wrote the forward to Zalmona's volume, and oversaw the museum's “renewed campus”: is there possibly some insecurity regarding a relatively fledgling art historical tradition? A century of something certainly sounds more optimistic than the retirement age, sixty-five years.

To be fair, it's not much of a stretch to include E. M. Lillien, the great illustrator of Herzl and the Bible, or Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School in Jerusalem in 1906, in a history of Israeli art. As has often been the case with Israeli cultural analysis, critics and scholars have teased and prodded the relation between those traditions characterizing pre-state Jewish life, largely in Europe, and the discursive forms that emerged in the wake of 1948. So, for example, Israeli literature is related to, but necessarily distinct from, modern Hebrew literature; and we may consider a figure like Leah Goldberg as belonging, differently, to each domain. But how would Maurycy Gottleib and Marc Chagall (Russian-born painters from the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively) feel about being included here? True, the sections on their work are expressly about “the prequel”: how traditional prohibitions on Jewish art and artists were “overthrown” as part of a national renaissance, including Zionism and the establishment of the state. But must everything set the stage for Israel? Though readers may be accustomed to treating Chagall's work as a set of allegories regarding wandering and cosmopolitanism, surely we can also recognize the enormous psychic space that Vitebsk occupied for the artist as a spiritual and cultural homeland, if not—ultimately—a geographic refuge. Then again, Jews have always been good at inventing traditions: Sholem Aleichem famously proclaimed Mendele Moykher Sforim to be his grandfather––though they were born barely a quarter-century apart––thus giving modern Yiddish literature roots and a pedigree. So what are a few decades, then, when it comes to creating a national tradition? While Israel may have just celebrated its sixty-fifth anniversary of statehood, according to the Israel Museum––it's got a century, bruto, of art.

Readers of all types will learn from this book about the production and reception of art in the twentieth century, and about Israeli culture and society; the generous reproductions are, without fail, representative and gorgeously rendered. One small quibble about the book's format: how about a few more footnotes? Even readers of books that are not an “academic tome for professionals in the fields of art history and criticism” (xii) might have benefited from a decent bibliography, beyond the small number of Hebrew texts––largely museum catalogues, many authored by Zalmona and his colleagues––that he uses to document the chapters. Zalmona's narrative draws on a series of key themes (local vs. universal; East vs. West; the new Hebrew body; art in the service of the nation; the landscape and the push-pull of the Orient; war, trauma, and the Shoah) and develops them across the decades, weaving incisive readings of individual art works with succinct historical and social context about Israel as well as the international art scene. But what, really, is the meaning of national art in an era that has witnessed the end of grand narratives––including history, the author, and originality? Zalmona himself seems to allude to this predicament in his brief review of “endings” (heralded by Fukuyama, Barthes, and Baudrillard), without mentioning the nation per se (335). The book – especially with its expansive view of what constitutes “Israeli” art––seems almost a throwback; Israel itself may well represent the last gasp of “the nation,” that is––a nation conceived in the good old-fashioned, nineteenth-century sense. Yet Israel was never really the European nation-state envisioned by Zionism, not for more than a few minutes in any case; already in the 1930s we see artists drawn to other territories and languages, especially the influence of the school of Paris, perhaps the ultimate utopian experiment in cultural cosmopolitanism––an experiment that devolved into the denunciation of “decadent” art, and the violence of World War II.

Amos Oz once claimed that “if you hit the right cafe in Tel Aviv at the right time of the day you could see––until a few years ago––the John Donne of Hebrew poetry and the Lord Byron of Hebrew poetry, and the Walt Whitman and the T. S. Eliot sitting together by the same table with the local Allen Ginsberg, all of them alive (and kicking hard), all of them on speaking terms or rather on screaming terms with each other.”Footnote ¹ Oz was commenting on the pace at which local literary tradition evolved: what took centuries in Europe, transpired across mere decades in Israel. Something of this occurred to me while reading Zalmona's book, both for the density and the velocity of its tale, as well as the intimate––claustrophobic?––relations among painters and their students, critics and their subjects. A few towering figures don't just stand out in Zalmona's narrative: many seem to be looking directly over each other's shoulders as they work in the classroom, in the studio, on the roof and, increasingly, in New York and Paris, as well as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There are the early usual “naïve” suspects (Reuven, Gutman), followed by the longue durée from the social to the abstract and back again: Streichman, Zaritsky, Janco, Ardon, Tumarkin, Gershuni, Lavi, Karavan, Ullman, Abramson. Above all––it seems for Zalmona––there is Danziger, whose at once allusive and abstract Nimrod (1938), a work that continues to inspire and provoke, is rightfully accorded a sensitive and comprehensive chapter of its own. The short early chapters give Zalmona lots of room for the meat of his argument––from the 1960s up to, it seems, the very last minute. You can practically smell the ink on the closing pages citing the work of Roy Chicky Arad––a critic and poet laureate of the Tent Protests––whose essay on the “beauty of the weak” (2009) intimates the return of the (repressed) luftmentsch in the streets of Tel Aviv.

The book's critical center, indeed the big take-away regarding Israeli art's historical narrative, rests in the meaning of abstraction. This fundamental question for modern art acquires an even finer point, perhaps, for Jewish creative artists, for whom secular forms––be they the lyric or the watercolor––have historically been shaped by the tension between ethics and aesthetics, and an argument regarding the value of art for art's sake. Israeli art, to the degree that it emerged within a discourse of modern Jewish identity, continues that argument. Indeed, two influential critical treatments, Sara Breitberg-Semel's “Poverty of Material” from 1986 and Sarit Shapira's “Routes of Wandering” from 1992, both regard Israeli conceptual art from points of view normatively associated with traditional Jewish culture. Shapira's exhibit examined Israeli wandering, a common trope in representations of the Jew in the European imagination (445). See also Zalmona's parsing of Breitberg-Semel, where the “deliberate impoverishment” of artists such as Rafi Lavie, evidenced in “the use of plywood boards, the lean aesthetic, the unpolished brushstrokes” was related to “the anti-sensual, anti-visual ‘nature’ of Judaism and of Zionist socialism” (314). (Notwithstanding the passing acknowledgement of the Israeli art establishment's misogyny and sexism [220], it is worth noting that many of Zalmona's most important critical interlocutors are women, including Breitberg-Semel, Shapira, and Ariella Azoulay. Are these female critics to the male Israeli art establishment what Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, and Harold Rosenberg were to WASP art historical scholarship in the United States?!)

The question of what has been hidden or effaced by Jewish abstraction troubles the narrative of Israeli art, especially as it seeks to both represent and critique diverse forms of national identity. The story of abstraction begins with the New Horizons group after World War II. Yosef Zaritsky turned his back on Tel Aviv's emergent urbanism and, in The Painter and a View of Tel Aviv from His Roof (1939), painted the hills of what would become Ramat Gan. His rejection of Zionism's romanticized vision of the land, and insistence on the autonomy of art, produced, as critics have noted, a painting about painting. However, Zalmona periodically flags the difficulty of abstraction for Israeli art. For example, describing the work of Menashe Kadishman, he notes: “In classic Israeli fashion, Kadishman's work combines loyalty to abstract modernist principles with a need to infuse artistic form with meaning (and perhaps legitimacy) by drawing upon myth and written sources” (259). This seesawing between the abstract and the social shapes both individual works as well as Zalmona's narrative of the trajectory of Israeli art.

Abstraction also characterizes Yehezkel Streichman's Ein Hod (1956), whose nominal subject represents something akin to Israeli art's primal sin: the conversion of the Arab village of ‘Ayn Hawd, whose inhabitants fled in 1948, to the Jewish artists’ colony of Ein Hod, founded in the early 1950s by Marcel Janco. Janco, another artist associated with New Horizons, also happened to be a JNF architect in charge of national parks (179), many of which were located on Palestinian ruins. Zalmona's reading of the painting serves as a gloss on the larger project of Israeli abstraction: “Mediterranean visual features convey local authenticity, while the Middle Eastern aspect of the scene has been ignored” (187). In other words, abstraction “cast a veil of vagueness over the precise details of reality” (171), a reality that included both the native Palestinian landscape and its destruction. Larry Abramson's series, Tsooba (1993–94), expressly revisited sites painted by Zaritzky, inserting images of dead plants, ruins, and relics to indicate a new sensitivity to place and the visual field, and to address the “erasure, oblivion and denial” (360) implicit in the earlier work.

The book's closing chapters treat this renewed interest in space in Dani Karavan's environmental sculptures and monuments and Micha Ulman's “digging” projects. Zalmona reserves a special place for Moshe Gershuni, whose work signaled a profound change in Israeli art: his critique of sacred cows such as the military and the embrace of everything the Zionist ethos had sought to suppress or deny (Shoah, Yiddish, Judaism) created templates for future decades, including the more overtly politicized work of David Reeb (Green Line with Green Eyes, 1987), the homoerotic subtexts in Adi Ness's solider portraits from the 1990s, Sigalit Landau's complex installations (My Country, 2002) and Yael Bartana's award-winning video art (And Europe Will be Stunned, 2007–2011). The volume's rich discussions of works from the 1980s to the present, too numerous to mention here, provide powerful testimony to the creativity of a relatively young and politically conflicted society. Along the way we get snapshots of power struggles within museums and teaching academies, and are reminded how the country's cultural institutions were founded largely by middle-class talents, tastes, and money. Zalmona notes how Israeli culture is increasingly produced within a global context, and is therefore subject to the effects of commodification and deregulation that shape transnational culture. Israeli art now hangs in the international banks and boardrooms on Rothschild Boulevard, not far from the relatively modest building that first housed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (a home donated by Meir Dizengoff).

The question of abstraction has been resolved, it seems, or perhaps simply swallowed up in the complex maw of what Israeli society has become. Witness the mental acrobatics necessary to define the work of Sharif Waked, a Palestinian Israeli born in Nazareth in 1964. Waked's Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003), part of the museum's permanent collection, is a mesmerizing seven-minute video that blends the polish of fashion photography with gritty documentary-style footage to depict the humiliation of Palestinians crossing through military checkpoints. It also draws uncannily on a century of debate about the Jewish body, its celebration and debasement; the parade of figures in tailor-made suits, with peek-a-boo holes so the chest or stomach show through, reminds this viewer of the body's vulnerability, the precariousness of Israel's borders, and the abnormal conditions of its statehood––still several decades shy of a century.