Tel Aviv Museum of Art

 

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art was established in 1932 in a building at 16 Rothschild Boulevard that was the former home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, who had donated the property for a museum in memory of his wife, Zina, following her death in 1930.^[2] On 14 May 1948, 250 delegates quietly gathered at the museum^[3] for the historic signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.^[4] In 1971, the building became Independence Hall when the museum relocated to 27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard.^[5]

Curator Nehama Guralnik began working at the museum in 1971, when French was the common language among staff, including the director, administrators and the curators, and catalogues were printed in French and in Hebrew, with English introduced later that decade. Guralnik curated more than 40 exhibitions during her 34-year tenure as international art curator.^[6]

The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. Planning for a new building began in 1963 when the museum's collections of modern and contemporary art began to outgrow the premises. Construction commenced in 1966 but stopped for two years due to shortage of funds, before moving to its current location in 1971.^[7]

Another wing was added in 1999 and the Lola Beer Ebner Sculpture Garden was established.^[8] The museum also contains "The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Art Education Center", opened in 1988.^[9]

 

The museum houses a comprehensive collection of classical and contemporary art, especially Israeli art, a sculpture garden and a youth wing.^[10]

Suzanne Landau, following 34 years at the Israel Museum, was appointed director and chief curator of the museum in 2012.^[11]

In 2018, the museum set an all-time attendance record with 1,018,323 visitors, ranking 70th on the list of most visited art museums.^[12] In 2019, the museum set a new attendance record, ranking 49th with 1,322,439 visitors.^[13] In 2022, it again ranked 49th, with 1,070,714 visitors.^[14] In 2023, it was ranked 48th on The Art Magazine's list of the 100 most popular museums in the world.^[15]

On 23 March 2023, Tel Aviv Museum of Art was partially closed, in participation with Israel's "day of paralysis"^[16] during the 2023 Israeli judicial reform protests.^[17] Following the 7 October attacks and subsequent incidents related to the Israel-Hamas War, the Israel–Hezbollah conflict (2023–present) and the 2024 Iran–Israel conflict, the museum removed several items on its collection from display and stored them for safekeeping in a secured basement. It also moved other exhibitions to a protected space on the facility's lower levels.^[18]

The Museum's collection represents some of the leading artists of the first half of the 20th century and many of the major movements of modern art in this period: Fauvism, German Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, the De Stijl movement and Surrealism, French art, from the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists to the School of Paris including works of Chaïm Soutine, key works by Pablo Picasso from the Blue and Neo-Classical period to his Late Period, Cubist paintings by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, several sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz, and Surrealists works of Joan Miró.

One section of the Museum displays the history of Israeli art and its origins among local artists in the pre-state Zionist community of the early twentieth century.

In 1989, the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein created a giant two-panel mural especially for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It hangs in the entrance foyer.^[19]

The Collection includes several masterpieces, among them the painting Friedericke Maria Beer, 1916 by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt and Untitled Improvisation V, 1914, by the Russian master Wassily Kandinsky.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, donated in 1950, includes 36 works by Abstract and Surrealist artists, including works of Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, and Richard Pousette-Dart, and Surrealists works by Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, and André Masson.

 

Sculptures are displayed in the entrance plaza and in an internal sculpture garden.

In addition to a permanent collection, the museum hosts temporary exhibitions of individual artists' work and group shows curated around a common theme.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art includes The Paulson Family Foundation Building, its main structure on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard; the Herta and Paul Amir Building; and the Eyal Ofer Pavilion.^[20]

Marking its 90th anniversary, the museum's main building was refurbished and renamed The Paulson Family Foundation Building in 2021, in honour of its benefactors.^[21]

In November 2011, the Herta and Paul Amir Building on the western side of the museum opened. It houses an Israeli Architecture Archive, and a new section of Photography and Visual arts. The new building was designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen.^[22] The new wing houses 18,500 square feet of gallery space over five floors.^[23]

The Amir building also contains Pastel, a fine dining restaurant led by Chef Hilel Tavakuli.^[24][25][26]

In May 2023, following an extensive renovation of the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, it was reopened as the Eyal Ofer Pavilion, in honour of its contemporary benefactor,^[27] with the first retrospective of the works of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in Israel exhibited on all four levels. The renovation was led by architect Amnon Rechter, whose father, Israel Prize laureate architect Yaakov Rechter, built the original pavilion in 1959.^[28]

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  Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, Gustav Klimt, 1916
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  The Shepherdess (after Millet), Vincent Willem van Gogh, 1899
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  Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, Maurycy Gottlieb, 1878
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  Rue L´Hermitage, Camille Pissarro, 1866
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  Grainstack at Giverny, Claude Monet, 1889
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  Dome of the rock, Samuel Hirszenberg, 1908
•  
  Reclining Figure 1969–70, Henry Moore, 1960s

• Israeli art
• List of largest art museums

• The Tel Aviv Museum of Art
• "Tel Aviv Museum of Art".
•   Media related to Tel Aviv Museum of Art at Wikimedia Commons