In new exhibit, Israeli museum responds to wartime isolation with ‘respins’ of great works
Running through February, ‘Masterpieces’ at the Mishkan Museum in Kibbutz Ein Harod contains 300 works by 47 artists, including rethinks of ‘The Last Supper’ and ‘Guernica’
Botticelli’s “Venus” has been reborn in the unlikeliest of places. The long-locked Renaissance goddess is currently greeting visitors just past the ticket counter at the Mishkan Museum of Art in Kibbutz Ein Harod — but no, she’s not on loan from Florence’s Uffizi Galleries.
This Venus is homegrown, life-sized and made of Styrofoam, the work of award-winning Israeli sculptor Sasha Serber. Welcome to “Masterpieces,” she seems to say, a group exhibition of over 300 artworks by 47 Israeli artists that recreate celebrated historical masterpieces at Israel’s first purpose-built art museum.
The usual whitewashed modernism of the Mishkan Museum (for which it earned its architectural reputation overseas) has temporarily been exchanged for jewel-toned wall colors you might see abroad. Lavender, teal and red are the background for paintings, drawings, videos and sculptures that look like Western art history’s greatest hits, but not quite, and play against the kibbutznik terrazzo floors.
The rooms are divided according to source inspiration: Italian Renaissance, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Baroque, Romanticism and Neoclassicism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, Picasso, Van Gogh, Northern Renaissance. If the participating artists are recreating masterpieces, then the Mishkan is itself recreating an encyclopedic museum à la the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Louvre.
“The exhibition started as a half-joke,” admits Avi Lubin, chief curator of the Mishkan Museum, who began ideating this show during the pandemic when it was impossible to visit museums overseas. He knew of artists who had recreated European masterpieces and kept gathering examples. These types of works aren’t normally exhibited to the public because audiences are less interested in seeing one artist recreate another (even though this is an age-old tradition).
“It started from this joke of me saying to myself, what, do we have to go all the way to Italy to see ‘The Last Supper?’ Adi Nes did ‘The Last Supper.’ Do we need to go all the way to Spain to see ‘Guernica?’ Aya Ben Ron made a ‘Guernica,’” he says.
The sense of cultural isolation didn’t end when the skies reopened after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. With the judicial overhaul, and now the war, more layers have been added to the cultural quarantine that first inspired “Masterpieces.”
Following the Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023, which saw 1,200 men, women and children slaughtered, mostly civilians, and 251 taken hostage in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli artistic community has been ostracized from without amid the country’s ongoing military campaign against the Hamas terror organization in Gaza. There’s also introversion from within.
“I present an exhibition from the Renaissance to Picasso but none of them are here, and it seems that there won’t be any, anytime soon. And contemporary artists — we likely won’t see many of them here in the near future. That’s on the one hand. And on the other, there’s something very hard now in the [international] cultural scene, being an Israeli,” says Lubin. “In my opinion a cultural situation of being closed off is catastrophic.”
Israeli creatives have long experienced various forms of boycott, which have only increased over the past year, across multiple fields including film, television, literature, and sports. In the visual arts, there are cases of international artists not wanting to engage with Israeli cultural institutions, and also of limiting Israeli artists from showing their work overseas.
The exhibition schedule at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, for instance, had to be adjusted at the onset of the war because some institutions canceled and weren’t willing to lend artworks, citing high insurance prices.
In February, artists and activists established a group called Art Not Genocide Alliance calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion from the Venice Biennale. An open letter penned by the group was signed by thousands of artists and cultural workers. Protesters tried to prevent the opening of a Michal Rovner solo exhibition at the blue-chip Pace Gallery in New York in March. In May, the Dutch Royal Academy of Art agreed to sever ties with the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in response to a student union campaign. The list goes on.
In the context of the stonewalling that the Israeli visual arts community has felt since October 2023, the timing of “Masterpieces” feels like a one-sided conversation between Israeli artists communicating in an international idiom, and the silence that they receive in return.
“This exhibition deals with that question. It’s almost impossible [for Israeli artists] to find international platforms, that’s part of this issue. I’m not someone who doesn’t recognize crimes being committed by Israel — the opposite. But I think that for something to even happen or if we want to find a solution, there must be a conversation,” Lubin says. “The shutting down of the possibility to argue, to talk, it’s a problem. And certainly in the cultural arena.”
Awareness of the current isolation and improbability of receptivity abroad adds another layer to art historical recreations produced since the beginning of the war. Bulgarian-born painter Boyan has repeatedly returned to the subject of the abduction of the daughters of King Leucippus in his series “After Rubens,” an image that resonates in relation to the hostage crisis, with five versions of the same composition displayed in the exhibition’s Baroque room.
In the same gallery, Uri Ben Natan’s digital painting “Wandering Jew” is a take on Jan Vermeer’s 17th-century painting “The Astronomer,” with the figure contemplating a globe (and possibly looking for a next place of refuge).
Another series created since October 2023 is “The Displaced” — tableau vivant video works by Asaf and Moran Gam Hacohen that have recreated, to date, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” These iconic compositions are crafted with a cast of Israelis who, like the artists themselves, were traveling in East Asia before October 7 and decided to extend their stay. Some flew to Asia when the war began out of concern for their children’s safety.
“This return to the classics reflects a need to cling to anchors within the chaotic reality we’ve found ourselves in since October 7,” shares Moran Gam Hacohen. “We were able to draw the strength and qualities that we so lack during this period from works that are canonical, timeless, eternal and not tethered to a specific place.”
Gam Hacohen’s partner and husband Asaf Gam Hacohen adds that “tableau vivants are completely artificial to begin with — they’re unnatural and contain the desperate attempts of the participants to embody the characters they were asked to portray and face the strong winds threatening to blow it all away.”
Strong winds seem to be blowing the long hair of Sasha Serber’s “Venus,” but they will probably never carry her outside of Israel. The works in “Masterpieces” are unlikely to ever journey abroad where their source inspirations originated. For now (and through February) they are at the Mishkan, their repository.
“So come in and you have everything — you have Botticelli, there’s Leonardo and Caravaggio, and you’ve got Van Gogh. You can come in, make yourselves comfortable. And you don’t have, of course, any of them,” Lubin says.
“A conversation has been created here that doesn’t have a response.”
