Israeli Printmaking

Israeli printmaking developed within the broader growth of modern organized art in the Land of Israel, conventionally traced to the founding of Bezalel in Jerusalem in 1906.[1] Its practitioners worked across lithography, screenprinting, woodcut, etching, and aquatint.[2][3] Subjects ranged from biblical and Jewish historical themes to religion, gender, and politics.[4][5]

The field took shape through art schools, independent artists, museum collections, and collaborative workshops. The Jerusalem Print Workshop, founded in 1974, became a major center for producing and teaching prints, while institutional collections and exhibitions have preserved both historical and contemporary work.[6][7]

Modern organized art activity in the Land of Israel is conventionally dated to 1906, when Boris Schatz founded the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem under a plan approved by the 1905 Zionist Congress.[1] The school functioned as an institution for crafts and graphic art as well as fine art, with a stated purpose of encouraging talented young Jews to study art in the Land of Israel.[1] Its early teachers sought to create a national artistic style that drew on Jewish historical and folkloric themes, combined European techniques with Near Eastern influences, and emphasized decorative treatment.[8][9]

Among the figures who shaped print culture from the outset was Ephraim Moshe Lilien, identified by the Central Zionist Archives as a photographer and printmaker who arrived in Palestine with Schatz and a group of students shortly after the 1905 congress decision.[9] They initially rented a house on Ethiopia Street in Jerusalem before the school moved to a larger building on Shmuel Hanagid Street, and the archives describe that early institution as the birthplace of the visual arts of the Land of Israel.[9]

An episode from the school's financially difficult early years recalls Mordechai Narkis finding Schatz mopping its floor late one evening, an example of the founder personally doing routine work to sustain the institution.[9]

Abel Pann (1883–1963), born Abba Pfefferman in the Vitebsk region of White Russia, joined the Bezalel teaching staff in 1913 and returned to Palestine to teach there again from 1920 to 1924.[4] During the First World War he produced paintings and prints addressing pogroms, including the book In the Name of the Czar: 24 Original Pictures.[4] From the 1920s onward, he made pastel drawings and prints of biblical scenes using local Middle Eastern people and landscapes as models, situating his imagery within the geographic origins of Jewish culture as he understood them.[4] Pann also brought Jerusalem its first lithographic press, which later came into the care of the Jerusalem Print Workshop.[10]

Hermann Struck, a leading practitioner of etching and the author of the seminal 1908 treatise Die Kunst des Radierens, settled in Haifa in December 1922 and contributed to the development of the region's artistic community.[11] As early as 1903, Struck had produced a series of etchings and drawings depicting settlements, cities, landscapes, and inhabitants across Palestine — including Tiberias, Safed, Rishon Lezion, Rehovot, Gedera, Mount Tabor, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa — before Tel Aviv was founded.[11] He served on the board of the New Bezalel School after its 1935 reopening and directly influenced artists including Jakob Steinhardt.[11]

The original Bezalel School closed in 1929 and reopened in Jerusalem in 1935 under Josef Budko as the New Bezalel School.[10] Budko developed a commercial graphics department and taught painting, illustration, woodcut, printing, and photography, with particular emphasis on graphics and the ornamental use of the Hebrew alphabet.[10] German-trained artists and teachers shaped the school's print culture after its reopening, and the institution established departments in graphic design, printmaking, architecture, ceramics, and photography, combining European artistic traditions with Israeli culture.[12] Artwork from this period featured many black-and-white drawings and prints, reflecting the influence of World War II, events in Palestine, and the dry mountain landscapes of Israel.[12]

Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968) was central to this environment. A German-born painter and printmaker who had studied engraving under Hermann Struck and became an early disciple of German Expressionism, he immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1933 and settled in Jerusalem.[2] In 1949 he was appointed head of Bezalel's graphics department and directed the school from 1954 to 1957.[2] He received the first international prize in graphic arts at the 1955 São Paulo Biennale and the Arta Liturgica Prize at the 1960 Venice Biennale.[2]

Steinhardt developed a distinctive woodcut method characterized by direct carving, sharp edges, and strong black-and-white contrasts.[2] He introduced color into his woodcuts in 1925 but generally favored dark tonalities. His Jerusalem-period woodcuts of the 1930s and early 1940s conveyed his response to reports of the persecution of European Jews while also depicting the atmosphere of the Old City; later works addressed biblical subjects and themes of suffering, the Holocaust, rhythm, and color.[2]

Jacob Pins (1917–2005), born in Höxter, Germany, immigrated to Palestine in 1936 and studied art under Steinhardt after five years of working on the land.[13] His stark, dramatic woodcuts often convey an atmosphere of war, relying on bold black-and-white forms with few or no halftones to express volume and three-dimensionality.[13] The influence of Japanese color prints shaped his formal approach, and Jerusalem was among his most frequent subjects; he was also a major collector of Japanese art.[13]

Israeli printmaking encompassed a wide range of technical approaches. Museum collections document lithography, color lithography, hand-colored lithography, and screenprinting in works associated with Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Safed, Ein Hod, and the Negev.[14] Individual practitioners also developed distinctive approaches to woodcut, etching, drypoint, and aquatint.[2][3]

Tuvia Beeri (born 1929), born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to Israel in 1948, studied etching under Johnny Friedlaender in Paris from 1961 to 1963 and attended the lithography studio of the École des Beaux-Arts. He later taught at Bezalel and also taught printmaking at Tel Aviv's Avni Institute of Art.[3] Regarded as one of Israel's leading graphic artists, Beeri favored aquatint above other intaglio techniques because its capacity for color and tonal variation could introduce a painterly quality into graphic work.[3] His prints achieved luminosity by layering bright colors, producing transparency, depth, and plasticity of form, with imagery described as a dream world of color and form evoking mysterious landscapes and ancient times.[3]

Stella Drabkin, a painter and mosaicist, developed new methods of printmaking through experiments with multitype — a variation on monotype printing using layers of texture and color — that produced mosaic panels on biblical themes and prints incorporating poems.[15] After her death, the Art Alliance established the Stella Drabkin Memorial Award Fund in 1972 in recognition of her innovations.[15]

Pinchas Cohen-Gan (born 1942), an artist and teacher at the Bezalel Academy, worked across printmaking, painting, and photography.[8] His output was characterized as conceptual and socio-political in orientation while ranging stylistically from expressionism to minimalism; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art presented a retrospective of his works on paper from 1969 to 1992.[8]

The Cincinnati Skirball Museum's collection of modern Israeli art illustrates the diversity of the field through specific works: Shalom Moskovitz's Jacob's Ladder (color lithograph, Safed, c. 1965), Marcel Janco's Monts du Negev (screenprint, Israel, c. 1960), Yosl Bergner's lithographs Toys (Tel Aviv, 1973) and The Tea Drinkers (Tel Aviv, 1966, hand-colored), Anna Ticho's Trees (lithograph, Jerusalem, c. 1968), Menashe Kadishman's Mountain B (screenprint, Tel Aviv, 1974), Reuven Rubin's Caesarea (color lithograph, 1972), and Mordecai Ardon's To the Morning Star (lithograph, Jerusalem, 1973).[14]

The Jerusalem Print Workshop, founded in 1974 by Arik Kilemnik, became a major institutional center for printmaking in Israel.[16] Kilemnik had returned to Israel in 1971 after studying and teaching printmaking in New York, bringing plans for building printing presses.[16] The workshop became operational after approximately three years of fundraising, negotiations, and logistical preparation; its equipment included presses acquired from a Dutch workshop on the Mount of Olives and three presses built from Kilemnik's New York plans.[16]

Located in a historic Jerusalem building in the Musrara neighborhood, the workshop serves Israeli artists through the traditions and methodology of printmaking, maintains two floors of gallery space, presents regular exhibitions, and offers printmaking courses for different skill levels.[16] Its collaborative model rests on an exchange between artist and printer: the artist articulates an aesthetic intention while the printer translates the idea technically and guides its execution.[16] Artists associated with the workshop include Moshe Gershuni, Micha Ullman, Anna Ticho, and Larry Abramson; Sharon Poliakine served as a master printer there for almost twenty years.[16]

The workshop also holds historic printing presses, including some described as centuries old, and participates in the Jerusalem Biennale for Drawing.[6] It identifies its mission partly in terms of celebrating the tradition of Hebrew printmaking and preserving the medium as an educational and artistic practice.[6] Data from 2010 compiled by the Pilat Center for Culture Research and Information recorded 187 gallery events connected with the Jerusalem Print Workshop, reflecting the scale of its activity within Jerusalem's contemporary art scene.[17]

The workshop published One Hundred Years of Printmaking in Israel (2015), a 514-page Hebrew-English volume edited by Gideon Ofrat that profiles approximately 120 artists and reproduces around 350 prints.[18] The National Library of Israel describes it as a comprehensive account covering printmaking workshops, changes and innovations in the field, and its theoretical as well as technical-practical dimensions.[18]

Larry Abramson began working with the Jerusalem Print Workshop as a young artist in the 1970s after immigrating from South Africa, and the workshop's environment was foundational to his development as a painter and printmaker.[19] Abramson became associated with a process-oriented approach that emphasized how an image evolves through successive stages rather than concentrating primarily on producing finished editions.[19]

His Botany exhibition used screenprinting and old Israeli newspapers carrying coverage of the Six Day War and Operation Protective Edge, first covering the sheets with calm, sky-toned oil paint and then adding sharply defined botanical illustrations that visually overpowered the printed news text.[19] In Israel Landscape (2008), he used etching to render separate versions of landscape paintings by Israeli masters and combined them into a single fragmented landscape connecting remembered beauty and harmony with war, poverty, and destruction.[19] His ongoing series The Rose of Jericho, begun in 2003, employed etching and acid-bite techniques to depict a desert plant associated in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions with revival, rebirth, and endurance.[19]

Andi LaVine Arnovitz, a Jerusalem-based conceptual artist, uses etching, digital processes, and other printmaking techniques alongside paper, fabric, thread, and porcelain.[5] Her print series, artists' books, and large-scale installations explore tensions involving religion, gender, and politics, with paper manipulation described as the foundation of much of her work.[5]

As graphic art became more popular among the public, printing studios were opened in conjunction with the Artists' Houses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and with the Israel Museum.[8] The Israel Museum mounted an exhibition titled The Medium and the Message: Six Centuries of Printmaking, drawing on its permanent collection to display more than 200 prints — including 21 shown publicly for the first time — and tracing printmaking's development from reproduction toward artistic expression and social commentary.[7] The exhibition included a special focus on women printmakers, with Israeli artist Orit Hofshi shown alongside international figures including Käthe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois, and Kiki Smith.[7]

Several major institutions preserve materials central to the history of Israeli printmaking. The National Library of Israel's Prints and Drawings Collection contains prints made with etching, engraving, and lithography, with subjects including landscapes, structures, historical events, and a large portion depicting synagogues and customs of Jewish communities in the Diaspora.[20]

The Central Zionist Archives holds a Graphic Collection comprising a Poster Collection of approximately 4,500 posters dating from the 1920s to the present, produced by Zionist institutions, the Jewish National Fund, the United Jewish Appeal, organizations of the Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine, Israeli government ministries, and commercial bodies active in the Land of Israel.[21] These works address topics reflecting the life of an emerging nation through art and color.[21]

The Museum of the Printing Arts in Safad was founded in Jerusalem in 1954 and holds a large collection that includes private libraries, sculptures, museum artifacts, ex libris labels, and printer's marks, alongside secondary literature on printing.[20] The Hermann Struck Museum preserves and displays the work of the pioneering etcher who helped lay the groundwork for Israeli graphic art before and after his settlement in Haifa.[11]