1.
Israel
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Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Middle East, on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Red Sea. The country contains geographically diverse features within its small area. Israels economy and technology center is Tel Aviv, while its seat of government and proclaimed capital is Jerusalem, in 1947, the United Nations adopted a Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an internationalized Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, next year, the Jewish Agency declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied territories including the West Bank, Golan Heights and it extended its laws to the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, but not the West Bank. Israels occupation of the Palestinian territories is the worlds longest military occupation in modern times, efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have not resulted in peace. However, peace treaties between Israel and both Egypt and Jordan have successfully been signed, the population of Israel, as defined by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, was estimated in 2017 to be 8,671,100 people. It is the worlds only Jewish-majority state, with 74. 8% being designated as Jewish, the countrys second largest group of citizens are Arabs, at 20. 8%. The great majority of Israeli Arabs are Sunni Muslims, including significant numbers of semi-settled Negev Bedouins, other minorities include Arameans, Armenians, Assyrians, Black Hebrew Israelites, Circassians, Maronites and Samaritans. Israel also hosts a significant population of foreign workers and asylum seekers from Africa and Asia, including illegal migrants from Sudan, Eritrea. In its Basic Laws, Israel defines itself as a Jewish, Israel is a representative democracy with a parliamentary system, proportional representation and universal suffrage. The prime minister is head of government and the Knesset is the legislature, Israel is a developed country and an OECD member, with the 35th-largest economy in the world by nominal gross domestic product as of 2016. The country benefits from a skilled workforce and is among the most educated countries in the world with one of the highest percentage of its citizens holding a tertiary education degree. The country has the highest standard of living in the Middle East and the third highest in Asia, in the early weeks of independence, the government chose the term Israeli to denote a citizen of Israel, with the formal announcement made by Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Sharett. The names Land of Israel and Children of Israel have historically used to refer to the biblical Kingdom of Israel. The name Israel in these phrases refers to the patriarch Jacob who, jacobs twelve sons became the ancestors of the Israelites, also known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel or Children of Israel. The earliest known artifact to mention the word Israel as a collective is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt. The area is known as the Holy Land, being holy for all Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam
2.
Meir Dizengoff
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Meir Dizengoff was a Zionist politician and the first mayor of Tel Aviv. Meir Dizengoff was born in 1861 in the village of Ekimovtsy near Orhei, in 1878, his family moved to Kishinev, where he graduated from high school and studied at the polytechnic school. In 1882, he volunteered in the Imperial Russian Army, serving in Zhitomir until 1884, there he first met Zina Brenner, whom he married in the early 1890s. After his military service, Dizengoff remained in Odessa, where he involved in the Narodnaya Volya underground. In 1885, he was arrested for insurgency, in Odessa, he met Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am and others, and joined the Hovevei Zion movement. Upon his release from prison, Dizengoff returned to Kishinev and founded the Bessarabian branch of Hovevei Zion and he left Kishinev in 1889 to study in Paris. Dizengoff opened the factory in Tantura in 1892, but it proved unsuccessful due to impurities in the sand, there he met Theodor Herzl and became his ardent follower, despite having been strongly opposed to the British Uganda Scheme promoted by Herzl at the Sixth Zionist Congress. In 1905, spurred by his Zionist beliefs, Dizengoff returned to Palestine and he also co-founded a boat company that bore his name, and served as the Belgian consul. Dizengoff became head of the planning in 1911, a position that he held until 1922. When Tel Aviv was recognized as a city, Dizengoff was elected mayor and he remained in office until his death, apart from a three-year hiatus in 1925-1928. During World War I, the Ottomans drove out a part of the population. In this position he dealt with aid sent to the exiles of Tel Aviv and he widely circulated and publicised the plight of the exiles, mainly via newspapers, and succeeded in convincing the rulers to agree to a regular supply of food and provisions to the exiles. Many committees and associations came into being during Dizengoffs term as mayor, one was the Yerid HaMizrah committee, founded in 1932, which organized its first fair that year. Initially, the fair was held in the south of the city, but after its great success, a large international fair was held in 1934, followed by a second fair two years later. Dizengoff was consequently involved with the development of the city, and encouraged its rapid expansion—carrying out daily inspections and he was always present at the head of the Adloyada, the annual Purim carnival. After his wifes death, he donated his house to the city of Tel Aviv, for use as an art museum, and he influenced many important artists to donate their work to improve the museum. In 1936, with the outbreak of the Arab revolt, the Arabs closed the port of Jaffa with the intention of halting the expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestine. Dizengoff pressured the government to give him permission to open a port in his new city of Tel Aviv and his dedication began with the words, Ladies and gentlemen, I can still remember the day when Tel Aviv had no port
3.
Helena Rubinstein
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Helena Rubinstein was a Polish American businesswoman, art collector, and philanthropist. A cosmetics entrepreneur, she was the founder and eponym of Helena Rubinstein Incorporated cosmetics company, the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber was her cousin. She was also the cousin of Ruth Rappaports mother, diminutive at 4 ft.10 in. Rubinstein emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1902, with no money and her stylish clothes and milky complexion did not pass unnoticed among the towns ladies, however, and she soon found enthusiastic buyers for the jars of beauty cream in her luggage. She spotted a market where she began to make her own, fortunately for Rubinstein, a key ingredient of the cream, lanolin, was readily at hand. These sheep were the wealth of the nation and the Western Districts vast mobs of merinos produced the finest wool in the land, to disguise the lanolins pungent odour, Rubinstein experimented with lavender, pine bark and water lilies. Rubinstein had an out with her uncle, but after a stint as a bush governess began waitressing at the Winter Garden tearooms in Melbourne. There, she found a willing to stump up the funds to launch her Crème Valaze. Costing ten pence and selling for six shillings, it walked off the shelves as fast as she could pack it in pots, Sydney was next, and within five years Australian operations were profitable enough to finance a Salon de Beauté Valaze in London. As such, Rubinstein formed one of the worlds first cosmetic companies and her business enterprise proved immensely successful and later in life, she used her enormous wealth to support charitable institutions in the fields of education, art and health. In 1908, her sister Ceska assumed the Melbourne shops operation, in 1908, she married the Polish-born American journalist Edward William Titus in London. They had two sons, Roy Valentine Titus and Horace Titus and they eventually moved to Paris where she opened a salon in 1912. Her husband helped with writing the publicity and set up a publishing house, published Lady Chatterleys Lover. Rubinstein, who knew little French, asked a guest what the ambassador had said and he said, Your ancestors burned Joan of Arc. Rubinstein replied, Well, someone had to do it, at another fête, Marcel Proust asked her what makeup a duchess might wear. She summarily dismissed him because he smelt of mothballs, Rubinstein recollected later, How was I to know he was going to be famous. At the outbreak of World War I, she and Titus moved to New York City, where she opened a salon in 1915. This was the beginning of her vicious rivalry with the great lady of the cosmetics industry
4.
Fauvism
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While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain, the paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as a development of Van Goghs Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derains work at Collioure in 1905, in 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier, How do you see these trees. So, put in yellow, this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine, Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism. Moreaus broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the potency of pure color was inspirational for his students. Matisse said of him, He did not set us on the right roads and this source of empathy was taken away with Moreaus death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development. In 1896, Matisse, then an art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. The next year he returned as Russells student and abandoned his earth-colored palette for bright Impressionist colors, later stating, Russell was my teacher, Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing. In parallel with the discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre-Renaissance French art. Another aesthetic influence was African sculpture, of which Vlaminck, Derain, many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisses painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon dAutomne, Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited near Matisses work and may have had an influence on the pejorative used. Vauxcelles comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, the pictures gained considerable condemnation—A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public, wrote the critic Camille Mauclair —but also some favorable attention. Matisses Neo-Impressionist landscape, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, had already exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905. Art history History of painting Neo-Fauvism Visual arts Western painting Gerdts, the Color of Modernism, The American Fauves. Spivey, Virginia, Fauvism, Smarthistory at Khan Academy Whitfield, Fauve Painting from the Permanent Collection at the National Gallery of Art Fauvism, The Wild Beasts of Early Twentieth Century Art Rewald, Sabine. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves,1910
5.
Cubism
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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging, Cubism spread rapidly across the globe and in doing so evolved to a greater or lesser extent. In essence, Cubism was the origin of a process that produced diversity. In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art, in other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Other common threads between these movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization. Cubism began between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picassos 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braques 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques, Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, english art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Coopers restrictive use of terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed, wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the Salle 41 artists, e. g. John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram, The diagram being a symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as not as imitations or recreations. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian, artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. Picassos paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as seen in Les Demoiselles dAvignon
6.
Futurism
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Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane, although it was largely an Italian phenomenon, there were parallel movements in Russia, England, Belgium and elsewhere. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past, Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurisms artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinettis Manifesto of Futurism, Boccionis sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, to some extent Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism. Futurism is a movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. We want no part of it, the past, he wrote, publishing manifestos was a feature of Futurism, and the Futurists wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, religion, clothing and cooking. The founding manifesto did not contain an artistic programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. This committed them to a universal dynamism, which was to be represented in painting. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, the Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, the centre of avant-garde art. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism and following a visit to Paris in 1911 the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists, Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. They often painted modern urban scenes, carràs Funeral of the Anarchist Galli is a large canvas representing events that the artist had himself been involved in, in 1904. The action of an attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals. His Leaving the Theatre uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated, Boccionis The City Rises represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. The Futurists aimed through their art thus to enable the viewer to apprehend the inner being of what they depicted, Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste, Dinamismo plastico. Ballas Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash exemplifies the Futurists insistence that the world is in constant movement
7.
Constructivism (art)
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Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin. This was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art, the movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had an effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as the Bauhaus. Its influence was pervasive, with effects upon architecture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion. The term Construction Art was first used as a term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a term in Naum Gabos Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Aleksei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, Constructivism was a post-World War I development of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the counter reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at INKhUK in Moscow, later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts. As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals, perhaps the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevichs UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings. Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovskys declaration the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes, artists, in addition some Constructivists were heavily involved in the ROSTA Windows, a Bolshevik public information campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky, the constructivists tried to create works that would make the viewer an active viewer of the artwork. These theories were tested in theatre, particularly with the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold developed a biomechanical acting style, which was influenced both by the circus and by the scientific management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile, the sets by the likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with sets by Aleksandra Ekster. These ideas would influence German directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, Gabo publicly criticized Tatlins design saying, Either create functional houses and bridges or create pure art, not both. This had already caused a controversy in the Moscow group in 1920 when Gabo. This was opposed to the utilitarian and adaptable version of Constructivism held by Tatlin, the tower was never built, however, due to a lack of money following the revolution. A Constructivist international was formed, which met with Dadaists and De Stijl artists in Germany in 1922, participants in this short-lived international included Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and László Moholy-Nagy
8.
De Stijl
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De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. The De Stijl consisted of artists and architects In a narrower sense, De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg that served to propagate the groups theories. Next to van Doesburg, the principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and Bart van der Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van t Hoff. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the work is known as neoplasticism—the new plastic art. Mondrian sets forth the delimitations of neoplasticism in his essay Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art and he writes, this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour. With these constraints, his art allows only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight, in general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, their vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition and this element of the movement embodies the second meaning of stijl, a post, jamb or support, this is best exemplified by the construction of crossing joints, most commonly seen in carpentry. This feature can be found in the Rietveld Schröder House and the Red, De Stijl was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about ideal geometric forms in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. The De Stijl movement was influenced by Neopositivism. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the style of architecture as well as clothing. However, it did not follow the guidelines of an -ism, nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like the Bauhaus, it was a collective project. In music, De Stijl was an only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer. Between 1913 and 1916, he composed his Proeven van Stijlkunst and this minimalistic—and, at the time, revolutionary—music defined horizontal and vertical musical elements and aimed at balancing those two principles. Van Domselaer was relatively unknown in his lifetime, and did not play a significant role within the De Stijl group. From the flurry of new art movements that followed the Impressionist revolutionary new perception of painting, Cubism arose in the early 20th century as an important, in the Netherlands, too, there was interest in this new art. During that period, painter Theo van Doesburg started looking for artists to set up a journal
9.
Surrealism
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Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream, leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I, the word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works, after the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the son of writer. He admired the young writers anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition, later Breton wrote, In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most. Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and they began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields, continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin, freuds work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness, as Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, There is only one difference between a madman and me. Beside the use of analysis, they emphasized that one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power, the group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to people from false rationality, and restrictive customs. Breton proclaimed that the aim of Surrealism was long live the social revolution. To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism, in 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire, the other group, led by Breton, included Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, Jean Carrive, René Crevel and Georges Malkine, among others. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority
