Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TMIM (Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From the Zionist Bauhuas to Feminist Art)
Période du rapport: 2020-05-01 au 2022-04-30
The historiography of Israeli visual culture has often emphasized the ongoing tension between artists' search for local roots, vis-a-vis their perception of modernism as representing universal values, as well as their desire to maintain a dialogue with the cultural centers of Europe and the United States. However, so far these scholarly debates have focused on the "fine art" fields of painting, sculpture, new media or architecture, and ignored other fields of aesthetic production. The proposed study will contribute to such debates by investigating a medium that has received little scholarly attention––textiles. Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From the “Zionist Bauhaus” to Feminist Art [TMIM] examines textile art and design produced in Israel between the 1940s-1990s, as a hotbed for a range of issues at the interstices of aesthetics, national identity, and gender. Grounded primarily in art and design history, but also in cultural history and material culture studies, this study uses unmined archival material, interviews, and objects’ analysis in order to provide a fresh perspective on some of the principal questions in Israeli art historiography, particularly the tension between the transnational and local aspects of Israeli art and designץ Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism contributes to the innovative field of critical craft studies, that emerged in art history in the past two decades and examines the complex relations between those fluid cultural categories: “art” and “craft.” art. Additionally, TMIM contributes to the growing literature examining the notion of "multiple modernisms" which scholars have used to refer to modernist movements that developed outside of North Atlantic centers, the study of which destabilizes cohesive perceptions of how, where, and when modernism actually developed.
Research objectives:
• To diversify and expand the canon of Israeli visual culture by examining a field of practice that has been overlooked by other scholars.
• To better understand the historical construction of an Israeli modern national style as grounded in the tension between the local and the global.
• To contribute to the growing scholarship of "multiple modernisms," using Israel as a test case.
• To increase recognition of the importance of little-known women Israeli artists-designers among scholars and the general public.
• To broaden the discussion and study of Israeli visual culture internationally by expanding the meagre non-Hebrew literature of the field.
Research objectives:
• To diversify and expand the canon of Israeli visual culture by examining a field of practice that has been overlooked by other scholars.
• To better understand the historical construction of an Israeli modern national style as grounded in the tension between the local and the global.
• To contribute to the growing scholarship of "multiple modernisms," using Israel as a test case.
• To increase recognition of the importance of little-known women Israeli artists-designers among scholars and the general public.
• To broaden the discussion and study of Israeli visual culture internationally by expanding the meagre non-Hebrew literature of the field.
TMIM focuses on textiles produced between the 1940s-1990s in different sites including an art academy, a craft organization, industrial factories and the fine art world, challenging the separation between the artistic, artisanal and commercial realms. The first part of this research the New Bezalel School of Art and Craft, that operated between 1941-1970, and directed by German-born weaving designers Julia Keiner (founder and director, 1941-1963) and Ruth Kaiser (director, 1963-1970). While Keiner and Kaiser remain entirely overlooked in accounts of Israeli art and design, I argue that they shaped perceptions of textile design that persisted in Israel until at least the late twentieth century and thus contributed significantly to the development of a quintessential Israeli aesthetics. TMIM's second section focused on textiles production in Maskit, a government organization founded founded in 1953 to develop sources of income for immigrants through home industries. Previous studies of Maskit focused on appropriation and adaptation of traditional motifs. Little scholarly attention has been paid to Maskit’s role in the development of Israel’s modern art-craft and art-textiles in particular. My research investigated Maskit's departments for handweaving printed textiles and the textile exhibitions in Maskit's gallery. I considered Maskit’s shift from traditional- to art-craft during the 1960s-1970s within the context of to Israel’s socio-economic circumstances as well as new ideas about craft that developed in the international arena. TMIM’s third section examines the production of textiles made on the boundary between art, craft and design between the 1970s-1990s. Based on this research, I concluded that there existed a direct link between the New Bezalel, Maskit and the emergence of Israeli fiber art in the 1970s, which lead from early experimentation with functionalist design based, to later exploration of fibers as an artistic medium. This trajectory resulted from the unique circumstances that existed in Israel: first, like in the United States and Australia, Central European emigres who fled Nazi Europe in the 1930s had significant impact on local textile production resulting in new notions reflecting transnational links; second, despite of Israel’s large textile industry, commercial textile design remained a marginal field until the 1980s, leading designers trained in applied textiles to work in alternative fields such as home industries, modern craft and non-functional art textiles; third, Maskit’s involvement with the World Craft Council and the International Studio Craft Movement was significant in the early institutionalization of textiles as an art medium, demonstrating again the amalgamation of local and global streams on this field of practice; and fourth, between the 1970s-1990s, fiber art became a thriving field continuing both the New Bezalel and Maskit initiatives, and absorbing international ideas from newly arrived immigrants. The field Israeli textile art and design was stirred almost exclusively by women, who operated mostly outside Israel’s central art. Consequently, they have remained completely overlooked and forgotten, reflecting biases against the field of textile as “amateurish” and “feminine.” Nevertheless, this study shows that this group of artists shaped a significant modernist aesthetic language in their medium, in tune with major international development in the field of textile, while deeply rooted in local socio-cultural circumstances.
The current literature includes studies of textile factories in Palestine/Israel; ethnographic studies of needlework traditions; exhibition catalogues featuring some biographical information; and brief references to textiles in books on Israeli fashion and dress. Art historian Yael Gilat significantly contributed to our understanding of the role of Yemenite embroidery in Israeli visual culture, while art theorist Sarah Hinsky's analysis of the old Bezalel rug department added has been a pioneering work on gender power. TMIM, however, focused on a much broader scope of textile art, and framed this field through new paradigms, such as transnational relations, the relations between commercial and fine art, the construction of national identity and the tension between localism and globalism in the formation of Israeli modernism. This research so far resulted in three papers presented in major International conference, and three essays for peer-reviewed journals currently in different stages of completion. This research will be used as the basis for a book that will serve as the first monograph on Israeli textile art and design. In 2020, I organized a panel as part of the College Art Association conference titled “Textiles and Nation Building,” which brought together four scholars who presented their research on textiles in Russia, Sweden, Israel and the United States.