Description of the attraction
Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum with an unusual history. The heart of his collection is made up of works by artists of the first half of the 20th century, including true masterpieces.
The museum opened shortly after the founding of Tel Aviv, long before Israel gained independence. The entire meeting was initially housed in the house of the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengoff.
A native of Bessarabia (Russian Empire), a Narodnik, engineer Mikhail Yakovlevich Dizengoff settled in Jaffa in 1905. In 1909, sixty-six families gathered on the coastal dunes to draw lots for land to found the first Jewish city in Palestine. One of the plots was bought by Meir and Tsina Dizengoff, and they built a house. Meir became the head of the municipality; when the area grew and turned into a city, he was elected mayor.
In 1930, beloved Qing died. In memory of his wife, Meir donated a family house on Rothschild Boulevard to Tel Aviv. He proposed to open an art gallery here, the basis of which will be the Dizengoff family collection. At the opening of the museum in 1932, the mayor said: "It is impossible to build houses, lay streets and improve the city without thinking about aesthetics and harmony, without instilling an aesthetic taste in the population." Sixteen years later, David Ben-Gurion chose this famous building to proclaim Israel's Declaration of Independence. At first, the country's parliament met here.
Over time, the museum became cramped in this house. In 1971, most of the collection was transferred to the main building on Shaul Ha-Melekh Boulevard, designed by architects Dan Eitan and Yitzhak Yashar. Later, according to the project of the architect Preston Scott Cohen, a west wing was added to it, a sculpture garden was added.
The collection of the museum, numbering more than 40 thousand exhibits, contains works by artists representing the art of the 20th century: impressionists, fauvists, German expressionists, cubists, futurists, Russian constructivists. Here you can see paintings by Monet, Pizarro, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Matisse, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Chagall, Picasso. The star of the museum is the famous "Portrait of Frederica Maria Beer" by the famous Austrian modernist Gustav Klimt.
The museum has a very representative department of old European masters, which includes 130 works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jan Brueghel the Younger, Reynolds, Canaletto, Rigo. In 1950, the museum also acquired paintings from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim, patroness of the American abstract artist Paul Jackson Pollock. The gift included works by Pollock, Basiotis, Pusette-Dart, Tanguy, Matta, Masson.
Adjacent to the museum is a sculpture garden named after the prominent Israeli fashion designer and designer Lola Beer Ebner, who designed uniforms for women serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Here in the open air sculptures of Calder, Gucci, Maillol, Lipschitz, Karo, Graham, as well as outstanding Israeli masters - Ulman, Berg, Cohen-Levy are exhibited.
