Visualizing the "Old New Land": Modernism, Zionism, and Exhibition Culture

Exhibitions played an extraordinary role in shaping public perception of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the early twentieth century, when Zionist groups organized shows in Palestine, Europe, and the United States in support of a Jewish state. This role expanded after the founding of the state of Israel. By the 1960s Israel was home to dozens of museums, from the encyclopedic Israel Museum in Jerusalem to small cultural centers on kibbutzim such as Ein Harod in the north and Yad Mordechai in the south. At the same time, the state supported Israeli art exhibitions at biennials in Venice, Paris, and São Paulo. Both at home and abroad, these initiatives attempted to form a visual culture that would bridge a nationalist ethos with supposedly universal ideals, merging ancient history with modern politics and evoking the “old new land,” as Zionist leader Theodor Herzl described a utopian Jewish state in 1902. The exhibition format itself, like the objects it displayed, rhetorically deployed secular Enlightenment ideals in the service of national interests. This rhetoric was most apparent on May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel was declared in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. When cultural leaders imagined a “Hebrew art”—like the reinvention of the Hebrew language—that would produce a unified culture to assimilate the country’s new immigrant population, they also hoped this curated vision of the new state would supplant earlier images of Palestine.