page_title: Israeli sculpture
section_title: Canaanite to abstract, 1939–1967
hierarchical_section_title: Israeli sculpture / History / Canaanite to abstract, 1939–1967
caption_attribution_description: Sculpture עברית: פסל
context_page_description: Israeli sculpture designates sculpture produced in the Land of Israel from 1906, the year the "Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts" was established. The process of crystallization of Israeli sculpture was influenced at every stage by international sculpture. In the early period of Israeli sculpture, most of its important sculptors were immigrants to the Land of Israel, and their art was a synthesis of the influence of European sculpture with the way in which the national artistic identity developed in the Land of Israel and later in the State of Israel.
  Efforts toward the development of a local style of sculpture began in the late 1930s, with the creation of "Caananite" sculpture, which combined influences from European sculpture with motifs taken from the East, and particularly from Mesopotamia. These motifs were formulated in national terms and strived to present the relationship between Zionism and the soil of the homeland.
context_section_description: At the end of the 1930s, a group called "The Canaanites" – a broad sculptural movement, primarily literary in nature – was founded in Israel. This group tried to create a direct line between the early peoples living in the Land of Israel, in the second millennium before the Christian Era, and the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in the 20th century, at the same time striving toward the creation of a new-old culture which would separate itself from Jewish tradition. The artist most closely associated with this movement was the sculptor Itzhak Danziger, who returned to the Land of Israel in 1938 after studying art in England. The new nationalism that Danziger's "Canaanite" art suggested, a nationalism that was anti-European and full of Eastern sensuality and exoticism, reflected the attitude of many of the people living in the Jewish community in the Land of Israel. "The dream of Danziger's generation", Amos Keinan wrote after Danziger's death, was "to merge with the Land of Israel and with the land, to create a specific image with recognizable signs, something that is from here and is us, and imprint the stamp of that something special that is us on history. Aside from nationalism, the artists created sculpture which expressed a symbolic expressionism in the spirit of British sculpture of the same period.
  In Tel Aviv Danziger  founded a sculpture studio in the courtyard of his father's hospital, and there he critiqued and taught young sculptors such as Benjamin Tammuz, Kosso Eloul, Yehiel Shemi, Mordechai Gumpel, and others.  In addition to Danziger's pupils, the studio became a gathering place for artists in other fields.  In this studio Danziger created his first significant works – "Nimrod" (1939) and "Shebaziya" (1939).
  From the moment it was first displayed, the statue "Nimrod" became the center of a dispute in the culture of Eretz Israel; in this sculpture Danziger presented the figure of Nimrod, the biblical hunter, as a lean youth, naked and uncircumcised, with a sword pressed close to his body, and a falcon on his shoulder. The form of the statue was reminiscent of the primitive art of the Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek cultures, and similar in spirit to European sculpture of this period. In its form the statue displayed a unique combination of homoerotic beauty and pagan idol worship. This combination was at the center of the criticism of the religious community in the Jewish settlement. At the same time other voices declared it the model for the 'new Jewish man'. In 1942 an article appeared in the newspaper "HaBoker" declaring that "Nimrod is not just a sculpture, it is the flesh of our flesh, the spirit of our spirit. It is a milestone and a monument. It is the epitome of ingenuity and daring, of monumentality, of the youthful rebellion that characterizes an entire generation...Nimrod will be forever young."
  The first showing of the sculpture in the "General Exhibition of the Young People of Eretz Israel", in Habima Theatre in May, 1942 engendered the persistent argument over the "Canaanite"  movement. Because of the exhibition, Yonatan Ratosh, founder of the movement, got in touch with him and requested a meeting with him.  The criticism against "Nimrod" and the Canaanites was coming not just from religious elements who, as mentioned above, protested against this representative of the pagan and the idolatrous, but also from secular critics who condemned the removal of everything "Jewish". To a large extent, "Nimrod" ended up in the middle of a dispute that had been started long before.
  In spite of the fact that Danziger later expressed doubts about "Nimrod" as a model for Israeli culture, many other artists adopted the Canaanite approach to sculpture. Images of idols and figures in the "primitive" style showed up in Israeli art until the 1970s. In addition, the influence of this group can be seen to a significant degree in the work of the "New Horizons" group, most of whose members experimented with the Canaanite style early in their artistic careers.
caption: The First Ones (1958) by Shoshanna Heimann
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