jerusalem | The Israel Museum has proudly announced a year-long series of special exhibitions and programs to mark its 40th anniversary.
The eight-part exhibition series, entitled “Beauty and Sanctity,” is drawn largely from the museum’s holdings and includes some notable recent acquisitions, as well as a few masterworks on loan from major institutions abroad. The works on loan will reflect the range of disciplines represented in the museum’s collections, which span art, archaeology, and Judaica and Jewish ethnography. In some of the shows, these disparate sections will be brought together.
The museum has already opened the first of these exhibitions, the “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” show of saints in European art. “The Beauty of Sanctity: Masterworks from Every Age,” the central exhibition in the series, opens March 29 and examines how objects from ancient to contemporary achieve sanctified status, through either ritual use or their aesthetic quality.
It begins with Neolithic masks reflecting the first signs of organized cultic practices and of humans’ attempts to reflect upon themselves in material form, leading to the emergence of the roots of modern monotheism. The exhibition also presents in a new context such masterworks as Nicolas Poussin’s “Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.”
The museum has also embarked on a major rehanging of its modernist section, featuring large works by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Sam Francis. Motherwell’s intellectual approach helped set the serious tone of the abstract expressionist movement. His painting “Havana” makes dramatic use of bold, black ovals and rectangles that float on a white ground, and primary blue and yellow bands, to evoke the “states of feeling” he strove to express. Rothko’s stacked expanses of color with blurred edges seem to encompass emotions from tragedy to ecstasy.
In Louis’ stain paintings, color is poured onto and into raw canvas, creating his signature flowing stripes of carefully controlled shapes. Francis, a second-generation abstract expressionist, used a highly controlled, even contrived, drip and splash technique that was distinct from Pollock’s instinctual method of painting. Francis’ asymmetrical balance of color against blank areas of canvas also reflects his strong interest in things Japanese; he even had a certain command of the language.