The most comprehensive collection of Israeli art makes its international debut

Over the course of the past century, Israeli art has grown and shifted while maintaining a distinct connective thread. Explorations of identity and place unite artists separated by generations and styles. Looking at the collective output of these diverse artists forms a portrait of Israel both socially and culturally through the 20th century.

The art collection of the Phoenix Group, compiled largely by their former founder Joseph Hackmey, who led the company until 2002, is one of the best examples of the full breadth of modern Israeli art. Many of these works, for historical reasons, were located in Europe and the US for much of the 20th century. ‘He understood from very early on that purchasing these works was bringing them home,’ Roni Gilat-Baharaff, International Senior Director at Christie’s, says of Hackmey.

From 23 February to 1 March, Christie’s New York will present A Hundred Years of Art in Israel: Selections of Important Art from the Phoenix Group Collection, a non-selling exhibition celebrating the singular vision behind the largest corporate Israeli art collection in Israel.

It will mark the first major international presentation of the collection, which has previously been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Ashdod Museum of Art, and is currently on view at the Ramat Gan Museum.

Amongst the highlights from the touring collection is Mordechai Ardon’s Venezia, from 1957. Born in Galicia in 1896, Ardon was a student of the Bauhaus school from 1921 to 1925. He settled in Jerusalem in 1933 and began teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design two years later.

Ardon’s style is abstract, but like that of his teacher Paul Klee, it is abstraction with a spiritual resonance. Informed equally by lived experience and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, Venezia presents shades which seem to vibrate against one another in a harmonious intersection of colour and form.

Ardon served as Bezalel’s director from 1940 to 1952 and later as the artistic adviser to the Ministry of Education and Culture of Israel.

His influence on subsequent generations of Israeli artists can be seen in Avigdor Arikha’s A Pause at the Easel, from 1990. Arikha, born in Romania in 1929, studied at Bezalel from 1946 to 1949 and pursued abstraction passionately. He emigrated to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1949 and by the mid-1960s had given up painterly abstraction in favour of drawing and printmaking.

His work bridged the modernist avant-garde and the centuries-old tradition of figure painting. He composed his works from natural light and in-person subjects, completing them in a single sitting. This approach echoes his close friend Henri Cartier-Bresson’s instant décisif, capturing all the chaos and beauty of life in a single, decisive moment.

The artist and educator Raffi Lavie, also of Arikha’s generation, primarily made art in and about his native region. Born in Tel Aviv in 1937, Lavie is considered one of the most important Israeli artists and teachers of the 20th century.

He is renowned for bringing the international avant-garde into an Israeli context. His paintings, often compared to those of Cy Twombly, are informed by Abstract Expressionism but distinctly embrace the spirit of the Tel Aviv streets, covered in scrawled-over poster remains.

His frenetic mark-making challenged the more lyrical sensibilities of Tel Aviv’s New Horizons movement, prompting him and a few other artists to form Ten Plus in 1965. The group prioritised avant-garde ideas, such as Pop art, collage, found art and spontaneity in their compositions, ushering in the contemporary movement in Israel.

The precedent set by Lavie and Ten Plus paved the way for artists like David Reeb. An a artist whose works often comment on current social issues, Reeb is amongst the best known contemporary artists working in Israel today.

Reeb’s Camel/Time (1989) interweaves local and international themes, using layered references to recognisable American and Israeli brands that alter the reading of the work depending on the perspective of the viewer.

Photography is the preferred medium of the Bezalel-trained contemporary artist David Adika, born in 1970, who is currently the head of the photography department at Bezalel. From his series on kitsch objects to his research on non-European Jewish identities, Adika highlights the influence of local culture on Israeli modernism. In Leaves, the coloured surfaces come from the Calathea, a popular non-native plant found in Israeli homes, making reference to Israel as a culture of immigrants.

Encompassing modern and contemporary masters who have synthesised wide-ranging international influences from abroad with local traditions, the Phoenix collection provides a scholarly and heartfelt record of the past century’s artistic developments in Israel. In addition to the exhibition, two works from the collection — Mordechai Ardon's View of the Wailing Wall, and Reuven Rubin's Olive Trees in the Galilee — will be sold to benefit young Israeli arts.

‘The breadth and quality of this collection is what makes it so powerful,’ says the Phoenix Group’s current CEO Eyal Ben-Simon. ‘In sharing it with the world, we are sharing works of art that we hold dear and that are part of who we are.’