Nostalgia Sunday – The Levant Fair

September 19, 2010 - 9:39 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel 

Sukkot is festival and exhibition season in Israel which means everything will be celebrated, feted and displayed over the coming weeks. But, though they may not know it, they owe a debt to the granddaddy of all Israeli events, the Levant Fair.

Fairs in the Yishuv, the early Jewish settlement, first started in the 1920s as agricultural exhibitions but by the second half of the decade their nature had changed to commercial and industrial. According to Levant Fair collector and historian Dr. Arthur H. Groten, “The need to promote the Palestine of the Yishuv, as the Jews of Palestine were called, as a vital economic link between West and East reflected the cosmopolitan attitude of many of the new immigrants…”

The 1932 Palestine and Near East Fair was the first to be called a “Levant Fair” and “was the first to have official foreign governmental representation including Great Britain, U.S.S.R, Egypt, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, Poland, Latvia and Bulgaria. 831 foreign firms exhibited and 285,000 people attended.”

It was that year that the fair adopted a new mascot: a flying camel. (Groten relates “an apocryphal tale” that when Tel Aviv’s Mayor Meir Dizengoff said to his colleague, the Mayor of Jaffa that he wished for his city to host a Levant Fair similar to those held throughout the Near East, “he was told that it would happen ‘when camels fly’”). True or not, the logo was much loved; it appeared on stamps, and is still used today by the Israel Trade Fairs & Convention Center.

But things really got going in 1934, “through the construction of an entirely new complex on the banks of the Yarkon River by a group of young architects, trained in Europe, many at the Bauhaus, under the direction of Arieh El-Hanani. The fairgrounds were an integrated assemblage of International Style buildings. In fact, it was the largest such integrated grouping ever constructed… Over 600,000 visitors paid to attend an event that included 36 foreign governments and 2200 firms (1500 being foreign).”

El-Hanani also designed the sculpture “Hapoel HaIvri” (The Jewish Worker), one of the Yishuv’s first works of urban public art.

On a personal note: my Israeli mother was born in Jerusalem in 1929; five years later, her family came to live in Tel Aviv. So I like to think that maybe, just maybe, she was one of the children who climbed on the statue, sat on her mother’s knee during the opening ceremony audience or rode the “Luna Park” carousel.

The last fair, held in 1936, was not well-attended due to the increasingly troubled situation in Europe, the rise of Nazism and the war against the Jews, as well as the Arab revolt.

Over the years, the fairgrounds fell into disrepair and the pavilions used mainly as ceramic and tile warehouses. The port closed to ships in 1965. The fairgrounds were moved to North Tel Aviv. Only in 2001 did reconstruction of the historic Tel Aviv port commence and with it, the rehabilitation of the Bauhaus structures — those few that remain. However, the statue of a flying camel still sits atop a flagpole at the main entrance and the modernist statue of the Hebrew Worker has also survived.

Today’s photos come mainly from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, a rich source of historical images of the Middle East photographed from 1898 to 1946.

For more about the early days of Tel Aviv, see “City of Work and Prosperity”: The Levant Fair, part of the Eliasaf Robinson Tel Aviv Collection at Stanford University. And there are more great photographs of the Levant Fair on a site called Abraham Stern’s Tel Aviv.

Also, check out Dr. Arthur H. Groten’s wonderful collection of stamps, ephemera and additional photos of the fair in his online paper, Semiotics and the Levant Fairs of Palestine. It is an amazing and enjoyable read.

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Foto Friday – Face, Body at Bezalel

January 15, 2010 - 6:59 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Life 

Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art & Design will be holding a conference this coming Tuesday entitled “Face, Body”.

Bezalel is Israel’s oldest and most prestigious academy of art and design whose students in the arts, design and architecture become leaders in their fields in Israel and the world.


Photo by David Adika

The conference, hosted by Bezalel’s photography department, will deal with the ways in which the face and body is presented in the plastic arts, in poetry, film and video, as well as in philosophy and science.


Photos by Eyal Ben Dov

The long explanations put forth by the organizers: “The face and the body are material and likeness. The face and the body are both real and the presentation of the real or the similar that enables the existence of the self and the other (everyone is both self and other) in various spheres as well as in discourse about the matter. The face and the body can also be addressed in the context of space and time, power interactions, as concepts and perceptions, as a covering and as what is contained within the cover.”

In a word: verisimilitude.


Image by Reuven Kuperman

Speakers include some of Israel’s leading art photographers and videographers, including department head Micha Kirshner, Reuven Kuperman, Simcha Shirman, Miki Kratsman, David Adika, Eyal Ben Dov, and videographer Alona Friedberg.

Click on the links to learn more about some of Israel’s premiere photographers. More information about the conference can be found on the Bezalel website.

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Drawing, sculpting and designing women

November 19, 2008 - 4:20 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, History and Culture 

Sitting TorsoIt’s well known that women played a key role in the forging of Israel’s military, intellectual and agricultural successes in the early generations of the nation. Just ask the leadership of the Union of Creative Women in Israel.

But many argue that women’s role in Israel’s formative visual arts scene has been given the short end of the stick. A group of women scholars has recently undertaken an extensive research project exploring the matter, yielding a formidable report entitled Creative Women in Israel, 1920-1970. The volume chronicles the lives and accomplishments of some 51 female photographers, 28 female architects and 86 female painters/sculptors, many of whom were celebrated in their time but are sadly overlooked or under-respected now – and that’s not counting 35 more figures not covered in depth in the book but currently being examined by the group.

Now that the book is set to be published imminently by Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of the Arts, the school has organized an entire day-long conference surrounding the occasion.

Entitled Creative Women of the Visual Arts in Israel and taking place this Sunday from 10:15 a.m. into the evening hours, the conference has been planned by an academic board headed by Dr. Ruth Marcus of the TAU Department of Art History. Many local and international presenters are involved as well, including Dr. Ines Sonder of Potsdam’s Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies, speaking about under-celebrated architect Lotte Cohn; Dr. Ruth E. Iskin, Ben-Gurion University professor of the Arts, author of Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting; and Prof. Tamar Garb of London’s University College, speaking about Feminism, Art History and the Challenge of the Woman Artist.

Pictured is long-lost sculptress Sulamit Nem Salom’s bronze Sitting Torso, used by permission from Creative Women in Israel, 1920-1970.

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