Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Hebrew: בצלאל, אקדמיה לאמנות ועיצוב) is a public college of design and art located in Jerusalem. Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz,[1] Bezalel is Israel's oldest institution of higher education and is considered the most prestigious art school in the country. It is named for the Biblical figure Bezalel, son of Uri (Hebrew: בְּצַלְאֵל בֶּן־אוּרִי), who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 35:30). The art created by Bezalel's students and professors in the early 1900s is considered the springboard for Israeli visual arts in the 20th century.
Bezalel's 460,000 sq ft main campus is located adjacent to the Russian Compound in the city center.[2][3] The architecture department remains at Bezalel's nearby historic campus.[4]
As of 2023, Bezalel offers ten bachelor's departments and five masters programs; it employs more than 500 lecturers and enrolls 2,500 students (2,200 undergraduate; 300 graduate).[5]
In 1903 Boris Schatz proposed establishing an art school directly to Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism. Schatz envisaged the creation of a Zionist style of art blending classical Jewish/Middle Eastern and European traditions. In 1905, the seventh Zionist Congress passed a resolution supporting the establishment of a Zionist school of art in Palestine.[6] The Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts was officially founded the next year in 1906, with assistance from E.M. Lilien.[7] The school opened in rented premises on Ethiopia Street in Jerusalem. It moved to a complex of buildings constructed in the 1880s surrounded by a crenelated stone wall, owned by a wealthy Arab person.[8] In 1907, the property was purchased for Boris Schatz by the Jewish National Fund. Schatz lived on the campus with his wife and children.[9] Bezalel's first class consisted of 30 young art students from Europe who successfully passed the entrance exam. Eliezer Ben Yehuda was hired to teach Hebrew to the students, who hailed from various countries and had no common language.[10] His wife, Hemda Ben-Yehuda, worked as Boris Schatz's secretary.[11]
In addition to traditional sculpture and painting, the school offered workshops that produced decorative art objects in silver, leather, wood, brass, and fabric. Many of the craftsmen were Yemenite Jewish silversmiths who had a long tradition of working in precious metals, as metal smithing was a traditional Jewish occupation in Yemen. Yemenite immigrants were also frequent subjects of Bezalel artists.
In 1912, Bezalel had one female student, Marousia (Miriam) Nissenholtz, who used the pseudonym Chad Gadya.[13]
Bezalel closed in 1929 in the wake of financial difficulties. After Hitler's rise to power, Bezalel's board of directors asked Josef Budko, who had fled Germany in 1933, to reopen it and serve as its director.[14] The New Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts opened in 1935, attracting many teachers and students from Germany, many of them from the Bauhaus school shut down by the Nazis.[15] Budko recruited Jakob Steinhardt and Mordecai Ardon to teach at the school, and both succeeded him as directors.[14]
In 1958, the first year that the prize was awarded to an organization, Bezalel won the Israel Prize for painting and sculpture.[16]
In 2009 Bezalel announced plans to relocate to a new campus adjacent to the Russian Compound, as part of a municipal plan to revive Jerusalem's downtown. The new campus—officially named the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel campus—opened in 2023.[3] It was designed by Tokyo-based award-winning architectural firm SANAA in collaboration with Israeli firms Nir Kutz Architects and HQ Architects.[2]
Bezalel pavilion was a tin-plated wooden structure with a crenelated roof and tower built outside Jaffa Gate in 1912. It was a shop and showroom for Bezalel souvenirs. The pavilion was demolished by the British authorities six years later.
Bezalel style
Bezalel developed a distinctive style of art, known as the Bezalel school, which portrayed Biblical and Zionist subjects in a style influenced by the European jugendstil (Art Nouveau) and traditional Persian and Syrian art. The artists blended "varied strands of surroundings, tradition and innovation," in paintings and craft objects that invokes "biblical themes, Islamic design and European traditions," in their effort to "carve out a distinctive style of Jewish art" for the new nation they intended to build in the ancient Jewish homeland.[19]
Decorative ceramic tiles with figurative motives with both biblical and Zionist scenes were created in the 1920s at the Bezalel School, with some surviving until today. In Tel Aviv some of the best-known examples are the following:
^"Historical Timeline". Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Archived from the original on April 23, 2024. Retrieved October 30, 2024. "1906: Prof. Boris Schatz founds Bezalel in Jerusalem. The goal: 'Training the people of Jerusalem for handicrafts, forming an original Jewish art and supporting Jewish artists, and finding a visual expression for the desired national spiritual independence - an independence that seeks to synthesize the European artistic tradition and the Jewish design tradition in the East and West, and combine it with the local culture of the Land of Israel.' The carpet weaving department is opened, followed by the stone carving department." Note that much of this information only appears on the much more detailed Hebrew version of the page.
^ ab"The New Campus". Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
^המועצה להשכלה גבוהה - מאגר מוסדות [Council for Higher Education Registry of Institutes]. che.org.il (in Hebrew). Archived from the original on February 7, 2009. Retrieved August 4, 2010.
^Zandberg, Esther (2010-12-09). "No Way Home". Haaretz. Retrieved 2024-01-01.
