The Museum’s modern art collection consists mainly of paintings and sculpture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1980s. Its scope demonstrates the vitality and wide variety of trends that heralded and established Modernism in Europe and the United States. The collection has been built up steadily since 1932, thanks to private collectors, public figures and scions of culture who thought it fitting to make the artworks they possessed available to public viewing.
The collection has some notable focal points: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, and others; a selection of unique paintings by Marc Chagall; masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Kees van Dongen, and Amedeo Modigliani; a selection of works by Pablo Picasso from different periods; as well as works by Surrealist artists, including Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and Yves Tanguy.
The collection faithfully reflects the various expressions of art created in the second half of the twentieth century – such as works of the European Art Informel school; comprehensive bodies of works by Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti; works by German artists in the postwar period; and important works by Gerhard Richter and Günther Uecker.
American art of the 1950s was added to the collection in real time, thanks to a donation of 27 works by the collector Peggy Guggenheim. This is the largest body of works from her collection outside the United States, and represents trends in American Abstract Expressionism that dominated that period, including the economical and succinct abstraction of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others. Later additions to the collection are American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Alexander Calder, and British artists Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon.
In addition, the collection includes a body of early and rare works by the Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko – sculptures, paintings and “sculptural paintings” from the years 1908–21. In 1933, the German-Jewish collector Erich Goeritz lent the collection to the Museum, thereby saving it, since most of Archipenko’s works were damaged or destroyed in World War I bombings, and later declared “degenerate art” by the Nazis. It was only in 1947 that Archipenko himself learned that the Tel Aviv Museum has such an important collection of his early works. After Goeritz’s death in 1955, his family decided to donate 32 of these works to the Museum, and today it is the largest and most important collection of early Archipenko works in the world.
The collection of modern art continues to grow and expand thanks to long-term loans and donations. It attracts great interest of scholars in Israel and around the world, and lends its works to exhibitions worldwide.
Max Ernst, The Bewildered Planet, 1942
Oil on canvas, 110×140 cm
Gift of the artist
© ADAGP, Paris, 2019
Jean Dubuffet, Appearance in Court, 1958
Oil on canvas, 100×81 cm
Mizne-Blumental Collection
Bequest of Annette Celine, 2018
© ADAGP, Paris, 2019
Alexander Archipenko, Woman at Her Toilet (Woman before Mirror), 1916
Oil on wood, sheet metal and cardboard mounted on wood panel, 86×64.5×5 cm
Gift of the Goeritz Family, London, 1956, In memory of Erich Goeritz
© 2019 Estate of Alexander Archipenko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Marc Chagall, Solitude, 1933
Oil on canvas, 102×169 cm
Gift of the artist, through the State of Israel, 1953
© ADAGP, Paris, 2019
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer, 1916
Oil on canvas, 168×130 cm
The Mizne-Blumental Collection
Bequest of Annette Celine, 2018
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Claude Monet, Grainstack at Giverny, 1889
Oil on canvas, 65×81.5 cm
Anonymous gift, 1973
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Alexej von Jawlensky, Blonde Woman, 1911
Oil on cardboard, 53×49 cm
Collection Moshe and Sara Mayer
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Ury Lesser, "Holsteinische Schweiz" Landscape, 1908
Oil on canvas, 100×70 cm
Purchased through the gift of Mr. Arieh Shenkar, Tel Aviv, 1944
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Pierre־August Renoir, Nude Seen from the Back, ca. 1880–81
Oil on canvas, 81×66 cm
Bequest of Wilhem Weinberg, Amsterdam-Scarsdale, 1985, in memory of his wife and children
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
James Ensor, My Favorite Room, 1892
Oil on canvas, 80×100 cm
Gift of Oscar and Shulamit Fischer's children, in memory of their father, Tel Aviv, 1947
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled Improvisation V, 1914
Oil on canvas, 111×111 cm
The Mizne-Blumental Collection
Bequest of Annette Celine, 2018
© Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Jackson Pollock, Earth Worms, 1946
Oil on canvas, 97×68 cm
Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, through AICF, 1954
© 2019 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Mark Rothko, Number 24 (Untitled), 1951
Oil on canvas, 237×120.9 cm
Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. through the American Friends of Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1968
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Alberto Giacometti, Woman of Venice IX, 1956–57
Bronze, 34×16.5×113.7 cm
Acquisition through the Gilman Foundation, New York, U.S.A., with the assistance of Dina Ettinger and Tamar Rudich, 2001
© Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris + ADAGP, Paris) 2019
The Museum’s modern art collection consists mainly of paintings and sculpture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1980s. Its scope demonstrates the vitality and wide variety of trends that heralded and established Modernism in Europe and the United States. The collection has been built up steadily since 1932, thanks to private collectors, public figures and scions of culture who thought it fitting to make the artworks they possessed available to public viewing.
The collection has some notable focal points: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, and others; a selection of unique paintings by Marc Chagall; masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Kees van Dongen, and Amedeo Modigliani; a selection of works by Pablo Picasso from different periods; as well as works by Surrealist artists, including Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and Yves Tanguy.
The collection faithfully reflects the various expressions of art created in the second half of the twentieth century – such as works of the European Art Informel school; comprehensive bodies of works by Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti; works by German artists in the postwar period; and important works by Gerhard Richter and Günther Uecker.
American art of the 1950s was added to the collection in real time, thanks to a donation of 27 works by the collector Peggy Guggenheim. This is the largest body of works from her collection outside the United States, and represents trends in American Abstract Expressionism that dominated that period, including the economical and succinct abstraction of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others. Later additions to the collection are American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Alexander Calder, and British artists Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon.
In addition, the collection includes a body of early and rare works by the Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko – sculptures, paintings and “sculptural paintings” from the years 1908–21. In 1933, the German-Jewish collector Erich Goeritz lent the collection to the Museum, thereby saving it, since most of Archipenko’s works were damaged or destroyed in World War I bombings, and later declared “degenerate art” by the Nazis. It was only in 1947 that Archipenko himself learned that the Tel Aviv Museum has such an important collection of his early works. After Goeritz’s death in 1955, his family decided to donate 32 of these works to the Museum, and today it is the largest and most important collection of early Archipenko works in the world.
The collection of modern art continues to grow and expand thanks to long-term loans and donations. It attracts great interest of scholars in Israel and around the world, and lends its works to exhibitions worldwide.