TAMA at 90 / Archive Encounter

“Dear Mr. Dizengoff! I would like to convey several things about the museum […] I now have the opportunity to deliberate over the value of this museum and what it brings. A beginning is good, this beginning is at times reminiscent of a painter who suddenly began painting […] thus making a mostly promising impression […] There is a sense that a beginning has been created of a Hebrew museum.”

Thus opened a letter from Chaim Atar (Aptaker) — a painter, one of the founders of kibbutz Ein Harod and the initiator of the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod — to Meir Dizengoff, Mayor of Tel Aviv and founder of Tel Aviv Museum, several weeks after the opening of the Museum on 2 April 1932. In his letter, Atar detailed his stance about the new museum’s value, goal and role.

Atar was not alone. During the Museum’s early years, many artists and intellectuals debated over its place and role, alongside the many discussions and deliberations over this question that concerned the Governing Board, headed by Dizengoff, and figures in Eretz Israel and overseas, who were involved in founding the art institute in Tel Aviv.

In celebrating TAMA’s 90th anniversary, we will return to those constitutive moments at an event to be held at the Archive on International Museum Day, 19 May 2022. We will examine the process of defining the Museum using the original documents and correspondence from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. We will also refer, from a perspective of 90 years, to the change that has taken place in the 21st century in the definition of a museum.
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Limited seats available