Modern Art

Twentieth-Century Art
Major collections on display: Mizne-Blumental Collection, Erich Goeritz Collection, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Susan and Anton Roland-Rosenberg Collection

A comprehensive exhibition of key trends and artists in 20th-century Europe and post-WWII USA.

The Mizne-Blumental Collection offers a comprehensive exhibition of early 20th-century Europe, faithfully representing many tendencies and featuring rare works of art. The works on view include Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (1916), which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, before its arrival at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Child in a Chair (Maia) (1939) by Pablo Picasso, painted at the beginning of World War II; Georges Braque’s work, Still Life with a Pipe (1911); and Contrast of Forms (1913) by Fernand Léger, from an early series by that title. In addition to a impressive group of Cubist works, the collection also features prominent Fauvist painters, such as Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees van Dongen; works by Blue Rider artists, such as Alexey von Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky; by Surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and René Magritte. The collection has been on display in the Museum’s permanent exhibition since 1993. The Mizne-Blumental collection has been on permanent display in the gallery of that name since 1993. In the spring of 2018, sixty of the Mizne-Blumental Collection were donated to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The Mizne-Blumental collection is on display alongside other works from the Museum’s collection, selected from two other unique collections in its holdings: a body of early works (from 1908 to 1921) by the Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko, and 36 works donated by the collector Peggy Guggenheim to the Museum in the early 1950s — the largest donation made by her outside the United States. This donation included, among others, works by Marc Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the First Half of the 20th Century: The Moshe and Sara Mayer Collection (long-term loan)
Temporarily closed

The works in this display span a century, from 1866 to 1968, and belong mainly to four major schools of early Modernism: Impressionism & Post-Impressionism in the late 19th century; Picasso and Cubism; Fauvism and Expressionism; and the School of Paris.

The Moshe and Sara Mayer Collection includes the most significant group of Pablo Picasso’s work at the Museum, including Woman with a Red Underskirt (1921), Farewell of the Fisherman (1902) from his Blue Period, Mother and Child by the Sea (1901), and Musketeer with a Pipe (1968) — as well as major works by Pierre-August Renoir, such as Algerian Woman (1882) and The Bather (1894; Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond (1919); a unique work by Joan Miró, At the Bottom of the Shell (1948); and other important works by modernist masters, such as Vincent van Gogh’s The Shepherdess (1889); Paul Gauguin’s Barbaric Tales (1892); Alexej van Jawlensky’s Blonde Woman (1919); Paul Cézanne’s Houses at the Side of the Road II (1881); Edgar Degas’ Ballet Scene (1887–90); and Henri Matisse’s Woman with Gladiolus Flowers (1922).

Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the School of Paris: The Simon and Marie Jaglom Collection (long-term loan)
Temporarily closed

This exhibition brings together the key figures of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, active in France in the second half of the 19th century, and the Jewish Paris School — immigrant artists, many of them Jews, active in early 20th-century Paris.

The Simon and Marie Jaglom Collection began with two paintings by Alfred Sisley, one of the Impressionist landscape painters who used to paint directly from nature. Other landscape paintings — such as Apple Trees in Bloom (1900) by Claude Monet, Abbeville Street And The Church Of Saint Vulfran (1894) by Eugene Boudin, and Camile Pissarro’s Windmill at Knokke (1894) — reinforced this trend in the collection.

Many of the artists whose works are on display at the gallery were based in Paris, which served in the early 20th century as an artistic melting pot and nexus of many avant-garde movements. The immigrant artists who came together in the city and produced their work there, each in their own distinctive style, became known as the School of Paris. They included several important Jewish artists, among them Amedeo Modigliani, Moïse Kisling, and Chaim Soutine, represented in this collection.

The Jaglom collection is not presented as a discrete entity: its works are displayed alongside other works from the museum’s collection, as part of the collection of works of that period and from the history of modern painting in general. Apart from Neo-Impressionist works, the gallery also presents paintings by Max Liebermann, and Lesser Ury — German painters of the turn of the twentieth century, whose work combined the innovations of Impressionism with traditional academic painting.

Another important artist who is featured extensively in this gallery is Marc Chagall. He became a close friend of the Tel Aviv Museum soon after its founding, and even contributed the first official artwork of its collection — his painting Jew with Torah (1925).