The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum with an unusual history. The core of its collection consists of works by artists of the first half of the 20th century, including some true masterpieces.
The museum opened shortly after the founding of Tel Aviv, long before Israel's independence. The entire collection was initially housed in the house of the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengoff.
A native of Bessarabia (Russian Empire), a people's activist, engineer Mikhail Yakovlevich Dizengoff settled in Jaffa in 1905. In 1909, sixty-six families gathered on the coastal dunes to draw lots for land plots: they were to establish the first Jewish town in Palestine. Meir and Tzina Dizengoff bought one of the plots and built a house. Meir became head of the municipality; when the district grew and became a city, he was elected mayor.
In 1930, the much-loved Tzina died. In memory of his wife, Meir donated the family home on Rothschild Boulevard to Tel Aviv. He proposed to open an art gallery there, the basis of which would be the Dizengoff family collection. At the opening of the museum in 1932, the mayor said: "It is impossible to build houses, pave streets and improve the city without thinking about aesthetics and harmony, without inculcating aesthetic taste in the population." Sixteen years later, David Ben-Gurion chose this famous building to proclaim Israel's Declaration of Independence. This is also where the country's parliament met at first.
Over time, the museum became cramped in this house. In 1971, most of the collection was moved to the main building on Shaul Ha-Melech Boulevard, designed by architects Dan Eitan and Yitzhak Yashar. Later, a west wing was added to it, designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen, and a sculpture garden was added.
The museum's collection of over 40,000 exhibits includes works by artists representing the art of the 20th century: Impressionists, Fauvists, German Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists, and Russian Constructivists. Here you can see paintings by Monet, Pizarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley, Matisse, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Chagall and Picasso. The star of the museum is the famous "Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer" by the famous Austrian modernist Gustav Klimt.
The museum has a very representative department of old European masters, including 130 works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jan Bruegel the Younger, Reynolds, Canaletto, Rigaud. In 1950, the museum also became the owner of paintings from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim, patroness of American abstractionist Paul Jackson Pollock. The gift included works by Pollock, Baziotis, Pousette-Dart, Tanga, Matta, and Masson.
Adjoining the museum is a sculpture garden named after the prominent Israeli fashion designer Lola Beer Ebner, who once designed uniforms for female soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces. There are outdoor sculptures by Calder, Gucci, Mayol, Lipschitz, Caro, Graham, as well as prominent Israeli artists such as Ullman, Berg, and Cohen-Levy.
