Reuven Rubin at Tel Aviv Museum of Art – a Zionist dream

The show is complemented by works of Israeli artists, some of whom were active during Rubin’s time, and others later: Arie Aroch, Joshua (Shuki) Borkovsky, Moshe Gershuni, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Hagit Lalo, Raffi Lavie, and Moshe Mokady.

“Their hurried arrival at TAMA introduced a rare institutional moment: a selection of Rubin’s works from the Museum’s collection was reunited with those usually housed in the city’s historic center,” states TAMA’s website. The result is an exhibition that adorns the Israeli art scene.

Reuven Rubin (1893-1974), whose name is derived from his bilingual signature – “Reuven” in Hebrew and “Rubin” in English – was born Reuven Zelicovici in Galați, Romania, into a poor hassidic family with no artistic connections.

As for the exhibition’s title, curator Dalit Matatyahu said, “The idea of hospitality came from the fact that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is the host of Rubin’s paintings, but then it evolved to the notion of hospitality in the way [Emmanuel] Levinas and [Jacques] Derrida wrote about it.

Because Reuven [Rubin] is both a guest and the host of other artists, hospitality in this context is envisioned as a response to the most essential and urgent imperative of our time — a call for sensitivity and profound responsibility toward the Other.”

The curator also explained why she expanded the exhibition to include paintings by other artists: “We are always looking at art of the past through contemporary eyes. In these terrible days, I felt I couldn’t present the Zionist dream [just] the way Reuven Rubin portrayed it.

"The paintings of Lavie, Gershuni, Aroch, and others give a wider, sometimes a political, context to Reuven [Rubin]. The key [to the selection] was the tension between the figurative works of Rubin and the abstract work from our collection.”

Nevertheless, the most important and dominant artwork in the show is Rubin’s. For fans of Rubin’s art, this exhibition is an opportunity to revisit his work. For those who have never encountered it, it is a must-see.

In my opinion, Rubin’s art is like a guide to the complexities of Israel: subjective, artistic, and somewhat dreamy, but still guiding. His paintings, like essays or novels, tell stories.

Nearly a decade ago, after my first visit to the Rubin Museum, I made a note: “The tastes of Gauguin in his earlier work and Chagall in later, plus the spices of Israel! I love it!” These were my personal associations.

I was captivated by Rubin’s way of combining European artistic traditions and techniques with local themes, nature, the Israeli light, as well as Jewish traditions, folklore, and biblical motifs.

His works depict Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, as a spiritual and cultural home for people of diverse backgrounds. Rubin painted Jews and Arabs, pioneers and shepherds, farmers and merchants, poets and artists, devout members of the old Yishuv, Yemenis, Bukharans, and new immigrants, living in harmony.

His landscapes, as well as the images of Jerusalem, Ein Kerem, Galilee, and Tiberias, and the small villages, managed to capture the tranquility of these places.

Perhaps it was a dreamlike story, poetic images that combined his imagination with the real-life images he saw in the 1920s and beyond. Perhaps, however, his eyes captured what others missed.

Rubin’s self-portraits and images of his family brought viewers closer together, as if they were his acquaintances – at least that’s how I felt when visiting his museum.

His life story is special in itself. Rubin showed artistic talent from early childhood. Although his religious parents did not encourage him to develop his talents, he continued to paint and eventually gained recognition. In 1912, at the age of 19, he received a scholarship to study at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.

When I recently met with Carmela Rubin, the curator and artistic director of the Rubin Museum, who is Reuven Rubin’s daughter-in-law, she told me that studying at Bezalel was his way of getting to Eretz Israel.

“He had this Zionist dream of coming to the Land of Israel and studying in Jerusalem; the scholarship enabled it. He wanted to be a Jewish painter here,” she said.

The school, however, disappointed him. The story goes that he disliked the way art was taught at Bezalel at the time. “It was crafts-oriented; they taught him to carve wood or ivory. He wanted art and painting,” she said.

Within a year he left for Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. The outbreak of World War I forced him to leave France. He returned to Romania, and in 1921 he traveled to New York, where he had an exhibition sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz. This helped him establish himself as an artist before returning to Mandatory Palestine in 1922, where he settled permanently.

“At first, he lived in Jerusalem. [Avraham] Melnikov, the sculptor, allowed him to use his studio in the Old City, but after a few months he moved to Tel Aviv. He loved the sea, the sandy dunes, and he really felt that Tel Aviv was like a clean page, that he could forge himself. Jerusalem is Jerusalem, the tradition and the orthodoxy; Tel Aviv was a new beginning that fitted his needs and his desires,” she said.

Asked about her favorite paintings of her father-in-law, she couldn’t choose just one. “Many paintings, mostly from the 1920s, his early encounter with the land and with the people and with the climate, and, of course, the Zionist ideology that brought him here in the first place. His enthusiasm, his irresistible attraction to the Orient, to the freedom that he felt here.”

Asked if there was any specific painting that came to mind while she was telling me the above, she replied: “In the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum [of Art], there’s a little painting of the seashore near Geula Street [in Tel Aviv, five minutes away from Rubin’s former residence, now the Rubin Museum]. There is an electrical lamp in it; it’s really an encapsulation of everything of this new beginning.”

Reuven Rubin started living on Bialik Street at the end of the WW II. “In 1939, he traveled to the US with his wife, who was American, and they (luckily for them) got stuck there for the duration of the war.

“In 1945, at the end of the war, with their baby son, David, they took the first ship to Palestine, and they rented the second floor of this building. The first floor was rented out to the offices of the Jewish Agency. A few years later, they had inhabited both floors, and later on they bought the house from its landlord.

“They lived there until he died in 1974. A month before he passed away, he bequeathed the house and the paintings to the Tel Aviv Municipality for the museum,” Carmela Rubin recounted.

She recalls her father-in-law as a very warm person. She said she regrets that she didn’t ask him the questions that later, after he was gone, she wished she would have asked. She met him only in the last decade of his life, but she has dedicated more than 40 years to keeping his legacy alive.

The Rubin Museum was opened in 1983. Now undergoing renovation, it is slated to reopen early this winter. When Rubin’s paintings were evacuated to TAMA during the Iran missile attack, TAMA director Tania Coen-Uzzielli not only gave shelter to the artwork but also came up with the idea of a joint exhibition.

Carmela Rubin said it was interesting for her to see her father-in-law’s paintings, so well known to her, on walls other than those of the Rubin Museum, in TAMA’s larger space, in an exhibition curated by someone else, not by her.

The art of the Jewish artist who, more than 100 years ago, had a dream of becoming a Jewish artist in Israel. Rubin not only succeeded but did more, becoming one of the founders of Israeli art and creating his unique artistic style, a palette of colors and light, and the local stories, on canvas.

At the opening of the exhibition in August, Coen-Uzzielli enthusiastically said: “Don’t read the descriptions near the paintings; just go and see!” 