Discover the work of Boris Schatz and the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. Learn about Bezalel's Passover Plate and its Seder influence.

Belarusian born Israeli artist. lived in germany studied at the Bezalel School. Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is Israel's national school of art. Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is Israel's oldest institution of higher education. The "Bezalel School of Art and Craft" was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz, who envisaged the creation of a national style of art blending classical Jewish/Middle Eastern and European traditions. The school opened in rented premises on Ethiopia Street. It moved to a complex of buildings constructed in the 1880s surrounded by a crenelated stone wall, owned by a wealthy Arab. In 1907, the property was purchased for Boris Schatz by the Jewish National Fund. Schatz lived on the campus with his wife and children. Bezalel's first class consisted of 30 young art students from Europe who successfully passed the entrance exam. Eliezer Ben Yehuda was hired to teach Hebrew to the students, who hailed from various countries and had no common language. In addition to traditional sculpture and painting, the school offered workshops that produced decorative art objects in silver, leather, wood, brass, and fabric. Many of the craftsmen were Yemenite Jewish silversmiths who had a long tradition of working in precious metals, as silver- and goldsmithing, which had been traditional Jewish occupations in Yemen. Yemenite immigrants were also frequent subjects of Bezalel artists. In 1912, Bezalel had one female student, Marousia (Miriam) Nissenholtz, who used the pseudonym Chad Gadya. Bezalel closed in 1929 in the wake of financial difficulties. After Hitler's rise to power, Bezalel's board of directors asked Josef Budko, who had fled Germany in 1933, to reopen it and serve as its director. The New Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts opened in 1935, attracting many teachers and students from Germany, many of them from the Bauhaus school shut down by the Nazis. Budko recruited Jakob Steinhardt and Mordecai Ardon to teach at the school, and both succeeded him as directors. In 1958, the first year that the prize was awarded to an organization, Bezalel won the Israel Prize for painting and sculpture. Bezalel Pavilion near Jaffa Gate Bezalel pavilion was a tin-plated wooden structure with a crenelated roof and tower built outside Jaffa Gate in 1912. It was a shop and showroom for Bezalel souvenirs. The pavilion was demolished by the British authorities six years later. Bezalel developed a distinctive style of art, known as the Bezalel school, which portrayed Biblical and Zionist subjects in a style influenced by the European jugendstil (art nouveau) and traditional Persian and Syrian art. The artists blended "varied strands of surroundings, tradition and innovation," in paintings and craft objects that invokes "biblical themes, Islamic design and European traditions," in their effort to "carve out a distinctive style of Jewish art" for the new nation they intended to build in the ancient Jewish homeland. Leading members of the school were Boris Schatz, Abel Pann, E. M. Lilien, Meir Gur-Aryeh, Zev Raban, Jacob Eisenberg, Jacob Steinhardt, Shmuel Ben David, Samuel Hirszenberg, and Hermann Struck. less

A Figure in Jerusalem, Oil on board, 57X62 cm. Signed.

Old wise face is painted in details, way the man is looking, his glance capture the attention. Schatz, the "father of Israeli art", was a founder of Bezalel.