The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...

, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

. It was established in 1932 in a building that was the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff

Meir Dizengoff

Meir Dizengoff was a Zionist politician and the first mayor of Tel Aviv.-Biography:Meir Dizengoff was born in 1861 in the village of Akimovici near Orgeyev, Bessarabia. In 1878, his family moved to Kishinev, where he graduated from high school and studied at the polytechnic school...

. The Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein , a Polish born Australian-American business magnate. She is the founder and eponym of Helena Rubinstein, Incorporated, which made her one of the world's richest women.-Early life:...

 Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. The museum moved to its current location on King Saul Avenue in 1971. Another wing was added in 1999
and a sculpture garden was established.

The museum houses a comprehensive collection of classical and contemporary art, especially Israeli art, a sculpture garden and a youth wing.

Permanent collection

The Museum's collection represents some of the leading artists of the first half of the 20th century and many of the major movements of modern art in this period: Fauvism

Fauvism

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

, German Expressionism

German Expressionism

German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin, during the 1920s...

, Cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

, Futurism

Futurism (art)

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...

, Russian Constructivism

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...

, the De Stijl

De Stijl

De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...

 movement and Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

, French art, from the Impressionists and Post- Impressionists

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...

 to the School of Paris

School of Paris

School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...

 including works of Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine

Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....

, and key works by Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

 from the Blue and Neo-Classical Period to his Late Period, and Surrealists works of Joan Miró

Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

.

In 1989, the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...

 created a giant two-panel mural especially for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It hangs in the entrance foyer.

The Collection includes several masterpieces, among them the painting Friedericke Maria Beer, 1916 by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...

 and Untitled Improvisation V, 1914, by the Russian master Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...

.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, donated in 1950, includes 36 works by Abstract

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 and Surrealist artists, including works of Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...

, William Baziotes

William Baziotes

William Baziotes was an American painter influenced by Surrealism and was a contributor to Abstract Expressionism.-Life and career:...

, and Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart was an American Abstract Expressionist painter.-Biography:He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Valhalla, New York. Although Richard never attended art school, his father, Nathaniel J. Pousette-Dart, was a painter and writer on art. He moved to Manhattan in 1937...

, and Surrealists works by Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...

, Roberto Matta

Roberto Matta

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren , better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art....

, and André Masson

André Masson

André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...

.

Sculptures are displayed in the entrance plaza and in an internal sculpture garden.

Temporary exhibitions

In addition to a permanent collection, the museum hosts temporary exhibitions of individual artists' work and group shows curated around a common theme.

The New Wing

On 2 November 2011 the new wing Herta and Paul Amir Building building on the western side of the museum opened. The wing houses Israeli Architecture Archive, and a new section of Photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 and Visual arts

Visual arts

The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...

, in a total of 19,000sq meters of space located over five floors, three above ground and two below. The new wing was designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen

Preston Scott Cohen

Preston Scott Cohen is a Boston based designer and the Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design . While Mr. Cohen is not a registered architect, he is a celebrated building designer and is Principal at Preston Scott Cohen, Inc...

.

External links

• The Tel Aviv Museum of Art
• Tel Aviv Museum of Art at ilMuseums.com