Art Museums

Dear Friends,

Without actually planning to, I’ve been to two art museums in the last week. (One because my friend’s boyfriend thought it would be cool and the other was for another friend’s birthday.) The second was the Haifa Museum of Art. It was primarily modern art and I found a lot of it to be creepy and/or very weird. There was a cool exhibit with pictures of bats taken in Haifa during the lockdown. There were also three paintings by Yehoshua Grossbard which looked vaguely impressionist but weren’t.

“In Wadi Nisnas, 1961” by Yehoshua Grossbard (Image source) — Wadi Nisnas is an area of Haifa that is nice to walk around in. The Melkite Cathedral is there.

The first museum was in Caesarea Maritima (which, incidentally is where Benjamin Natanyahu, the Prime Minister lives). They have a surprisingly large collection of sculptures by Salvador Dali!

“L’Unicorne” by Salvador Dali (Image Source) — you can’t really tell in this picture, but the hole that the unicorn’s horn is sticking through is shaped like a heart.

A. I didn’t know Dali did sculptures (for those of you who don’t recall, Dali is the surrealist painter who liked melted clocks and then reverted to the Christianity of his childhood and did some weird/thought-provoking religious art).

B. How did Israel end up with a bunch of his art? He wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have anything to do with Israel. But also, the University of Haifa has a Monet or two with a bunch of other impressionist art; and Haifa has the only museum of Japanese art in the Middle East (which has been closed since COVID-19 started otherwise I would tell you more about it). Apparently, Tel Aviv has a bunch of Bauhaus architecture as well. So, maybe Israel just has a panache for acquiring famous art and/or artists?

Pax, Friends!

DS