Tower of David Period
The “Tower of David Period” is the nickname which describes Israeli art during the 1920s. The nickname was coined as a result of the exhibition that took place in the Tower of David during that period. Instead of one artistic direction, this period was characterized by artistic works of conflicting styles, reflecting the worldview of the artists with regard to the social, political, and artistic reality within the Land of Israel and outside of it. Alongside the art created at “Bezalel”, which was characterized by decorative motifs and the influence of ars nova, the young Land-of-Israel artists produced works of art that reflected a variety of modernist influences. Background: The Land of Israel at the Beginning of the 20th Century The variety of expressions and styles in the Land of Israel in the "Tower of David Period" reflects the historic and decisive division in the history of the Jewish people which preceded this period and continued through the days of the Yishuv, the body of Jewish residents in Palestine, before the establishment of the State of Israel, under the British Mandate. The Yishuv community had been caught up in an accelerated process of change since the First Aliyah in 1881. The aspiration of the elite groups of new immigrants was not just to settle the Holy Land and to implement an emotional and spiritual awakening there, like most of their predecessors from the “Old Yishuv”, but also to fashion it in their own image and identity; this included, according to their own consciousness, both old and traditional elements and new and revolutionary elements, intertwined in a unique ideological treatise. From the beginning of the 20th century, people of the Second Aliyah worked to change the status and situation of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel. The decisive compensation for their efforts came with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the events that followed in its wake: in 1917 the Russian Revolution took place and the Bolsheviks seized the government; the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires dissolved into individual nations; and even the victorious Colonial powers, headed by Britain and France, began in effect a process of convergence. After the signing of the peace agreements, and as a result of them, a new world order prevailed; and in the Land of Israel, the British Mandate government slowly took root, beginning with the Balfour Declaration and the entry of the army into the Land of Israel, effecting a gradual occupation in 1918, the beginning of the military government, and later the civil government in 1920, and ending in the publication of the first “White Book” in 1922. The British in fact expressed support for the Zionist leadership, when they allowed delegations of the Zionist Commission and Hadassah to come to the Land of Israel and found the basis for declaring future Jewish sovereignty there; on the other hand they hampered aliyah to the Land of Israel and disbanded the Jewish Legion, which they had recruited during World