Search

The existence, or lack thereof, of a distinguishable Israeli style remains a central question in the historiography of Israeli art and design. This a examines tensions produced by this debate between the 1940s and 1960s—a formative period of Israeli nation-building—as manifested in the design and pedagogical ideology of handweaver Julia Keiner (1900–1992), who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Germany in 1936 and founded the textile department at the New Bezalel School of Art and Craft. I argue that, for Keiner, good design was based on objective, universal principles stemming from the interrelation of process and material, as well as the objective laws of nature. However, her work was ineluctably entangled with this search for a distinctly Hebrew or Israeli style. This essay shows how each of the textile department's two fields of training—weaving and embroidery—reflected tensions between Keiner's universalist approach and local efforts to establish such a national style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1934, the American textile designer Ruth Reeves traveled to Guatemala to study and collect Indigenous textiles that would inspire a group of her own pieces. The 1935 Guatemalan Exhibition of Textiles and Costumes displayed Reeves's designs directly next to their Guatemalan sources. While Reeves repeatedly claimed that she created her designs "in the spirit, rather than in the letter" of the Guatemalan textiles, her methods of adaptation ranged from allusive to direct. Thus, the exhibition's unusual structure was balanced by curatorial devices used to distinguish the two groups of works. This essay argues that Reeves's exhibition challenged common concepts of modern authenticity and her own self-image as an original artist-designer. Furthermore, I contend that it was precisely the location of Reeves's work at the intersection of art and design that enabled her to occupy this complex position in regard to her cross-cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]