Plastic arts and nation‐building in Israel

This article begins as an attempt to analyse an apparently paradoxical situation created by two events, which occurred simultaneously in 1948: the establishment of Israel as an independent state and the emergence of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) group of artists, acknowledged as the most renowned local artists at the time. The creation of the state of Israel may be considered the high point of Jewish nationalism, when the nation celebrated its distinctiveness. On the other hand, Ofakim Hadashim was a group of intellectuals who aspired to disengage their artistic work from the dominant political processes of the time. The basic claim of its members was l'art pour l'art, which ostensibly contradicted the significance of the general political process. This situation is highly interesting since it challenges the general sociological assumptions about the role of intellectuals in nation‐building processes, and also contradicts the usual explanation regarding the Israeli state‐building process. It concludes that an explanation of the social complexity existing in 1948 can be found in an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted phenomenon embracing a diversity of inherently contradictory practices.