A Haven National and Universal
Two years ago, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem became “renewed.” Now, an article in the New York Times places it on equal footing with the national museums of Britain, Austria, Russia, and the United States, while also emphasizing its uniqueness as an ever-evolving balance between the universal and the particular:
The world's great national museums are not modest places. Whether imperial in origin (as in Vienna) or popular in intention (in London), whether aristocratic in tone (in St. Petersburg) or eagerly embracing multitudes (our own Smithsonians), they reflect the vision of the countries that created them. In galleries we can discern how a nation thinks about itself and its place in the world by seeing what it values and how it tells its stories.
The Israel Museum adds another kind of intricacy to this reflection, because it is, like its nation, so young, and because the story it tells, also like that of its nation, is so old.
Two years ago the museum's director, James S. Snyder, unveiled the result of what he called a "renewal." It was a $100 million, three-year project: a reconsideration of the museum's collections, with its nearly 500,000 objects; a doubling of the exhibition space on its 20-acre campus; and an expansion of its structures, with new galleries and public spaces. While I am a little late to the party and have only a vague recollection of the less structured and more compressed energy of the museum's original incarnation some 30 years ago, the current effect is exhilarating.
The reworking manages to create a sense of monumentality without imposing any artificial grandeur. It combines a rigorous formality with an almost casual playfulness. And whether you enter through its newly constructed corridor radiant with translucent glass — a walkway that leads to the dazzling spectrum of color of Olafur Eliasson's 44-foot-wide "Whenever the Rainbow Appears" — or mount the steps of the outdoor promenade that leads to another commissioned work, Anish Kapoor's gleaming metallic sculpture "Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem," you feel a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, of contemplativeness and urgency, not unlike feelings inspired by the country itself.
The world's great national museums are not modest places. Whether imperial in origin (as in Vienna) or popular in intention (in London), whether aristocratic in tone (in St. Petersburg) or eagerly embracing multitudes (our own Smithsonians), they reflect the vision of the countries that created them. In galleries we can discern how a nation thinks about itself and its place in the world by seeing what it values and how it tells its stories.
The Israel Museum adds another kind of intricacy to this reflection, because it is, like its nation, so young, and because the story it tells, also like that of its nation, is so old.
Two years ago the museum's director, James S. Snyder, unveiled the result of what he called a "renewal." It was a $100 million, three-year project: a reconsideration of the museum's collections, with its nearly 500,000 objects; a doubling of the exhibition space on its 20-acre campus; and an expansion of its structures, with new galleries and public spaces. While I am a little late to the party and have only a vague recollection of the less structured and more compressed energy of the museum's original incarnation some 30 years ago, the current effect is exhilarating.
The reworking manages to create a sense of monumentality without imposing any artificial grandeur. It combines a rigorous formality with an almost casual playfulness. And whether you enter through its newly constructed corridor radiant with translucent glass — a walkway that leads to the dazzling spectrum of color of Olafur Eliasson's 44-foot-wide "Whenever the Rainbow Appears" — or mount the steps of the outdoor promenade that leads to another commissioned work, Anish Kapoor's gleaming metallic sculpture "Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem," you feel a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, of contemplativeness and urgency, not unlike feelings inspired by the country itself.