Matan Ben Cnaan’s monumental painting The Bureaucrat presents a dramatic moment involving a large crowd of women, men, and children in an open landscape. What is happening? Who is the “bureaucrat” standing at the center, clipboard in hand? The eminent Israeli author David Grossman took a long, hard look at this work and proposed a reading that scrutinizes details while offering a broad overview.

The creativity of Avner Katz (1939–2020) rested firmly on three pillars: illustration, painting, and writing. And each one supported the other, adding to the remarkable diversity of Katz’s distinctive work. The exhibition presents self-portraits that feature text and image in varying doses. Seen together, they enrich our understanding of the man and his unusual art: a writer who painted pictures and a painter who wrote metaphors.

In December 1919, following a stormy passage from Odessa, the SS Ruslan landed at the port of Jaffa. This ship is often called the Mayflower of the Land of Israel, since its 600 passengers included many figures who would enter the Zionist pantheon: intellectuals and ideologues, artists and poets, leaders and activists.