As Promised

The selection of posters in the exhibition – about one percent out of the thousands of Israeli posters in the Museum’s collection – demonstrates the poster’s role as the most efficient tool of advertising and propaganda employed by the Israeli establishment until about fifty years ago.

Through familiar symbols, recognizable images, and short, catchy slogans these posters sought to strengthen the public’s Zionist consciousness, instill socialist values, and encourage viewers to “redeem” the nation’s lands and enlist in its defense forces. The clean vision they offered expressed sublime ideals and illustrated the Zionist dream – one that, as dreamers often do, turned a blind eye to reality.

It is precisely this dream and its aftermath that is the subject of the poster If You Will It, It Is No Dream, created in 2011 by David Tartakover, a pioneer of the Israeli political poster. As with other political posters that began to appear in the early 1970s, often choosing photographs as their visual basis, this work is part of a phenomenon that saw artists and designers taking a critical stance and seeking to represent reality as they saw it.

Many of the posters shown in the exhibition are from Tartakover’s private collection, recently donated to the Museum; three of them are his own works.