The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is currently hosting a unique exhibition titled "Reuven Rubin: Be My Guest," featuring works by the renowned Israeli artist Reuven Rubin. The exhibition came about under extraordinary circumstances following a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, when the Rubin Museum, housed in the former residence of Reuven Rubin, sustained damage from the shock wave of a ballistic missile explosion on a nearby street. As a result, Rubin's paintings were evacuated to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for safekeeping.
The exhibition features works from both the Rubin Museum and Tel Aviv Museum of Art collections, creating what the museum describes as "a rare institutional moment" where Rubin's works from the museum's collection were reunited with those usually housed in the city's historic center. The show is complemented by works from other Israeli artists, including some who were active during Rubin's time and others from later periods: Arie Aroch, Joshua (Shuki) Borkovsky, Moshe Gershuni, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Hagit Lalo, Raffi Lavie, and Moshe Mokady.
Reuven Rubin (1893-1974), whose name derives from his bilingual signature – Reuven in Hebrew and Rubin in English – was born Reuven Zelicovici in Galați, Romania, into a poor Hasidic family with no artistic connections. Despite these humble beginnings, he became one of the founders of the Eretz Yisrael style of Israeli art. His works are now included in the collections of major international art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beyond his artistic achievements, Rubin served as Israel's first diplomatic representative in Romania from 1948 to 1950 and received the Israel Prize in 1974.
Curator Dalit Matatyahu explained the exhibition's title, saying, "The idea of hospitality came from the fact that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is the host of Rubin's paintings, but then it evolved to the notion of hospitality in the way [Emmanuel] Levinas and [Jacques] Derrida wrote about it. Because Reuven [Rubin] is both a guest and the host of other artists, hospitality in this context is envisioned as a response to the most essential and urgent imperative of our time – a call for sensitivity and profound responsibility toward the Other."
Matatyahu also addressed her decision to expand the exhibition beyond Rubin's works alone. "We are always looking at art of the past through contemporary eyes. In these terrible days, I felt I couldn't present the Zionist dream [just] the way Reuven Rubin portrayed it," she explained. "The paintings of Lavie, Gershuni, Aroch, and others give a wider, sometimes a political, context to Reuven [Rubin]. The key [to the selection] was the tension between the figurative works of Rubin and the abstract work from our collection."
Rubin's artistic journey began early, showing talent from childhood despite his religious parents' lack of encouragement for artistic pursuits. In 1912, at age 19, he received a scholarship to study at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem. According to Carmela Rubin, the curator and artistic director of the Rubin Museum who is also Rubin's daughter-in-law, "studying at Bezalel was his way of getting to Eretz Israel. He had this Zionist dream of coming to the Land of Israel and studying in Jerusalem; the scholarship enabled it. He wanted to be a Jewish painter here."
However, the Bezalel experience proved disappointing. "The school disappointed him," Carmela Rubin explained. "The story goes that he disliked the way art was taught at Bezalel at the time. It was crafts-oriented; they taught him to carve wood or ivory. He wanted art and painting." Within a year, he left for Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. The outbreak of World War I forced him to leave France and return to Romania. In 1921, he traveled to New York, where he had an exhibition sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz, helping establish his reputation as an artist before returning to Mandatory Palestine in 1922.
Upon his return to Palestine, Rubin initially settled in Jerusalem, where sculptor Avraham Melnikov allowed him to use his studio in the Old City. However, after a few months, he moved to Tel Aviv. "He loved the sea, the sandy dunes, and he really felt that Tel Aviv was like a clean page, that he could forge himself," Carmela Rubin noted. "Jerusalem is Jerusalem, the tradition and the orthodoxy; Tel Aviv was a new beginning that fitted his needs and his desires."
Rubin's artistic style captured the essence of the Zionist dream through his unique blend of European artistic traditions and local Israeli themes. His works depicted Eretz Yisrael as a spiritual and cultural home for people of diverse backgrounds, painting Jews and Arabs, pioneers and shepherds, farmers and merchants, poets and artists, devout members of the old Yishuv, Yemenis, Bukharans, and new immigrants living in harmony. His landscapes and images of Jerusalem, Ein Kerem, Galilee, Tiberias, and small villages managed to capture the tranquility of these places with dreamlike, poetic imagery.
When asked about her favorite paintings by her father-in-law, Carmela Rubin found it difficult to choose just one. "Many paintings, mostly from the 1920s, his early encounter with the land and with the people and with the climate, and, of course, the Zionist ideology that brought him here in the first place. His enthusiasm, his irresistible attraction to the Orient, to the freedom that he felt here," she said. She specifically mentioned a painting in the current exhibition of the seashore near Geula Street in Tel Aviv, just five minutes from Rubin's former residence. "There is an electrical lamp in it; it's really an encapsulation of everything of this new beginning."
Rubin began living on Bialik Street at the end of World War II. In 1939, he had traveled to the United States with his American wife, and they remained there for the duration of the war. In 1945, at the war's end, they took the first ship to Palestine with their baby son David and rented the second floor of a building whose first floor housed the offices of the Jewish Agency. They eventually inhabited both floors and later bought the house from its landlord, living there until Rubin's death in 1974.
A month before his death, Rubin bequeathed the house and his paintings to the Tel Aviv Municipality for the museum. The Rubin Museum opened in 1983 and is currently undergoing renovation, with plans to reopen early this winter. When Rubin's paintings were evacuated to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art during the Iranian missile attack, museum director Tania Coen-Uzzielli not only provided shelter for the artwork but also conceived the idea for this joint exhibition.
The exhibition represents more than just an art display; it symbolizes the resilience of Israeli culture amid ongoing conflict. As the article's author reflects, "In my eyes, Reuven Rubin: Be My Guest is a fulfillment of the collective Zionist dream, when amid sirens and missiles, during the ongoing nearly two years of war, in which we have experienced sorrow, art wins." At the exhibition's opening in August, Coen-Uzzielli enthusiastically encouraged visitors: "Don't read the descriptions near the paintings; just go and see!"
