Nachum Gutman Museum

Nahum Gutman was one of Israel's most well known artists. His body of work was broad. He worked in a variety of media including oils, watercolors, gouache, sculpture, mosaics and engravings. Born in Telenesty, Bessrabia, he immigrated to Eretz-Israel in 1905 with his parents at the age of seven. Gutman was truly a product of his environment and one the students who rebelled against the European way of painting at the Bezalel (art academy). Hemi Gutman, the artist's son, a professor of biophysics at Tel Aviv University, explained that when his father attended Bezalel, all the teachers were of European decent. Their entire treatment of subject matter was based on European landscapes and even on European lighting. The group that rebelled, believed that the different landscape in Israel, one in which summer days are often gray and filled with blinding light (from dust) required a new and different treatment. The museum dedicated to Nahum Gutman opened just last year, in a building known as the Writer's or Editor's House. It is the result of what Hemi Gutman described as, "15 years of blood sweat and tears". Only a small portion of the permanent collection of several thousand works are on display at any given time. Located in the Neve Zedek, area of Tel Aviv (see Route #1, Orange Routes article) the building was originally built in 1887 in one of the first neighborhoods outside of Jaffa. It housed the editorial board of the `Ha'poel Ha'tzair' (Young Laborer) newspaper between 1907-1914 and was home to Y.H. Brenner, Dvora Baron and Joesph Aharonovitz.