Major Gift of 59 Prints to Israel Museum

Major Gift of Prints to Israel Museum

59 Prints From The Fred Jahn Gallery by Contemporary Artists Franz Hitzler, Barry Le Va, Fred Sandback, Rudi Troger, and Hermann Nitsch To Further Strengthen Museum’s Print Collection of 50,000 works

Jerusalem – The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, announces the receipt of an important gift of 59 prints for its Department of Prints and Drawings. The prints, by five contemporary artists, were donated by the Fred Jahn Gallery in Munich, which concentrates in contemporary art. The artists include Austrian Herman Nitsch (ten lithographs), Americans Fred Sandback (22 lithographs) and Barry Le Va, (four lithographs, three diptych lithographs and three woodcuts), as well as work by Germans Rudi Tröger and Franz Hitzler. The addition of these prints to the department’s collection is of great importance, as these significant artists were not represented until now in the department’s sizeable collection of over 50,000 works.

The artists

Franz Hitzler, born in Thalmassing, Bavaria, in 1946, is a unique phenomenon in contemporary art. He creates a new kind of figurative art using the graphic print as a means of defining personal statements.

Born in Long Beach, California, in 1941, Barry Le Va uses the floor as his field of operation and scatters about large amounts of materials and forms, including drawings. His lithography work, beginning in 1990, grew out of his work in sculpture.

Fred Sandback, born in Bronxville, New York, in 1943, created works that are minimal and literal prior to his untimely death at the age of 59 in 2003. The prints are part the series Twenty-Two Constructions from 1967.

Born in 1929 in Marktleuthen, Franconia, Rudi Troger creates prints that are characterized by an eccentric linear style, reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti.

Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, is known for his experimental and multimedia works, as well as performance art. He is associated with the Vienna Actionists, and, like them, considers his art outside traditional categories of genre.

The Department of Prints and Drawings at the Israel Museum

The Department of Prints and Drawings is one of the Israel Museum’s most esteemed collections and is comprised of some 50,000 drawings, prints, and illustrated books from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on Israeli art. Among the artists represented are a wide range of European and American artists including Marc Chagall, Eugène Delacroix, Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, Wassily Kandinsky, Parmigianino, Pablo Picasso and Rembrandt; contemporary artists such as Jasper Johns, Susan Rothenberg and Kiki Smith; and Israeli artists as Moshe Kupferman, Yaacov Pins, Jakob Steinhardt and Calman Shemi.

Highlights of the collection include:

• The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art:some 2,400 works on paper, illustrated books, periodicals, pamphlets, documents and letters, some of them extremely rare, making the Israel Museum an international center for the study of these two seminal art movements
• The Norman Bier Section for Maps of the Holy Land: antique maps from the most important schools of mapmaking from the fifteenth century on, including Bibles, religious texts and cosmographies, in which many of the maps were printed for the first time

The Fred Jahn Gallery

After ten years of collaboration with the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich, Fred Jahn opened his own gallery in 1979 with a program of art from the second half of the 20th century. The Fred Jahn Gallery has primarily focused on the work of the “new” German painters, such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz and Gerhard Richter, as well as American artists working in minimal and post-minimal art, such as Barry Le Va and Fred Sandback, and painters Carroll Dunham and Terry Winters. Currently the gallery deals mainly with works on paper.

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

The Israel Museum is the largest cultural institution in the State of Israel and is ranked among the leading art and archaeology museums in the world. Founded in 1965, the Museum houses encyclopaedic collections ranging from prehistory through contemporary art. They include the most extensive holdings of Biblical and Holy Land archaeology in the world, among them the Dead Sea Scrolls. In just over forty years, the Museum has built a far-ranging collection of nearly 500,000 objects through an unparalleled legacy of gifts and support from its circle of patrons worldwide. It has established itself as an internationally valued institution and a singularly rich cultural resource for Israel, the Middle East, and the world.