On October 7, 2023, a special emergency team arrived at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to move valuable masterpieces to protected storage, including works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, René Magritte, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leonora Carrington, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, and many others. Now, nearly fifteen months later, the artworks will return to the galleries, which will reopen to the public.
Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art:
“Over the past year, we have been examining and redefining the Museum’s roles and its commitment to the community and the general public. The heart and core of the Museum’s identity are the collections, and removing the works at the outbreak of the war, without knowing when they would return to display, raised questions about the role of art in such times.
Now, as these masterpieces return from the vaults to the museum halls, we invite the public to return, and to contemplate them together with us. I believe that art has the power to provide comfort and healing, to uplift the spirit, and to inspire even in times of crisis. We saw this here only recently with over 200,000 wartime visitors who continue to visit the exhibition To Catch a Fleeting Moment: 150 Years of Impressionism, the first harbinger that came up from our storage spaces this year and is still on display in a protected space.”
Noa Rosenberg, Curator of Modern Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art:
“In recent days, the museum staff has excitedly and carefully been bringing the works back to the galleries, one by one. We were particularly moved by the return of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Friederike-Maria Beer (1916), which was painted during World War I and depicts a Viennese socialite standing upright, for whom Klimt chooses a backdrop of another, distant war. The idea that most Modern artists experienced the great wars of the twentieth century and continued to create during and after them, provides an unequivocal statement about the power, the importance, and the duty of art to exist in any situation, and even if it seems for a moment that the light goes out and disappears, in the end it will always return.”
