Self-Portrait

A sculptor and painter, Boris Schatz is most significant in the history of Jewish art as an early visionary of a Jewish national art rooted in “native” Middle Eastern forms and as the founder of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem (1906). Born in Vorne in the Russian Empire’s northwestern reaches (now Varniai, Lithuania) and raised in a traditional Jewish milieu, he developed an interest in sculpture and painting and, with extensive help from the established Russian Jewish sculptor and painter Mark Antokolski, pursued an arts education in Western Europe. Making a successful career in the European art world—he came to Bulgaria in 1895 at royal invitation to found the Royal Academy of Art in Sofia—Schatz also became a committed Zionist. Proposing the establishment of a Jewish art school in Jerusalem at the turn of the century, he won the support of the Zionist movement to do so in 1905. Naming the school for Bezalel, the biblical figure identified with the making of the Tabernacle, Schatz yoked fine-arts training to a workshop-centered focus on traditional Middle Eastern Jewish decorative craft traditions, like silverwork and carpet-weaving, all refocused thematically on iconography associated with Jewish visions of the Land of Israel/Palestine, Zionist ideals, and the idea of a Jewish national artistic style. Schatz’s own work, which focused heavily on Jewish figures especially after 1903, has been characterized as Jewish national romanticism.