Still searching for the fine arts in Israel

 I wrote many posts ago about my disappointing experience attending a performance of Beethoven's 9th in a city outside of Jerusalem. The orchestra was 1/2 sized, maybe a 1/3 of a regular orchestra, and the conductor conducted himself like some kind of clown on Israeli television, stomping out in big boots to accentuate his entrance, dressed like Mork from Ork, and making absurd faces and gestures to the audience, particularly before the big chorus where he grinned at us as if to say, here it comes. It was undignified, and worse than that, drew the attention to conductor. I came to hear Beethoven. I had been hopeful that finally an orchestra came to town, after ten years of my being here but plan not to attend if ever by chance an orchestra comes to town again.

So next on the plan in pursuit of the fine arts was to hit a museum. The Israel museum has reduced hours, around 22 a week. I went on a Sunday and found that it was closed. It was a long trip to get there too. I might try again but in the meantime I found my way to the Tel Aviv museum of art. That also was a long trip, and hour and a half, which included that depressing experience of passing through Israel's bland nearly brutalist train stations and all the fry Jews that inhabit and dominate this so-called Jewish state.

I'm sorry to say that the TA museum of art was also a disappointment. I feel bad saying it because they are trying. The staff is trying, and working with what's available to them, which isn't much. Most of the art was local or recent. It does describe itself as a museum of modern and contemporary art so I shouldn't have expected much in the way of the classics, and there is little in the way of classic art. But that's the only art museum in Tel Aviv, other than a few galleries. From the website:

The Museum’s Old Masters Collection comprises some 150 works, including unique paintings, sculptures, and objects. The collection focuses on three major areas: Italian art in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; Flemish and Dutch art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and nineteenth-century Jewish art. 

Selected works from the collection are on permanent display in the 16th–19th Century Art Galleries in the Main Building.

That's selected works from the 150 in the collection, a collection not of 150 paintings but 150 everything including objects. 

The collection at the Met. in NY consists of 2,666 European paintings that are shown online. They probably have much more. And that includes paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Vermeer, and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. 

This includes the period of impressionism, which is not part of the TA Museum's Old Masters Collection. That's in their Modern Art collection, which I toured. Some of it was OK. They do claim to have a painting by Van Gogh, but I couldn't find it. 

Usually I leave art museum's inspired. I left the TAMA depressed. 

I'll have to try the Israel museum again. They claim to have a Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, and Pissarro. Maybe that will be enough for me. I'm not an art expert, and I don't need a 1000 pictures. But I like to see something noteworthy. And it's nice to be in inspiring buildings, like the Detroit Inst of the Arts, or the museum in St. Louis, and certainly the Met. Israel doesn't have buildings like that. But I'll try the Israel museum again. I just wish the place wasn't so darn hard to get to, and that it would be open on Sunday, my day off.