curator: Tamar Meir
19.2.25 - 17.5.25
After over four decades that the Rubin Museum has been open to the public displaying Rubin’s art along with diversified exhibitions of Israeli art across generations, and following the quite recent transformation of Tel Aviv’s Bialik street into a lively center of cultural tourism focusing on the history of “The First Hebrew city”, the time has come, we feel, to tell the story of the house on 14 Bialik street and the family that inhabited it between 1945 and 1975.
In February of 1929, a young woman traveler, Esther Davis, a native of New York’s Lower East Side, boarded the “Mauritania” where she soon met a “painter from Palestine” as Reuven Rubin introduced himself to her. 18 year old Davis had won the first prize in an essay contest on the subject of Palestine, organized by the American Zionist youth movement “Young Judea”. The prize was no other than a three month trip to Palestine. In a ceremony in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1928, upon receiving the prize, the young New Yorker opened her address with the words: “The eternal hope that Palestine would once again become the homeland to Jewish culture, a haven to the Jewish body and soul, never stopped beating in Jewish hearts”.
She could not have foreseen at the time that the meeting on board the ship with the man who was almost twice her age, “a slim gentleman, tall and strange-looking, but quite charming”, as she described him in her diary, would dramatically change the course of her life.
What had been planned as a short visit (and even so, too long for her worried parents who were far from Zionism) became a life-journey, the essence of which is on display in the current show. The love story developing between the two, turned into a life-long partnership, and the feeling towards the land with its sites and its people – became that of a native homeland, aligned with their Zionist passion. Furthermore, the attraction to the vibrant social and cultural life of Tel Aviv won the heart of the young American visitor.
Esther’s story thus surfaces on three levels: her love and dedication to Rubin and through him her introduction to the world of art, the Zionist spark to the land of Israel, and finally, the newly-felt sensation of Tel Aviv as home. Indeed, the couple’s Tel Aviv home on Bialik street soon became a social hub where artists, writers, poets and actors congregated convivially.
Along some familiar Rubin paintings and sketches in the exhibition, are also intimate works, sometimes experimental, here displayed for the first time. Some of these canvases seem to have been reworked by Rubin time and again. One can detect the artist’s emotional struggle when attempting to portray those closest to him, Esther and their children David and Ariella. In some cases these portrayals did not survive Rubin’s own critique and on display are their archival black- and-white photos.
Exposed in the exhibition is also Esther’s continuous daily toil in writing and in amassing a wide range of documentation, preserving a rich assemblage of notes, correspondences, diaries, photos and objects. These became with time the basis of Rubin Museum’s historical archive, alluding to her innate, intuitive historical sense that left behind a significant testimony to a formative historical chapter in our collective past. Significantly, Esther also contributed to Rubin’s artistic career in her active tending along the years to his circle of collectors and friends.
Esther’s story, that of “the artist’s wife”, usually hidden behind the facade of the artist and his art, receives front stage in this exhibition.