Tuesday 2 April 2013

Israel Take 2 - Day 2

So after our very late night out, we enjoyed a late morning. Being Shabbat and towards the end of Passover, we knew that our options would be fairly limited, but museums you can almost always count on. So we headed off to the Tel Aviv Modern Art Museum. We spent almost all of our time in the new wing where there were a series of rather cool exhibitions:

among others, but these were the ones where we spent most of our time. I was very surprised at the breadth and depth of the curation. It is definitely a top notch museum.

While taking a tea break, Stephen combed through the event listing and lighted upon an exhibit called Irises, Daffodils, Dragonflies and Butterflies which was being shown in the Helena Rubenstein Pavilion, which though part of the museum was a short walk away. Wanting to get back out in the sunshine for a little bit, we all decided this was a great plan. So over we went. Turned out that the intended exhibit was actually a side show to another exhibit featuring an Israeli-French artist called Absalon who was a sculptor/designer who was very much in the same line, albeit more radical, as the Bauhaus movement. The work was stunning.

The Irises and Daffodils, Dragonflies and Butterflies exhibit of the glassware of Emile Galle was a bit of a shock to the system after the minimalism in the Absalon exhibit, but it was beautiful in its own way - more classically so, but no less for that. A good reminder that "modern art" spans a huge time frame and an incredibly diverse body of work. I'm wondering how long it will be until some of the older work (turn of the century through the pre-WWI years) will get reclassified out of the "modern" genre, but for now it's always interesting to see what gets lumped in under that heading.

By now, it was well past lunch time and we were all rather hungry, so down the Sderot Rothschild to find ourselves some food. We landed on a little local burger chain called Moses and had some very good hamburgers indeed! 

A quick stop back to the hotel, ostensibly for my cardigan, I made the mistake of laying down and closing my eyes "just for a minute" while the boys checked on something and the next thing I knew it was 2 hours later. I was still exhausted so opted to stay in and finish catching up on my sleep while the boys took a walk. I felt a little bad, but I figured if I was going to crash, doing it at this end of the trip rather than later was probably the better option. This also allowed the boys to get some time to catch up just the two of them, which is good for their friendship.

No harm done in the end and a low key way to end the first phase of our trip. Next up, transitioning to our base in Galilee.

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