Fleeting Beauty in European and Asian Art, Иерусалим, до ≈20 сентября

Beauty surfaces for a moment and then it vanishes.

Across eras, continents, and media, artists were drawn to transient conditions – light, atmosphere, and season. French Barbizon School painters of the mid-19th century abandoned academic idealization in favor of direct observation, studying natural effects in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Working alongside them, Fontainebleau photographers explored soft focus, tonal effects, and the photographic process. Inspired by these painterly photographs, the early 20th-century Pictorialists evoked memory and mood – transcendent encounters with nature.

French Impressionist artists pushed Barbizon School investigations further. Painting outdoors, without preparatory studies, they observed that color is continuously altered by atmospheric conditions and reflections. Their rapid brushstrokes in complementary hues dissolve solid forms into optical vibration. Under their hand, reflective surfaces – rivers, harbors, expanses of sea – are transformed by light.

The fascination with the fleeting nature of time was already present in Chinese landscape painting of the Song dynasty (960 – 1279), where it was viewed through the broader ethical stance of striving to keep cosmic harmony between human beings and nature. Daoist philosophy (Dao meaning “the way” in Chinese) encouraged artists to explore the life force of constant renewal and change. By leaving large areas of their paintings empty, they achieved a balance between the invisible and formless on one hand and tangible form on the other. Thus, luminous views of mountains, sky, and water provide moments of contemplation and moral cultivation.

Another approach to transience is found in the Buddhist teachings of materiality and non-materiality, explored in Japanese art. In the Edo period (1603 – 1868), artists expressed the Japanese concept of mono no aware – meaning “the beauty of things passing” – in moments poised between appearance and disappearance. A boat drifting through mist, blossoms at the threshold of decay, a bird in flight. Artists evoked nature’s changing states, inviting us to contemplate the ebb and flow of time.

Culled from the Israel Museum’s rich collections, the works displayed here immortalize transitory moments. Contemporary artists continue to transform the act of looking into an awareness of temporality.