R. Stewart Weiss
Guest Columnist/JPost
13 August '10
Our family had the pleasure this past week – along with tens of thousands of other visitors – of viewing the newly renovated and revamped Israel Museum in Jerusalem. While a number of the exhibits, in particular the flagship Dead Sea Scrolls, remain the same, the museum as a whole is an entirely new and breathtaking adventure that must be experienced by all lovers of Judaica, culture and history.
Like all great art, the pieces now on display challenge the viewers to open their minds to new ideas and unexpected possibilities, dramatically jolting us from our staid and safe world of complacency and conformity into a refreshing re-examination of right and wrong, life and death, light and darkness.
I found myself at times mystified and at times mesmerized by this $100 million, world-class beacon of inspiration, a genuine tour de force and lasting tribute to the many artists who pooled their talents in its formation, and in particular to the museum’s director and creative genius, James Snyder.
One of the artistic wing’s centerpieces is the magnificent oil on canvas Castle of the Pyrenees, painted in 1959 by Rene Magritte. It depicts a massive rock floating in the clouds above the sea, upon which rests a medieval castle. The artist, it seems to me, is suggesting that there are fantastical places within our imagination which hover somewhere between Heaven and Earth, well within our view yet just beyond our touch. Disconnected as they are from the ground we walk upon, floating above the waves, these castles represent that ideal home we yearn for, that splendid, safe and serenely spiritual haven we all crave but find elusively outside our grasp.
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