The book HaMeshutaf Kibbutz: Art from the Left 1978–1988 combines historical and visual research to retrace the conceptual and visual activity of HaMeshutaf Kibbutz artists group, whose title means: “The Common: Kibbutz.” The book sets out to fill a gap in the research of 1970s and 1980s art in Israel, which has not yet fully addressed the history of the group. Recounting the historical, social, and political backdrop against which the group was established, the book describes the shift in the status of artists in the kibbutz community and presents the history of doubt and self-criticism in kibbutz discourse and thinking. It offers a reexamination of the sequence of artistic events in the 1970s in an attempt to give HaMeshutaf Kibbutz group its proper place along the timeline.

Established in 1978 by artists Dov Heller (Kibbutz Nirim) and Yaacov Chefetz (Kibbutz Eilon) as part of the awakening of the Israeli left-wing following the right-wing rise to power in May 1977, HaMeshutaf Kibbutz wished to act as agents of change and criticism – within the kibbutz society in particular and in the Israeli society in general. The two founders were joined by the artists Yuval Danieli (Kibbutz HaMa’apil), Avraham Eilat (Kibbutz Shamir), Dov Or Ner (Kibbutz Hatzor), Haim Maor (Kibbutz Givat Haim Meuhad), Yosef Ohman (Kibbutz Ga’ash), Tuli (Shaul) Bauman (Kibbutz Amir), Yaacov Shofar (Kibbutz Sde Yoav), Mirta Edery (Kvutzat Shiller) and others.

The book unfolds the events, actions, and participants in the shows, compiling a comprehensive photographic and textual archive that sheds light on the works featured in them and the subject matters they explored. In its first and second exhibitions the group focused predominantly on the dissolution of socialist values in the kibbutz society and the decline and degeneration of its anti-bourgeois ways of life, as Tamir puts it in the foreword to the book:

The group members identified as outright and unapologetic left and offered themselves as partners for a social-critical dialogue – a call that most likely was not reciprocated by the opposing camp. They chose to put themselves in the perilous position of social artists in the understanding that the old values have waned and eroded on their own, due to the natural disintegration of ideas and revolutions. Yet, “Dissolving Values” by Yaacov Chefetz (1978) and “Dissolving Myths” by Haim Maor (1980) could not turn back the hands of time. They held on to the coattails, while the torn shirt and faded features of A. D. Gordon, the great thinker of the Zionist labor movement, already completely disintegrated. In 1980, the members of HaMeshutaf Kibbutz held up a broken mirror and demanded reaction and involvement.

In the second half of its activity (1984–1988) the group focused on direct political protest against the Israel-Lebanon War. The exhibitions that were held at the “castle” – the 1930s structure in the middle of the fields of Kibbutz Ga’ash – were accompanied by Dalia and Rami Moran’s project “Days in Lebanon” counting the days of IDF’s presence in Lebanon, which would become a public icon of protest visible to anyone driving along the Coastal Highway. The book documents “The Castle in Red,” which celebrated May Day 1985 and the first withdrawal from Lebanon after three years of fighting, in a series of photographs by Yosef Ohman.

The artists of HaMeshutaf Kibbutz chose to be political, and yet to act through art. They opened up the political to questions about ways of life and human relationships, reexamined fundamental issues, and protested the Lebanon-Israel War in real time, a protest that eventually led to their disbanding as an autonomous artists group (Tali Tamir, from the foreword to the book).

The book is comprised of two sections. The first section includes the historical research materials and artistic-political analysis of the period and the group’s activity. The second section is a catalogue raisonné of the group’s exhibitions and the works they featured. The writing process involved an extensive and in-depth archival research and interviews with the artists, and some of the photographs and other never-before-seen documentary materials are presented in the book for the first time.

The research was carried out by the prominent curator and scholar of Israeli art Tali Tamir, winner of the 2010 Curator Prize of the Ministry of Culture and Sports and former chief curator of The Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv and director of the Nahum Gutman Museum of Art. Tamir currently serves as a lecturer in the Institute for Israeli Art at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo and is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Faculty at Tel Aviv University. She has published numerous essays and books and curated exhibitions in prominent museums in Israel, including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Ein Harod Museum of Art, Bat Yam Museum of Art, and Petach Tikva Museum of Art.

Tamir says: This book fulfills my personal debt to the middle generation artists of the kibbutz movement, whom I got to know and exhibit as a curator at The Kibbutz Gallery (1995–2005), about a decade after the group broke up. I met mature artists whose work is still imbued with a vital and vigilant ideological and radical element, and saw their artistic activism as productive unrest and constant willingness to question concepts and provoke thought and discussion.