After a mere two decades of Jewish nationalist art, most especially exemplified by the works of Moshe Lilien and

Zev Raban, the idealism of Zionist rebirth depicted in their paintings and drawings succumbed in other artists, and at first in a potentially positive way, to an infatuation with local Orientalism and soon, in the canvasses of Israeli painters like Nachum Gutman and Israel Paldi, Arabs began to replace Jews as models for biblical themes and subsequently Jewish content was then rejected altogether in favor of local non-Jewish subjects. By the 1930s, the large numbers of prominent German Jewish artists and intellectuals in flight from Nazism brought with them to pre-State Israel a deep ambivalence towards Zionism, even a kind of disdain. They favored instead the cosmopolitanism and universalism that were the hallmarks of the modernist explosion in Weimar before Hitler, for in the expression and advocacy of modernism many of these Jews had played distinguished roles. How ironic that luminaries of such urbane outlook should have found themselves rescued from the gas chambers by both Zionism, which they regarded as a parochial ideology, and by a land like Israel, then occupied by the British, and which they deplored as a backwater. The irony was lost upon them. Suffice it to say that they soon occupied positions of prominence in Israeli visual culture and made their negative feelings known in both pedagogy and art. Bezalel which had been closed now reopened in 1935 under the directorship of Joseph Budko, a German Jew and the main language of discourse at the school was not Hebrew but German. This carried forward into the 1940s and in the paintings of Meron Sima, Mordecai Ardon and Leopold Krakauer, one finds reflected a sense of bleakness and to roughly paraphrase Levitt, landscapes devoid of Jewish meaning.