Style combination · Contrasts
Bezalel School × Kultur-Lige
Two Jewish national arts of the same years with hand-drawn Hebrew letters: Bezalel's Zionist, biblical pictures in gilded symmetrical frames in Jerusalem, and the Kultur-Lige's secular Yiddish children's books in faceted avant-garde planes in Kyiv; never merge them into one 'Jewish style'.
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What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Bezalel School Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design
- Type from Kultur-Lige
- Colour from Bezalel School
- Form from Bezalel School
- Composition from Bezalel School
- Surface from Kultur-Lige
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Kultur-Lige
Rise
Archivo Black; Kultur-Lige used The scribe's square Hebrew script (ktav ashuri), written by a sofer for Sikhes khulin (1917), whose 'wonderful' style Lissitzky set out to match in his illustrations and Lissitzky's hand-drawn Yiddish verses lithographed into each picture of Had Gadya (1919), the refrain running along the margins and closing in a circle at the foot
Text · Bezalel School
The house style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1906 with E. M. Lilien and given its definitive form by Ze'ev Raban. It joined Jugendstil and Symbolism to Persian, Syrian and Islamic ornament, Yemenite silverwork and ancient Jewish coins to make a Jewish national art: biblical and Zionist scenes in symmetrical, ornament-packed frames, hand-drawn Hebrew letters as decoration, and jewel colours heightened with gold, on books, posters, carpets, metalwork and tiles until the school closed in 1929 (its designs lingered on objects into the 1950s).
Jost; Bezalel School used Bezalel workshop Hebrew display lettering, which combined Arabic-script forms with German Jugendstil writing and Ze'ev Raban's hand-drawn Hebrew letters, rendered in gold at the centre of an illustrated page
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Bezalel School, with a counter-accent from Kultur-Lige. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Bezalel School Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design
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#f0e4c6ground · 36% -
#1d4e89ink · 14% -
#c9a03aaccent · 18% -
#a8322daccent · 14% -
#2f8a8caccent · 10% -
#4f5d2faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e4c6;
--ink: #1d4e89;
--accent-1: #c9a03a;
--accent-2: #a8322d;
--accent-3: #2f8a8c;
--accent-4: #4f5d2f;
--font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Bezalel School: Bezalel works quote Hebrew scripture and decorate ritual objects: do not crop, distort, mirror or print biblical verses, and above all the names of God, on throwaway items (such pages are customarily buried rather than discarded), and have any Hebrew read by a fluent reader. The style's figures cast Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews, who modelled for its students and worked as its silversmiths and stone carvers, as picturesque biblical types, and its programme was Zionist in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine; credit the artisans, avoid exoticising living communities, and do not present it as a neutral 'Holy Land' or regional style. It also built a Jewish national art in part from Arab and Islamic sources (Persian and Syrian metalwork, Damascene inlay, Moorish pattern, and Hebrew lettering that drew on Arabic script) in a land it shared with Palestinian Arabs, whom, like Yemenite Jews, its artists took as models for biblical figures: name those sources rather than presenting the motifs as purely Jewish, and treat pieces such as 'Come to Palestine' and the Zionist insignia as political documents, not neutral travel imagery.
Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design: These books quote sacred forms: Hebrew letters, the divine name (written in Had Gadya), scroll formats and scribal square script, synagogue art and tombstone inscriptions. Do not use the letters as decorative glyphs or mirror them; have any Yiddish or Hebrew written and checked by a fluent reader, and keep divine names and scroll and tombstone forms off throwaway or commercial items. The movement was secular and Yiddishist, a modern Jewish culture in Yiddish backed by Jewish socialist parties, Folkists and left-wing Zionists, not the Hebrew, Zionist art of Bezalel and not religious art, so do not present it as a generic 'Jewish look', and do not reduce its folk figures to stereotyped shtetl types. Many of its people were persecuted: Ryback's father was killed in the pogroms, and Hofshteyn, Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko were executed in Moscow on 12 August 1952. Chagall (d. 1985) and Chaikov (d. 1979) are still in copyright: draw your own letters and figures rather than reproducing their pages.
04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Bezalel School
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Both put pictures inside symmetrical ornamental frames, but Vienna squared the frame into grids and bars while Bezalel filled it with Middle Eastern filigree, carpet and metalwork motifs.
- Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art Pairs well · Both built a graphic language for a people's cultural renewal from ancestral ornament and biblical subjects in the 1920s; combine Bezalel's gilded frames with Aaron Douglas's flat silhouettes.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Contrasts · In the same decade Turkey replaced the Arabic script with Latin letters, while Bezalel made the revived Hebrew script its chief ornament; set them side by side to show two national answers to script.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · While Bezalel was gilding hand-drawn Hebrew letters inside ornamental frames, German modernists stripped ornament for sans-serif type and asymmetric layout; the two mark the poles of 1920s print.
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition Pairs well · Bezalel took Moorish and Islamic geometric pattern for its borders and filigree; pair the two for frames whose star tilings and strapwork hold a figurative centre.
- Hebrew Poster Lettering & Early Israeli State Design Contrasts · The Jerusalem national art that came before it used the same menorah, ancient coins and hand-drawn Hebrew, but packed them into gilded, ornamental, biblical frames; the Tel Aviv studios reduced them to a single emblem on flat colour, and the emblem committee of 1949 deliberately left out overtly religious symbols.
- Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering Pairs well · Another national illumination of the 1900s–1920s, with hand-drawn national letters, jewel colours and gold inside heavy symmetrical frames; compare how each built a national art from ancient ornament.
- Mir iskusstva Book Art Pairs well · In the same years both used Art Nouveau's ornamental frame to build a national book art from older ornament; set Bilibin's folk borders beside Raban's filigree frames to compare two revivals, or combine their framed, lettered pages.
With Kultur-Lige
- Russian Futurist Book Contrasts · Its parent in method: artists drawing the whole page and printing it by lithography in small runs. The Futurist book is Cyrillic, mostly black and deliberately crude; the Kultur-Lige book is in Yiddish, earnest, and at its most ambitious in colour, and builds its pages from the Hebrew letter and synagogue ornament.
- Suprematism Pairs well · Lissitzky moved from one to the other in 1919, giving Had Gadya a Suprematist inner jacket; set a folk figure and a drawn verse against a few floating planes to keep a story inside an abstract page.
- Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book Contrasts · The Leningrad picture book that followed is in Russian, uses flat cut-paper figures floating on white and drops folk ornament; choose the Kultur-Lige page when letters and ornament must carry a culture's memory.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · Lissitzky's next step: grotesque type, rules and photomontage replaced the drawn letter and folk motif; compare them to decide between a handmade, culturally rooted page and a machine-age one.