Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Hebrew: Muzeon Tel Aviv Leomanut) is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and display of modern and contemporary art from Israel and around the world.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art was established in 1932 in a building at 16 Rothschild Boulevard that was the former home of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, who had donated the property for a museum in memory of his wife, Zina, following her death in 1930. On 14 May 1948, 250 delegates quietly gathered at the museum for the historic signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. In 1971, the building became Independence Hall when the museum relocated to 27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard.
Curator Nehama Guralnik began working at the museum in 1971, when French was the common language among staff, including the director, administrators and the curators, and catalogues were printed in French and in Hebrew, with English introduced later that decade. Guralnik curated more than 40 exhibitions during her 34-year tenure as international art curator.
The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. Planning for a new building began in 1963 when the museum’s collections of modern and contemporary art began to outgrow the premises. Construction commenced in 1966 but stopped for two years due to shortage of funds, before moving to its current location in 1971.
The museum houses a comprehensive collection of classical and contemporary art, especially Israeli art, a sculpture garden and a youth wing.
Suzanne Landau, following 34 years at the Israel Museum, was appointed director and chief curator of the museum in 2012.
In 2018, the museum set an all-time attendance record with 1,018,323 visitors, ranking 70th on the list of most visited art museums. In 2019, the museum set a new attendance record, ranking 49th with 1,322,439 visitors. In 2022, it again ranked 49th, with 1,070,714 visitors. In 2023, it was ranked 48th on The Art Magazines list of the 100 most popular museums in the world.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art includes The Paulson Family Foundation Building, its main structure on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard; the Herta and Paul Amir Building; and the Eyal Ofer Pavilion.
Marking its 90th anniversary, the museum’s main building was refurbished and renamed The Paulson Family Foundation Building in 2021, in honour of its benefactors.
In November 2011, the Herta and Paul Amir Building on the western side of the museum opened. It houses an Israeli Architecture Archive, and a new section of Photography and Visual arts. The new building was designed by architect Preston Scott Cohen. The new wing houses 18,500 square feet of gallery space over five floors. The Amir building also contains Pastel, a fine dining restaurant led by Chef Hilel Tavakuli.
In May 2023, following an extensive renovation of the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, it was reopened as the Eyal Ofer Pavilion, in honour of its contempoary benefactor, with the first retrospective of the works of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in Israel exhibited on all four levels. The renovation was led by architect Amnon Rechter, whose father, Israel Prize laureate architect Yaakov Rechter, built the original pavilion in 1959.
