Tel Aviv Museum of Art

The museum divides its campus into three: the Paulson Family Foundation Building on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard; the Herta and Paul Amir Building beside it to the west; and the Eyal Ofer Pavilion, which is not beside it at all. Each was, in the museum's phrase, the new building of its moment, and each carries the architecture of its decade: late modernism in the 1950s, Brutalism in the 1970s, and the digital geometry of the 2000s.

The two Shaul Hamelech buildings are joined internally and share one ticket desk, so a visitor moves between them without noticing the seam except in the floors, which do not line up. The Amir Building carries the permanent display of Israeli art on its upper levels along with galleries for photography, drawing, design and contemporary art. The main building holds the rest of the permanent collections and the larger temporary exhibitions.

The Eyal Ofer Pavilion is a separate trip: 6 Tarsat Boulevard, in the cultural cluster next to Habima, roughly fifteen minutes on foot from the main gate. It runs its own exhibitions on its own hours, which differ from the main museum's on Thursdays, and at the time of writing admission to it is free, funded by the Azrieli Foundation. Two gardens fill the gap between the Shaul Hamelech buildings: the sunken, eucalyptus-shaded Lola Beer Ebner Sculpture Garden of 1999 and Nata's Garden of 2011.

• Paulson Family Foundation Building, 1971: the permanent collections and the big temporary shows
• Herta and Paul Amir Building, 2011: Israeli art, photography, drawing, design, contemporary art
• Eyal Ofer Pavilion, 6 Tarsat Boulevard: temporary exhibitions, currently free, a separate walk
• Lola Beer Ebner Sculpture Garden and Nata's Garden, in the gap between the two main buildings

Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv's first mayor, wanted the new city to have an art museum and could not find it a home, so he gave it his own. His wife Zina died in 1930; in her memory he dedicated his plot and the two-storey house on it at 16 Rothschild Boulevard, and the building was remodelled around the gift. Bedrooms became galleries. By the end of the work the house held fifteen exhibition spaces and a concert and lecture hall, and Dizengoff kept the upper floor as his flat.

It opened on Saturday 2 April 1932, under the name Tel Aviv Museum, which it kept until 1989. The opening exhibition mixed its own holdings, among them Modigliani, Chagall and Chana Orloff, with loans from 34 local artists including Yosef Zaritsky, Anna Ticho and Reuven Rubin. Dizengoff had also wanted a Bible gallery of sculpture replicas and was talked out of it.

The museum ran its first year with no director and no chief curator. In 1933 Karl Schwarz, an art historian then heading the Jewish Museum in Berlin, came at Dizengoff's invitation to run it, and stayed until 1947, building the collection and founding an art library. Dizengoff died in September 1936 and left the house to the municipality, asking the residents of Tel Aviv in his will to take care of the museum.

The hall built for concerts and lectures is the one in which the state of Israel was declared on Friday 14 May 1948. The museum moved out in 1971 and the building became Independence Hall. What matters here is that the institution then went looking for a purpose-built home, and took two attempts to find one.

The first attempt was the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, inaugurated in 1959 and intended to replace Dizengoff House outright. It quickly became clear that its site could not carry a building large enough. So the museum's director Haim Gamzu and the mayor Chaim Levanon lobbied the government, which allocated ten dunams (2.5 acres) on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, and a design competition was announced.

The judges wrote their priorities down, and the museum still quotes them: a museum is a repository of works of art and should be a work of art in its own right; the architecture should encourage philanthropists and collectors to donate or lend. Flexibility and simplicity came after that. The competition was won by Dan Eitan, who received the Israel Prize for architecture in 2019, and Itzhak Yashar, with a building in the Israeli Brutalist idiom that dominated public construction here between the 1950s and the 1970s.

What they built is a spiral: four galleries wrapped around a tall central atrium, with a ramp climbing from the entrance hall so that a visitor always knows roughly where they are. The galleries are white cubes, unadorned and lit from above. It was inaugurated on 19 April 1971 with Prime Minister Golda Meir, Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Mayor Yehoshua Rabinowitz present. Dan Reisinger's logo followed and restated the plan as a graphic: four black rectangles around a white void, forming a stylised Hebrew letter mem.

The dating is not entirely consistent even in the museum's own telling. Its history page says the decision to build on Shaul Hamelech was taken in 1964 and that the building was inaugurated twelve years later, in 1971, which is seven years rather than twelve. Wikipedia's account has planning starting in 1963 and construction in 1966, halted for two years by a funding shortage. The opening date of 1971 is not in doubt; the run-up to it is told differently in different places.

Forty years of extensions and partitions had buried much of the original design by the time renovation began in 2018. The work stripped those accretions back towards Eitan and Yashar's building, added a cafe facing the sculpture garden, rebuilt the box office and created the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Family Experiential Center for the education programme. In 2021, on the museum's ninetieth anniversary, the main building was renamed the Paulson Family Foundation Building after its benefactors.

By the 1990s the collection had outgrown the main building again, and the exhibition areas had barely changed since 1971. Mordechai Omer, director from 1995 to 2011, pushed the extension onto a lot an earlier director, Marc Scheps, had secured. An international competition and an international fundraising campaign followed, and the Herta and Paul Amir Building was inaugurated in 2011 to a design by Preston Scott Cohen with the Israeli project architect Amit Nemlich. The museum's own history says the new wing doubled its exhibition space.

The site was awkward in two directions at once: a triangular plot with a height restriction on it, and a requirement for large, level, accessible galleries. Cohen's answer inverts the appearance. From the street the Amir Building reads as a low horizontal object; it is in fact a vertical one, with three levels below ground. The envelope is folded like origami into a geometry that changes angle continuously, and it is built from 465 panels of polished concrete, cast on site.

The interior is arranged around a single vertical void, the Lightfall, a 26.5 metre atrium running from a roof skylight down to foundation level. Its walls are concrete screens broken by openings, which throws daylight sideways into the circulation and lets a visitor read their position from inside the void. It is also used as a gallery in its own right, for installations made to its proportions.

The building also holds the Israeli Architecture Archive, a large auditorium, study workshops, the ticket offices and Pastel, the museum's fine-dining restaurant.

• 465 polished concrete panels, cast on site, folded into the outer envelope
• Three subterranean levels under a building that looks horizontal from the street
• The Lightfall: 26.5 m from roof skylight to foundation, used as a display space
• Upper levels: the permanent display of Israeli art, plus photography, drawing and design

The modern collection runs from the middle of the nineteenth century to the late 1980s and was built, in the museum's words, steadily since 1932 by private collectors and public figures who thought their pictures belonged in public. The Impressionist end names Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and Pissarro. Beyond that sit Chagall, Klimt, Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Modigliani, Picasso across several periods, and the Surrealists Ernst, Dalí, Carrington and Tanguy. Postwar holdings include Dubuffet, Giacometti, Gerhard Richter and Günther Uecker.

Two of the best-known pictures came in one bequest: Klimt's Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer of 1916 and Kandinsky's Untitled Improvisation V of 1914, both labelled as the Mizne-Blumental Collection, bequest of Annette Celine, 2018. Monet's Grainstack at Giverny of 1889 arrived as an anonymous gift in 1973.

American abstraction arrived early and by gift. Peggy Guggenheim gave 27 works, which the museum describes as the largest body from her collection anywhere outside the United States, taking in Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning. The dating deserves a note: the gift is often given as 1950, but the museum's own label for Pollock's Earth Worms of 1946 credits it to Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, in 1954. Later American and British additions include Georgia O'Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Alexander Calder, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon.

The strangest holding has the best story. In 1933 the German-Jewish collector Erich Goeritz lent the museum his early Alexander Archipenko works, from 1908 to 1921, and by doing so saved them: most of Archipenko's early output was destroyed in First World War bombing or later declared degenerate art by the Nazis. Archipenko himself did not learn until 1947 that Tel Aviv held them. After Goeritz died in 1955 his family donated 32 of the works, and the museum states that this is now the largest collection of early Archipenko anywhere.

Alongside all of that the museum holds what it calls the world's largest collection of Israeli art, running from the 1920s to the present: the Paris School influence of the 1930s and 1940s, the New Horizons group of the 1950s, the turn towards identity from the 1960s, and video and installation work since. Permanent displays rotate and works travel on loan, so no particular painting is guaranteed to be on the wall on a given day.

The paved plaza between Shaul Hamelech Boulevard and the museum entrance was Museum Square. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 it filled with families of the people taken to Gaza and with the installations they and others made, and within about two weeks it was being called Hostages Square. The Tel Aviv municipality made that the plaza's official name on 11 August 2026, saying the change was meant to keep the period between 7 October 2023 and the return of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, on 26 January 2026, in the city's memory.

What stood there is documented. A long Shabbat table was laid with a place for every hostage. Tents were staffed by people from the attacked kibbutzim, who talked to visitors and put up posters of their missing members. There were kiosks, small stages, and an electronic counter of the days elapsed, stopped after the last hostage's body was recovered. Rallies filled the square on Saturday nights.

The museum did not treat this as somebody else's business happening on its doorstep. It closed after 7 October and reopened at the end of November 2023 after roughly six weeks dark, during which staff ran lectures online and activities for evacuated children. It gave the square storage space, lavatories and shelter during rocket alerts, and later ran therapeutic tours for the bereaved, the injured and survivors of the Nova festival. Its director, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, has described the plaza as a spontaneous art space. It is quieter now, and the entrance is reached across it.