Gazit was a monthly for art and literature, "a stage for artistic-literary creation and free thought", according to its definition on the cover of each of its issues. The journal was founded by Gabriel Talphir (Yosef Wunderman) in 1931. The monthly was published regularly every month from 1932 to 1982 (except for a short period in the second half of the 1930s). For many years it was the only Hebrew magazine dedicated to visual arts.[1][2]
History and Content
Gazit magazines published articles on the history of art, theater, architecture, musical analysis of works, criticism of painting and sculpture from the Western World, Southeast Asia, India and Japan. It short monographs of artists, especially of Israeli and Jewish artists, as well as stories, poetry and translations from Greco-Roman literature. The journal contained relatively high-quality prints (in black and white) of works of visual plastic art, photographs of architectural buildings and theater sets.[3][4]
One of the initial trends of the journal was to confirm the place of art in Judaism and the justification of its practice in the Land of Israel ("Although before it [art] seemed to contradict the spirit of the nation... but now it has ceased to be an ideal alone, an ideal enjoyed by foreigners, those who sit in the tents of Yefet are not beyond the extent of the spread of its sheets, but within its contents.")[5]
In honor of "Gazit" jubilee and seventy years of Tel Aviv, Shlomo Lahat, mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, wrote to Talphir that he could not imagine the original artistic and cultural activity in the city without the magazine and its dedicated work.[6]
