Dreams of Israel - 3Landesmuseen

Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925) is considered a prominent Art Nouveau artist and an important representative of cultural Zionism, a movement that viewed a revival of Jewish culture as a basis for a new sense of Jewish self-confidence. His art, in which he masterfully combined Zionist ideals with the aesthetics of Art Nouveau, became a significant source of inspiration for the Zionist movement in the twentieth century. For the 100th anniversary of Lilien’s death, the Landesmuseum Hinter Aegidien dedicated a retrospective to the artist.

E. M. Lilien was born on May 23, 1874, in Drohobycz (then part of Austria-Hungary, today Ukraine). He completed training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow before moving to Munich in 1899 to work as an illustrator for various magazines. Barely a year later, Lilien moved to Berlin, where he quickly came into contact with Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism and author of the book Der Judenstaat (A Jewish State).

Lilien’s photographs on display in Europe for the first time

Lilien travelled to Palestine, which he knew as the “Holy Land,” four times between 1906 and 1917–18. At that time, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. On these trips, each lasting several months, he took hundreds of staged photographs of people and places, which he used in his studio in Berlin as a basis for his drawings and etchings. When transferring the photographs from one medium to another, Lilien carefully worked the ideas behind the photographs into existing stereotypes. The E. M. Lilien: Dreams of Israel exhibition clearly depicts the central role of photography for the artist’s work. The Braunschweig Landesmuseum is the first museum in Europe to receive Lilien’s photographs as digital loans from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art with permission to display the scans of the glass plate negatives.

The Westermann Bible

At the very beginning of his career, Lilien already dreamed of illustrating biblical texts. He saw the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as the story and cultural memory of the Jewish people. The George Westermann publishing house in Braunschweig gave him the opportunity in 1907 to make his dream come true. The result was three unique volumes that offer profound insight into Lilien’s vision of cultural Zionism, embedded in Art Nouveau and the history of the Jewish people.

Lilien, who married Helen Magnus of Braunschweig in 1906, lived on Wolfenbütteler Strasse in Braunschweig from 1920 until he died in 1925. The exhibition in the Landesmuseum Hinter Aegidien invites visitors to engage with the work of a fascinating artist whose oeuvre continues even today to resonate in various, at times also controversial, ways.