The New Barbizon: Back to Life

Yaniv Shapira (born 1967) is a curator, researcher, and writer specializing in Israeli art. He previously served as the Chief Curator of the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod. His curatorial and scholarly work focuses on contemporary painting, the history of Israeli art, and the relationships between art, society, and local cultural contexts. Shapira has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and art institutions throughout Israel and has written critical essays, articles, and catalogue texts for artists and exhibitions. He is the author of the book and exhibition catalogue The New Barbizon: The Return to Life (2017), published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, which examines contemporary realist painting, plein-air practice, and a socially engaged perspective on Israeli reality.

“The New Barbizon” is a group of women artists active in Israel since 2010. It originally included five painters born in the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s (with the exception of Natalia Zourabova, who immigrated in 2004). Today, the group comprises three members: Natalia Zourabova, Anna Lukashevsky, and Olga Kundina.
The group’s name refers back to the Barbizon School of mid-19th-century France, whose artists worked in the rural village of Barbizon, painting nature directly from observation and moving toward the emergence of Realism. Their move outdoors was not an end in itself but part of a resistance to Romantic and Neoclassical painting, carrying a socially engaged stance.
Similarly, the painters of “The New Barbizon” work from observation and seek to express a critical, socially engaged position. Rather than turning to the bourgeois nature of the 19th century, they venture into the urban jungle with easels and paints, sitting and working for hours in city centers, markets, and areas of conflict. They gravitate toward sites of social and political friction and toward the complex zones of hardship produced by contemporary Israeli reality—ethnically mixed spaces inhabited by refugees, migrants, and laborers, which frequently appear in their paintings.