The Art Collection of Prof. Michael Adler «

In 2006, the collector Prof. Michael Adler donated his unique art collection to the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Adler began collecting Israeli art in the 1960s, when he paved his academic path as a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York. In forming the collection, he focused on works of Israeli art, aiming “to build an Israeli nest for myself in a foreign land.”[1] Philosophy and logical thinking, which have always accompanied Adler in the fields of mathematics and economics, resonated in collecting abstract works of art and conceptual and post-minimalist art.

Today, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art is home to the Michael Adler Collection, which includes about fifty works by a variety of Israeli artists from the 1960s to the 1990s. The artist Joshua Neustein served as an art consultant for the collection. Among the artists of the collection are the heads of Ofakim Hadashim (“New Horizons” art movement), Joseph Zaritsky, Avigdor Stematsky, and Yehezkel Streichman; leading figures in the Israeli art field such as Arie Aroch, Raffi Lavie, Michael Gross, and Rita Alima; and a host of conceptual artists, including Joshua Neustein, Benni Efrat, Buky Schwartz, Larry Abramson and others, whose work was seen in the 1970s as controversial in the local art field.
Most of the works in the collection share common principles, which particularly interested Adler and guided him in his choice, such as the principle of minimalist reduction. Most of them are devoid of an iconographic or descriptive dimension, and many tackle intellectual questions and the re-examination of the elements of the act of art itself, such as scratching, cutting, painting, erasing, or creating based on a pre-determined operating principle.
Works from the Adler collection were presented at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in several exhibitions, including “Curatorial Exercises” (2017), “Michael Adler’s Ideological Collection” (2013), “DIY*”, (2008), and “Michael Adler Collection” (2008).

[1] Michael Adler is quoted in: Adi Englman (Ed.), DIY* – The Michael Adler Collection and Israeli Post-Minimalism in the Seventies and in Contemporary Art, Exhibition catalog (Herzliya: Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), pp. 6-10.