On arrival, Schur immediately began realizing the purpose of his appointment and his artistic aspirations. He managed the Enamel & Ivory Painting Department and taught miniature painting, and took to painting the landscape of the country and its people with great gusto. His encounter with the Holy Land (its light, climate, landscapes, history, and mythology) and its people (their appearance and clothing, language, customs, and lifestyles) transformed his artistic work. He now completely abandoned the academic style of painting, in favor of art influenced by his experiences in Palestine, driven by the same ideas that underpinned the Bezalel School under its founder, Boris Schatz. “The most original subjects for work are outdoors and in the markets, and the freedom and liberty from ancient times come to life in our imagination,” Schatz wrote in his book Bezalel: Plans and Goals (1906). Sure enough, Schur found the subjects of his paintings in the country’s landscapes and, above all, he favored its native inhabitants. The duality inherent in the Hebrew word for “portrait,” dyokan – derived from the ancient Greek words dyo (two) and eikon (image) – is reflected in the work of Schur, comprised of two contrasting trajectories: on the one hand, an aspiration to provide a faithful portrait of an individual subject, and on the other, a wish to create an archetypal rendition that is expressive of a worldview.

During World War I, Schur served as the director of the Bezalel School. It was a low point in the school’s history: the Turks had exiled Boris Schatz to Damascus, the security situation was unstable, the German committee froze its school funding, Turkey conscripted Bezalel’s teachers and students to its military, and a general sense of uncertainty hung over the institution’s future. However, thanks to the connections he forged with various officials in the local Turkish administration, who saw him as a loyal Ottoman subject, he managed to maintain the school’s status and sustain its operations. After the war, under the British Mandate regime, the academy resumed normal operations, although it continued to experience many challenges. Schur returned to running his department and to teaching art, until Bezalel’s closure in 1929. Schur continued to be very active as an artist and teacher throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1945, and was buried on the Mount of Olives.

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