The 1924 painting by the German-born Aryeh Lubin, on the other hand, is an example that employs a frontal perspective that overlooks a panoramic landscape. Entitled View of Ramat Gan Hills,(Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv) distance is represented on three successive planes, which seems to reveal the process by which the so-called desert is made to bloom. The viewer’s closest terrain filling up the major part of the painting shows the cultivated rolling hills; in the middle distance, we see the dwellings of the settlement nestling amidst a dense orchard; in the far distance, we see the rugged and barren hills that are lined up as it were to be appropriated and turned green at a later stage.

As for paintings representing the place of the native other, they have mostly been painted from the high viewpoint that hovers above the site. The consistency in choosing such a high viewpoint that overlooks the place from a dominating position as if the other’s place is being observed from the height of a settlement’s tower, has been known since the 17th century as ‘perspective cavalière’ -- a theoretical perspective that was originally developed to serve military purposes. By employing the high viewpoint of a ‘perspective cavalière’ the Jewish settler artist did not seek to give the tangible illusion of the other’s place; like the military cartographer whose high viewpoint sought to provide information beyond enemy lines, the European settler artist sought through their landscapes to convey information regarding the exotic foreignness of the place from their vantage position. The presence of the native other in some of these paintings was often the main instrument by which artists relayed their individual observation.

The subject of how the ‘perspective cavalière’ has been maintained by the pioneers of Israeli art deserves an independent study. In this limited time and space, I shall suffice by showing you slides of a few paintings created during the 1920s and early 1930s.

These paintings include ‘Landscape’ (1924) by the Russian-born Shmuel Ovadiahu ( The Bialik House, Tel Aviv); ‘Road to Nazareth’ (1925) by the Rumanian-born Reuven Ruben (Mrs.Esther Rubin Collection, Tel Aviv); ‘Jerusalem, Jaffa Gate’ (ca.1925) by the Russian-born Yoseph Zaritzky ( Shaya Yariv Collection, Tel Aviv); ‘Orchard in Jaffa’ (1926) by the Russian-born Nahum Gutman ( Israel Museum, Jerusalem); ‘Lifta Landscape’ (1927) by the Palestinian-born Sionah Tagger (Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv); ‘Ein Karem Landscape’ (1928) by the Russian-born Israel Paldi (Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv); ‘Figure in Landscape’ (1920s) by the Russian-born Pinhas Litvinovsky ( Joseph Hackmey Collection, Tel Aviv); ‘Safad Landscape’ (ca.1930) by the Hungarian-born Mordechai Levanon, ( Joseph Hackmey Collection, Tel Aviv); ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ (1931) by the Palestinian-born Moshe Castel (Israel Museum, Jerusalem).
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To demonstrate how a native Arab artist painted the place Palestinians call home, I shall now focus on the works of a rural artist from the post-1948 period. Unlike the pioneers of Israeli art whose art methods and visual devices had been inherited from a long pictorial tradition that evolved in Europe, pioneers of Palestinian art had the Byzantine and the Islamic visual traditions for their pictorial roots . Neither of these traditions complied with the rules of spatial perspective whereby ‘the visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.’