Biography | Martin Weyl — The Year This Campus Made Him Director

Sixteen years after he worked on the concrete, the Israel Museum named Martin Weyl director.

The year was 1981.

He had already been a guide, an assistant curator, curator of sculpture, and chief curator.

Hebrew University had given him a doctorate in the philosophy of art in 1974.

The appointment is recorded on the museum's officer list as running from 1981 to 1996.

Haaretz later called it a fifteen-year tenure.

He used the chair the way a builder-turned-curator would.

He pushed the Ruth Youth Wing, which became a model for museum education far beyond Jerusalem.

He raised money and collections.

He kept advising Teddy Kollek on outdoor sculpture.

In 1996 he handed the museum to James S. Snyder and moved to the Beracha Foundation.

From that office he spent the next decade on Hiriya, the garbage mountain south of Tel Aviv that became Ariel Sharon Park.

The campus on this ridge is the through-line.

He arrived as a laborer in 1964.

He left as director in 1996.

The buildings he first helped raise were the buildings he later had to run.

Photo: Asaf C. (he.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons