The story
On the afternoon of 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in a modest house on Rothschild Boulevard and read out the declaration founding the State of Israel. That house belonged to Meir Dizengoff, the city's first mayor, who had given it to Tel Aviv sixteen years earlier as its art museum. The reading was held there partly because it was a hall people already knew.
The museum long ago outgrew that room. Its home today is the low, sculptural building on Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, opened in 1971, joined in 2011 by the Herta and Paul Amir wing, a bright origami of tilted planes by the architect Preston Scott Cohen that folds daylight down into the galleries.
Inside you move between Israeli art and a European modern collection built up from the founding years, with Klimt, Klee and Kandinsky among the names, and rooms of Impressionists. The old Dizengoff house still stands a short walk away, kept now as Independence Hall.
