Visual arts in Israel or Israeli art refers to visual art or plastic art created by Israeli artists or Jewish painters in the Yishuv. Visual art in Israel encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques, styles and themes reflecting a dialogue with Jewish art throughout the ages and attempts to formulate a national identity.

In 19th century Palestine, much of the art was decorative and sold to religious pilgrims and travelers. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Jewish painters fleeing pogroms in Europe settled in Tel Aviv.

In 1925 Yitzhak Frenkel also known as, Alexandre Frenel, considered the father of Israeli modern art, brought to modern Palestine the influence of the École de Paris; by teaching and mentoring many of the nascent state's upcoming great artists. Furthermore, he along with other artists led the movement of Israeli artists to the Artist's Quarter of Tzfat leading to a golden age of art in the city during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

After the destruction of Jewish communities in Europe during the holocaust, Israel emerged as the center of Jewish art.

Different art movements aroused in Israel, including the Canaanite and New Horizons movements.

Early art in 19th century Palestine was mainly decorative art of a religious nature (primarily Jewish or Arab Christian), produced for religious pilgrims, but also for export and local consumption. These objects included decorated tablets, embossed soaps, rubber stamps, etc., most of which were decorated with motifs from graphic arts. In the Jewish settlements artists worked at gold smithing, silver smithing, and embroidery, producing their works in small crafts workshops. A portion of these works were intended to be amulets. One of the best known of these Jewish artists, Moshe Ben Yitzhak Mizrachi of Jerusalem made Shiviti (or Shivisi, in the Ashkenazic pronunciation, meditative plaques used in some Jewish communities for contemplation over God's name) on glass and amulets on parchments, with motifs such as the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Book of Esther, and views of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Objects of applied art were produced also at the "Torah ve-Melakhah" ("Torah and Work") school founded in 1882 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This school opened departments for the production of art objects in Neo-Classical and Baroque styles, produced by combining manual labor with modern machines.

A large body of artistic work was produced by European artists, primarily Christian painters, who came to document the sites and landscapes of the "Holy Land". The motive behind these works was orientalist and religious and focused on documentation – first of the painting and later of the photography – of the holy sites and the way of life in the Orient, and on the presentation of exotic people. Photographs of the Holy Land, which also served as the basis for paintings, focused on documenting structures and people in full daylight, due to the limitations of photography at that time. Therefore, an ethnographic approach is in evidence in the photographs, which present a static and stereotypical image of the figures they depict. In the photographs of the French photographer Felix Bonfils, for instance in his prominent photographs of the Holy Land in the last decades of the 19th century, we even see an artificial desert background, in front of which his figures are posed. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, local photographers began to appear, the most important of whom is Khalil Raad, who focused on an ethnographic description of the reality of the Holy Land, in large part colonial. In addition there were other photographers, many of them Armenian, who worked as commercial photographers in the Land of Israel and neighbouring countries.

Until the beginning of the 20th century no tradition of fine arts existed in Palestine^{[citation needed]} although European artists came as visitors and painted the "Holy Land". Artists and craftsmen of Judaica objects and other applied arts made up the majority of artists working in the Land of Israel. Although the "Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts," known as "Bezalel", was not the first art school established in the Jewish settlement, its importance in setting the boundaries of the tradition of modern art in Palestine was very great indeed, and it is customary to view its establishment as the beginning of Israeli art.^{[citation needed]} The school was founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz with the support of heads of Jewish and Zionist institutions. At Bezalel emphasis was placed on objects of applied art with a metaphysical dimension.