The mahJ will be showing the first exhibition entirely devoted to Pierre Dac (1893-1975). More than 250 family archive documents and excerpts from films and television and radio programmes will highlight the life and work of this master of the absurd, one of the founder figures of contemporary French humour.
The exhibition "Words and drawings of the children of the maison d'Izieu" brings together nearly 150 photographs, archival documents and children's drawings made by the residents of this colony which served as their refuge during the Second World War.
Featuring some 180 photographs, including series never previously exhibited, "The Trials and Tribulations of Erwin Blumenfeld, 1930-1950" exhibition focuses on the photographer’s most fertile period. It also casts new light on his vision of art and his life during the Second World War.
The island of Djerba, in southern Tunisia, is home to one of the oldest and most famous synagogues in the world, the Ghriba. The community around this synagogue, whose existence is accounted for since the Middle Ages, was documented by Jacques Pérez in 1979-1980, in a series of colorful photographs that illustrate their ancestral traditions.
The mahJ is showing The Parade, the series of drawings created by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in 1950. Although this Polish-born American artist was a prominent figure in American post-war art, he is still little known in Europe. The recurrent theme in his work is the inexpressible horror of the Holocaust.
Echoing the "Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris pour école, 1905-1940" exhibition, the mahJ is paying tribute to Hersh Fenster (Baranów, 1892–Paris, 1964), the journalist, Yiddish writer and author of Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Our Martyred Artists), published in Paris in 1951. Both a memorial and an art book, it retraces the lives and work of 84 Jewish artists living in France who died between 1940 and 1945, about whom Fenster compiled testimonies and photographs over a five-year period. Some, like Chaïm Soutine and Otto Freundlich, are well known, others, such as Étienne Farkas and Jacob Macznik, less. Yet all played their part in the final years of what the critic André Warnod dubbed in 1925 the “School of Paris”. Painters, sculptors, illustrators, men and women, their work was brought to a premature end and sometimes destroyed.
