Founded in Russia in 1880 to extricate Jews from misery through the promotion of handicrafts and agriculture, ORT (Organisation Reconstruction Travail) is today an international education and training network established in over forty countries. 2021 marks the centenary of its presence in France.
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.
The exhibition "Maya Zack, Acting Memory. Video works, 2007-2017" opens on 3 october in the Contemporary gallery, on the occasion of the Nuit Blanche Parisian event. At the mahJ and for the first time in a French museum, Maya Zack is showing a trilogy of films made over a decade: Mother Economy (2007), Black and White Rule (2011) and Counterlight (2016-2017),
From Saturday 3 October 2020, to Sunday 12 September 2021
At the mahJ and for the first time in a French museum, Maya Zack shows a trilogy of films made over a decade. Comprising Mother Economy (2007), Black and White Rule (2011) and Counterlight (2016-2017), this series is the result of a long period of research and creation, formalised in a language combining drawing, sculpture and video. Recurrent figures in this trilogy are women dialoguing with the past and giving it substance. As the last survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing, the artist questions the risk of forgetting and the processes of memory.
The School of Paris designates the artistic scene constituted by foreign artists from all over Europe and also the Americas, Asia and Africa. This cosmopolitism was unprecedented in art history.
Please note: the exhibition "Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris as a school" is fully booked online.
daily, starting from Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - 11:00, until Sunday, March 28, 2021 - 23:59
After an extensive investigation, the mahJ’s curators have unveiled part of the mystery shrouding three portraits of the Hassoun family of Constantine. Their research succeeded in localising the family, discovering the cultural identities indicated by the garments worn and establishing the singular path that took them to France.
In addition to these discoveries, this presentation is an opportunity to more fully understand the work of the museum’s curators and their interest in each work’s hidden facets...
