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.
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 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...
daily, starting from Thursday, October 17, 2019 - 10:00, until Sunday, February 23, 2020 - 23:59
Jules Adler (1865-1952) was born into an Alsatian Jewish family at Luxeuil-les-Bains in Franche-Comté. The powerful and singular oeuvre of this painter of the second naturalist generation is little known to the public today, yet one of his pictures, The Strike at Le Creusot (1899), became an iconic image of the workers’ struggle and has been frequently reproduced in history books.
