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Hersh Fenster and the lost shtetl of Montparnasse
Saturday 15 May – Sunday 10 October 2021
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.
Pierre Dac. Du côté d'ailleurs
From Thursday 15 October 2020 to Sunday 25 April 2021
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.
Obligatory reservation online, including for those eligible for free admission and Amis du mahJ members. Please note that this exhibition is best suited for a francophone audience.
Maya Zack, Acting Memory. Video works, 2007-2017
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.
Jews in Morocco, 1934-1937 Photographs by Jean Besancenot
Tuesday 30 June 2020 – Sunday 18 April 2021
Jean Besancenot’s photographs, taken from 1934 to 1937, are a priceless record of rural Jewish communities in Morocco no longer in existence.
Adolfo Kaminsky. Forger and photographer
Adolfo Kaminsky, a member of the Resistance and a brilliant forger, spent thirty years of his life producing counterfeit identity papers to save lives. He discovered photography during the Second World War reproducing official stamps for forged identity cards.
Jules Adler. Painter of the people
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.
From the BnF collection Italian Hebrew manuscripts
In the museum’s permanent collection from 20 March to 22 September 2019, the BnF and the mahJ are showing a selection of Italian manuscripts exceptionally loaned by the BnF.