The Guerry Columns by Georges Jeanclos
Until January 31st 2021
The Guerry Columns, a major work Georges Jeanclos (1933-1997), joined recently the mahJ’s collections thanks to an exceptional donation by the artist’s family of a full-scale terracotta study of the bronze monument erected in the hamlet of Guerry at Savigny-en-Septaine in the Cher. A poignant evocation of one of the crimes of the Shoah perpetrated on the French territory, this work constitutes a major enrichment of the mahJ’s contemporary collection.
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.