With the "Newcomers" programme, the mahJ is committed to studying and highlighting the lives and work of women artists in the collection.
This first exhibition is devoted to Charlotte Henschel (1892-1985), Georgette Meyer (1916-2020) and Sonia Steinsapir (1912-1980), three women artists from the same generation, with singular life paths and different artistic sensibilities.
The exhibition retraces the little-known career of dancer Paula Padani (1913-2001) through over 250 photographs, posters, documents and costumes. With her vision of movement as a force for life, and her ability to bounce between different countries and cultures, she blazed new trails for her art and played a pioneering role in the emergence of Israeli contemporary dance.
Deported to Dachau in October 1944, Zoran Music (1909-2005) survived there until April 1945. At the risk of his life, he produced many drawings. Although he did not evoke the camp in his works in the immediate post-war period, it had a decisive influence on his creative work from the 1970s onwards. More than twenty-five years after his liberation, he began the cycle Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We are not the last). In a series of works, including many almost monochrome paintings, Music evokes the intensity of the tragedy and the ‘silence’ of this funereal universe, retaining only the lines needed to depict the mass graves. Traces of a hell from which the survivors never fully returned, these canvases become the symbol of the horror of the concentration camp system.
Nearly twenty years after its first exhibition devoted to Alfred Dreyfus, the mahJ is returning to the "Affaire" to recall the major stages of this crucial moment in French history, one of the many consequences of which was the law separating Church and State. The exhibition reveals Dreyfus's relentless fight to bring the truth to light, correcting the image of a man who was a bystander to the conspiracy that led him to spend four years in prison and another seven fighting for his rehabilitation.
The Palais-musée des Archevêques de Narbonne houses one of the oldest Jewish inscriptions in France, dated 688-689, the funerary stele of Justus, Matrona and Dulciorella, a sibling whose cause of death is unknown. It will be on display for six months at the beginning of the mahJ's permanent collection.
