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.
In popular Jewish culture, a dybbuk refers to a wandering soul that takes possession of a living person, according to a belief that developed in Eastern Europe from the 18th century onwards. The dybbuk is one of those supernatural creatures that have gone beyond the realms of superstition to become a theme that inspires artists past and present. The mahJ is the first museum to explore the subject in a rich exhibition combining theatre, film, music, literature and popular culture.
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 Mušič (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, Mušič 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.
