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.
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.
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.
Studio Roffé, opened in 1906 in Apt by Élie Roffé and his wife Blanche Lazare, specialised in portraits and coverage of local events. After Élie's death in 1938, Blanche and their son Marcel continued the business until they were arrested and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Their work, recently rediscovered, bears witness to their involvement in local life. The exhibition features around sixty of their images, taken from a collection of thousands of negative plates in the Apt municipal archives.
Pascal Monteil is a storyteller who expresses himself through embroidery. Using old hemp canvas and brightly coloured wool, he embroiders stories in which literary, poetic and historical figures coexist. His works bring together different temporalities, provoking unexpected encounters.
He is the winner of the Prix Maratier 2022, awarded by the Pro mahJ foundation.
