Jewish Museum: "Paris Magnétique"

19. April 2023

Fascination Paris in the Jewish Museum: “Paris Magnétique”

This exhibition is a real discovery! Already in 2021, the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris showed an exhibition about the artists of the "Paris School"and their works created between 1905 and 1914. Now this period has been extended in the Berlin exhibit. The Jewish Museum shows the art of the years between 1905 and 1940. And this art inspires!

The “Paris School” does not designate a style of painting or a specific art movement, but stands for an attitude of mind and the affiliation to a circle of artists who met and lived far away from home in the roaring Paris of the 1920s. What all the artists had in common?

They were immigrants, many of them of Jewish origin. Sonia Delaunay belonged to that circle or Kees van Dongen, Juan Gris, Picasso, Chagall or also less known ones, like Marevna*, who had a daughter with the artist Diego Rivera (Marika Rivera, an actress) and created fantastic cubist works or also Chaim Soutine and many more. Some artists had fled the Russian Revolution or progroms, others poverty, but all were united by art and the attraction of Paris.

* the artist Marevna – actually Maria Bronislavovna Vorobyova-Stebelskaya, had devoted herself to cubism, she got the name Marevna from the writer Maxim Gorky, who named her after the Russian fairy Marevna, with Marevna she signed her paintings

Well-known and especially many of the less wellknown artists are shown in “Paris Magnétique” as well as their interconnections within the Parisian art scene. Paris as a city of artists comes to life before the mind’s eye: who met with whom in the Café du Dôme, for example, and which art dealers represented the artists who were to go down in history… lots of photos, newspaper and film clippings, and above all, of course, pictures! The name of the Dômiers was born and the artists who belonged to this group were mainly dedicated to Fauvism.

Café du Dôme can still be discovered today during a Parisian city stroll on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. From 1905, it was one of teh Parisian cafés to be for artists (Man Ray, Max Ernst, Kandinsky, Modigliani), writers (Guillaume Apollinaire, Simone de Beauvoir or Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway and Ezra Pound), sculptors (e.g. Otto Freundlich) and art dealers like Alfred Flechtheim. The list of regular guests seems endless!

Today’s known and unknown artists – they were all united in Paris, belonged to the same cliques and influenced each other. In this exhibition you can get to know them better as well as getting new insights into their artistic live, e.g. about the studio house “La – ever heard of it? – an exciting exhibition that can be visited until May 2023.