Exhibition: Chagall Illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls at Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Marc Chagall, Illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls. Photos: Courtesy of Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Exhibition: Chagall Illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls at Tel Aviv Museum of Art (ISJM) Art Knowledge News reports on a current exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art of etchings by Marc Chagall illustrating Gogol's Dead Souls. The collections was given by Chagall to the Museum when he visited Tel Aviv during his visit to Tel Aviv in the 1931, where he had been invited by Mayor Meir Dizengoff, who had met Chagall in Paris the previous year. Chagall had joined the Paris Committee to promote the new art museum in Tel Aviv which opened the following year. At the time Tel Aviv was a quickly growing city establishing itself through art and architecture as a world capital of modern art and design.

Marc Chagall's Illustrations for Gogol's "Dead Souls" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

At the center of Gogol's "Human Comedy" Dead Souls is the character of Chichikov, a charming, shrewd scoundrel, who buys from landowners dead serfs whose names have not yet been taken off the official census, that is, the "dead souls" that must be disposed of in order to avoid paying serf tax for them. Chichikov intends to present these souls as living persons, "deposit" them as collateral against a bank loan, settle in a far province and establish himself as a respectable country gentleman. Through Chichikov's journey the reader is exposed to Russia's people and social classes: the lazy, greedy landowners; the power-hungry, honor-craving bureaucrats; the destitute serfs who are nothing but their masters' chattel – in life as well as after death. They are all described by Gogol – and illustrated by Chagall – with exaggeration, as a larger-than-life yet compassionate grotesquerie.

Gogol wrote Dead Souls, a penetrating yet affectionate novel, in 1842 while far from Russia, in Rome, and that Chagall, too, made his witty prints when he was far from Russia, in Paris. The satirical prints are characterized by an acerbity that at times verges on cruelty, and are reminiscent of the work of expressionist artist Georg Grosz, whom Chagall had known in Berlin. Distorted, diagonal scenes and a top angle view evoke a sense of movement and instability. This arrangement of form and space, so typical of Chagall, appears in this series for the first time.

From 18 January 2010 Grotesque, exaggerated figures that are more than slightly critical of 19th century Russian society, with its characteristic corruption and bureaucracy.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel's main art museum, first opened to the public in 1932 in the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Museum quickly became the cultural center of the Tel Aviv, presenting local and foreign artists.

Visit : http://www.tamuseum.com/index.html

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Israel: Ambitious New Plan To Reinvent & Rename Beth Hatefusoth

Israel: Ambitious New Plan To Reinvent & Rename Beth Hatefusoth

by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) As work on the new Israel Museum facility in Jerusalem moves into its final phases, an ambitious new plan to reinvent and rename Tel Aviv's Beth Hatefusoth (Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora) has been announced. The preliminary concept for the museum - developed by curator Dr. Orit Shaham-Gover - was presented to the Board of Governors of Beth Hatefutsoth on June 26th. The $25 million project envisions an entire rebuilding and redesign of the existing museum structure.

The museum, which in recent years has been beleaguered by organizational, financial and identity problems - will also change its name from the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora to the Museum of the Jewish People. For the first time in its history the museum appears to have rallied Israeli government support and international organizations and donors to sustain and expand its mission. When the museum opend in 1978 it was hailed as one of the most innovative history museums in the world, and was one of the first museums that was fully designed around a didactic mission, rather than a collecting one. Beth Hathfusoth pioneered many methods of using photo and later digital documentation to tell historical and ethnographic narratives, but beginning in the 1990s when a new wave of high-tech Jewish museums opened in America and Europe, many questioned Beth Hatefusoth’s ability to compete and to sustain relevancy.

Throughout its history the museum has also struggled with its very identity. As a museum devoted to maintaining the history of Jews in the Diaspora its mission was at odds with the mainstream Israeli social, political and cultural agenda. The new plan and the new name are apparently designed to address and rectify these old problems.

For more on the story see Schelly Talalay Dardashti's report on Tracing the Tribe.

Exhibition: Tel Aviv Bauhaus Architecture on View in Munich

Exhibition: Tel Aviv Bauhaus Architecture on View in Munich

(ISJM) In conjunction with the year-long exhibition City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History (September 24, 2008 through August 30, 2009), curated by Bernhard Purin at the Jewish Museum of Munich, the Museum is also mounting several exhibits under the rubric "Places of Exile."

The second of these exhibits, a photo-essay by Israeli photographer Yigal Gawze, Minchen ve'Tel Aviv opened on March 25, 2009 and runs through June 7, 2009. ‘Fragments of a Style’ looks at the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, celebrating its 100th anniversary in April 2009. The photos emphasis the "White City," the largest concentration of Bauhaus-inspired and other modern pre-World War II architecture in the world. According to the organizers, "At the same time ‘Minchen ve’Tel Aviv’ traces the life histories of four Jewish artists who lived and worked in Munich for many years and for whom Tel Aviv did not just became a place of exile after 1933 but also a new home."

You can download the catalog here:

Gawze's photo-essay will later be shown in Prague and Berlin.

City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History

The following rationale and description of City Without Jews comes from the Museum website:

Throughout 2008 Munich celebrated its 850th anniversary. Such jubilees are often seen as occasions to look back on a city’s history with pride, to identify with it, and to awaken the residents’ awareness of its history. But how is a museum—whose task is to promote the history and culture of a certain section of the community—supposed to react to such a festival year, when for more than 400 years in the city’s 850-year history, it was involuntarily and often forcefully excluded from taking part?

In its contribution to the city’s anniversary, the Jewish Museum Munich has chosen to trace precisely those times during the last 850 years when Jews were not allowed to live there, when Munich was a City without Jews. At the same time, the reasons for their expulsion, persecution, and settlement prohibitions have been highlighted and the issue of the Dark Side of Munich's History broached.

The twelve exhibits, which render predominantly negative events in the city’s history visible, are complemented by video boards in the exhibition. Students at the University for Television and Film in Munich have collated statements by historians and experts in the fields of literature, politics, and cultural affairs, related to Munich’s topography and which refer to events of exclusion, persecution, and annihilation that actually happened. This allows visitors to the exhibition "City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History" to see the objects in a broader historical context while at the same time linking them to specific sites in Munich.

Curator: Bernhard Purin
Assistance: Tatjana Neef