Chagall - Images . Dreams . Theater 1908-1920
March 11 to June 12, 1994
The Jewish Museum of Vienna, in its exhibition “Chagall -Images . Dreams . Theater 1908-1920” presents some of the most significant paintings of Marc Chagall. The artist’s mural paintings for the Jewish State Chamber Theater in Moscow are the focal point of the show. Today, these large paintings, which were completed within thirty days in 1920, represent a near perfect example of Chagall’s “Russian Years”. The Jewish Museum shows these paintings in their original constellation; now, as it did then, the painting “Introduction to the Jewish Theater” dominates the set. The second part of the exhibition contains a selection of Chagall’s work, reflecting on the one hand impressions of his life in the city of his birth, Witebsk, and, on the other, showing some personal details from his private life.
Curator: Werner Hanak
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
“Gewidmet dem Andenken” - Treasures of Vienna’s synagogues and prayer houses
June 9 to November 9, 1994
With the exhibition “Gewidmet dem Andenken” (In Commemoration), the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna presents a selection of ritual objects from the collections of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (Jewish Community of Vienna). This invaluable treasure, which was donated to the Museum by the Viennese Kultusgemeinde, is not a “collection” in the usual sense of the word; rather, these items are what remained of the ritual objects of the formerly flourishing Jewish community of Vienna and were brought together after 1945. These objects had been donated to the former Viennese synagogues and prayer houses “in honour of the torah”, sometimes anonymously, sometimes by named sponsors; occasionally, they were given “in commemoration” of deceased relatives of the sponsor, in other cases, for the consecration of a new synagogue. In taking over this stock of objects, the Jewish Museum has accepted a historically very valuable but also extremely difficult legacy. For these items must not be treated simply as works of art - after all, they were ritual objects embedded in a concrete style of life, from which they were literally torn in 1938. For this reason, they are not only mute witnesses to the glorious history of the Jewish community of Vienna - they are also witnesses to destruction. By directly juxtaposing splendidly preserved objects with broken and destroyed items, this exhibition attempts to convey the double meaning inherent in these exhibits. In looking at them, we are exhorted to commemorate and to contemplate.
Curator: Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
MOPP - Max Oppenheimer 1885-1954
June 24 to September 18, 1994
The Jewish Museum presents the oeuvre of one of the great marginalized personalities of Austrian 20th art history in the exhibition “MOPP - Max Oppenheimer 1885-1954”. Max Oppenheimer was born in Vienna in 1885. Until forced to emigrate by the National Socialists in 1938, he was one of the leading Austrian avant-garde artists; together with Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, he created an Austrian version of expressionism in the years around 1910. Shortly afterwards, he reflected on the possibilities of French cubism; his Berlin cityscapes of the 1920s linked this cubism with stylistic elements of futurism. After his emigration to the United States in 1939, MOPP, as the artist called himself, was largely forgotten.
Apart from its denunciation by the National Socialists, Oppenheimer’s oeuvre also suffered heavily from being scattered all over the world. This is another reason for the belated appreciation of Oppenheimer at the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna: the Museum had to get into touch with almost forty owners to present fifty oil paintings, the most important posters and a selection of Oppenheimer’s graphic works in order to assemble the first comprehensive retrospective since MOPP’s emigration. The exhibition, which was designed by G. Tobias Natter, offers a representative overview of Oppenheimer’s major works from all artistic periods, i.e. from the earliest beginnings in 1907/08 to 1954, the last year of his life: visualizations of music, mythologically styled nudes, portraits, landscapes, still life paintings and excellent examples of his graphic output.
Curator: Tobias G. Natter
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
Natzler Keramiken 1935-1990
July 8 to October 26, 1994
On 11 March, 1938, the day before the German troops entered Vienna, the young ceramic artists Otto Natzler and Gertrud Amon received a communication informing them that their ceramics, exhibited at the Austrian pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, had won the Silver Medal of that event. A few weeks later, the two young people, who had married in the meantime, were forced to emigrate to Los Angeles because of their Jewish background. In their luggage, they also carried a potter’s wheel, a small electric kiln, clay and about one hundred of their best ceramic objects.
When Gertrud and Otto Natzler had to leave Vienna, barely thirty years old, they were at the beginning of an artistic career that had just started with works produced for the galleries “Bimini” and “Haus und Garten” and with a personal show at Galerie Würthle. Within a very short time, Gertrud and Otto Natzler began to enjoyed great success in their new country: already in 1939, they won the first prize at a ceramics exhibition in Syracuse, New York; in 1940, their oeuvre was presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on the occasion of the group show “Contemporary American Industrial Art”.
Over the following decades, the collaborative output of Gertrud and Otto Natzler was presented at numerous group exhibitions and individual shows in U.S. museums and galleries. The creative process of the Natzlers’ ceramics was equally impressive: Gertrud turned the objects on the wheel while Otto perfected them by burning and glazing.
From 8 July to 26 October, 1994, the Jewish Museum presents in co-operation with the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna a retrospective of Otto Natzler’s oeuvre in Vienna, Natzler’s birthplace. 80 ceramic objects dating from 1935 to 1990 will be shown; these works are either loans of U.S. museums, come from Otto and Gail Natzler’s private collection or were made available by the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (this concerns some early “Viennese” objects dating from 1935-1938). The exhibition will mainly focus on the collaboration of Gertrud and Otto Natzler and the artistic development of Otto Natzler after his wife’s death in 1971. In addition, the exhibition will feature biographical photos and videos showing Otto Natzler at work, as well as large-scale photos of Otto’s ceramic glazes by Gail Natzler.
Curator: Sylvia Mattl-Wurm
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
Surviving in Sarajevo - A Jewish Community Helps a City
September 30 to November 20, 1994
In this pictorial documentation, the U.S. photojournalist Edward Serotta has tried to document the fate of the Jewish community of Sarajevo (a community not directly involved in the Bosnian civil war), its life and activities in the besieged and embattled city. Mr. Serotta and his camera bear witness of how a Jewish community was able, in the midst of a European war, to provide shelter for its closest neighbours, which comprise all ethnic and religious groups living in Bosnia, and to help these people learn the lesson Jews have been learning for centuries: survival. Until the present time, about 75% of the members of the Jewish community have left the beleaguered city. For the remaining Jews, the decision to stay in their home-city Sarajevo was also a decision taken within the context of the humanitarian aid organization “La Benevolencija” to convert the premises of the Jewish community into an effective aid centre,where people are supplied with food and medical drugs, a first-aid station extends medical care, and the organization’s post-office and radio station often provide the only link with the world outside. In the past few months, “La Benevolencija” - together with the American Joint Distribution Committee - has furthermore organized eleven refugee convoys, thus providing safety for 2,300 persons including 1,000 members of the Jewish community.
Curator: Werner Hanak
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
Joseph Roth. 1894 - 1939
October 7, 1994 to February 12, 1995
In its exhibition “Joseph Roth . 1894-1939”, the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna honours the life and work of one of the leading Austrian writers of the 20th century. Novels like “Job”, “Radetzky March” or “Die Kapuzinergruft” laid the basis for Joseph Roth’s fame, and he became even more widely known after most of his works had been successfully filmed. Yet only a small group of experts have actually made Roth the subject of their studies. This exhibition aims at presenting a highly differentiated biography of the writer, thereby evoking all aspects of his work. More than 500 exhibits will be on show — original documents, letters, first editions and photographs; thanks to the generous support of numerous collectors, about 100 of these items will be presented to the general public for the first time ever, thereby providing a full picture of Roth that goes beyond his achievements as a novelist to present him as a successful journalist, controversial polemicist in Jewish matters and committed political opponent of National Socialism. The exhibition will begin with his Jewish childhood and youth in Eastern Galicia in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and mirror all stages of his life and their significance for his literary work, to end with Roth´s death as an exile in Paris.
The exhibition was made possible through the support of the Leo Baeck Institute (New York) and the Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur; it was designed by Victoria and Heinz Lunzer.
Curators: Heinz Lunzer, Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
Proletarians and Revolutionaries: An Exhibition on the History of the Jewish Workers’ Movement
November 11, 1994 to January 29, 1995
This exhibition focuses on the history of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Europe and the United States from the late 19th to the mid-20th century; a special section will deal with Austria. The exhibition covers all aspects of this mass movement which comprised political parties, trade unions, educational and social institutions and, in the social and ideological sense, constitutes a multi-layered, sometimes contradictory complex. In the context of the movement, we find both poverty-stricken labourers and passionately committed intellectuals; on the political level, revolutionaries with internationalist tendencies were opposed by groups favouring a Jewish national solution.
“Proletarians and Revolutionaries” explores the early history of the Jewish Workers’ Movement and follows its further development until the eve of the Second World War by means of photographs, documents, films and other exhibits. The question of how to visualize the polemic clash of ideologies, the wealth of different organizations and the geographic scatter of the individual sub-movements rendered the representation of the history of the Jewish Workers’ Movement extremely difficult. The Tel Aviv-based Beth Hatefutsoth Museum, which provided a large part of the material for the Vienna exhibition, therefore suggested to divide the exhibition into major sections which will be presented in a historical and geographic sequence. The exhibition will above all focus on Russia, Poland, Great Britain, the U.S. and Palestine; in addition, a special subsection will deal with the developments in Austria.
Curator: Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek
Palais Eskeles
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
