INTIMATE GALLERIES: PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUMS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM IN PRAGUE (original) (raw)
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Judaica Bohemiae, 2022
Does the past have a face? No doubt. One way to conceive it is as a succession of moments that become embedded in the consciousness and unconscious of each one of us, generally in an individualized way. By nature it is a protean and complex face, very personal and different for everyone, hardly reducible to a universal gallery of ‘icons’ à la pantheons of famous persons. In this sense, it is not a singular past, but a multitude of pasts, millions, if not billions, retained in the reservoirs of living memory, not an immutable imprint but one that is constantly transforming along with the vicissitudes of individual experience, the flux of emotions, perceptions, and moods.
Rebuilding a Destroyed World: Rudolf Beres – a Jewish Art Collector in interwar Kraków
Interwar Kraków was a vibrant cultural center in newly independent Poland. Jewish intelligentsia played a significant part in preservation of Krakowian culture, but also endowed artist and cultural institutions. In a shadow of renowned Maurycy Gottlieb, there is his great collector and promoter of his artistic oeuvre, Rudolf Beres (1884-1964). The core of the collection was inherited from his father Emil. Rudolf, who arrived to Kraków to study law, brought these pictures with him, and with time extended the collection, not only with Maurycy Gottlieb's artworks, but also other distinguished Polish artists. As a director of the Kraków Chamber of Commerce and Industry he played an influential role in the city and country scene. As a member of Solidarność – Kraków B'nai Brith chapter, he was active in the cultural events and ventures in the city. He was the main force behind the famous exhibition of Maurycy Gottlieb's of 1932 in the National Museum in Kraków. Rudolf collected extensive information on Maurycy in order to commemorate his life and promote artistic oeuvre of the first Jewish artist of such significance. His home art gallery , mostly because of Gottlieb's collection was visited by various Jewish activists; for example Hayim Nahman Bialik. Moreover, Rudolf planned to exhibit Maurycy's work in Tel Aviv. With a group of B'nai B'rith members he traveled with his wife to visit Palestine. He was a close friend of Feliks Kopera, the director of the National Museum in Kraków, for which he extensively organized money collection for erecting a new galleries' building. The paper presents forgotten and unpublished facts about a Jewish art collector of Kraków, a person whose art works he once possessed and cherished, are now in various museums and private collections as a result of WWII and communist regime. I bring the man back from obscurity of history's selectiveness. The historical documents, family heirlooms and discovered war memoirs of Rudolf construct the past of the great Jewish citizen of Kraków without whom Mau-rycy Gottlieb could have been unknown as much as he is known now. The Jewish intellectual life of interwar Kraków was destroyed first by the six years of World War II and then during the ensuing decades of communist power in Poland.
The paper outlines the collecting efforts undertaken by the Jewish Community in Prague and its Museum during the period of 1942–45 as a form of systematic rescue, analyzes the collection’s postwar role, and examines its importance for the preservation of the collective memory and identity of Czech Jewry. Special emphasis is put on the fate of the Prague Jewish Museum’s collection within the context of the turbulent political events of 1948 and 1968, which produced two major waves of emigration that resulted in significant material loss and eroded the integrity of the country’s Jewish cultural, intellectual, and spiritual wealth. Using as case studies a few select objects that went missing from the collection during the war and postwar years, only to resurface recently in public or private sales, the paper elaborates the problems of murky provenance, which have engendered the widespread contamination of today’s globalized art market, and examines the fragile boundary between rescue and misappropriation, and ransom and settlement, two basic dichotomies posing fundamental ethical problems. The process of restitution and repatriation is featured not only in the context of seeking justice but as a means of healing and preserving the memory of a community nearly decimated by the Nazi genocide and the Communist totalitarian regime that followed.
Displaying city and nation in the Prague City Museum (1883-1938)
Museum History Journal, 2022
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Prague transformed from the provincial hub of Bohemia to a modern metropolis, head of the Czech nation, and capital of the new Czechoslovak state. This article explores what place Prague City Museum inhabited during this process. In particular, it looks at how the role of the museum was debated concerning its location and construction, in the meaning-making practices related to its collections, and in reflections on its somewhat weak outreach to the larger public. Analysis of the museum’s permanent exhibitions as well as four temporary exhibitions organised in 1895, 1916, and 1934-35, shed further light on how the city was conceptualised and its national historical narrative interwoven with that of its urban past, while also discussing various modes of representation and signification used in promoting its existence.
Jews and Slavs, 2022
The 27th volume of the international series Jews and Slavs, entitled Jewish-Slavic Cultural Horizons: Essays on Jewish History and Art in Slavic Lands, dwells on the political, cultural, literary, and artistic interaction between Jews and Slavic peoples from the Middle Ages to the World War II aftermath. The volume accomplishes a joint cooperative project of The Center for Slavic Languages and Literature of the Hebrew University, The Center for Jewish Art of the same university, and The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. The publication contains 21 articles dedicated to the history, ethnicity, culture, literature, theatre, fine arts, architecture, heritage and memory thematically grouped in nine sections. The particular sections elucidate the protection of Jewish movable and immovable heritage and memory in Slavic countries, the destiny of Jewish cultural heritage in the Holocaust and its aftermath, an image of a Jew in Christian and Jewish cultures, Jewish ethnography and historiography, history of Jewish art and artists’ biography, Jewish artistic life in Slavic public milieu, the methodology of Jewish art history, the search for “Yiddishland” in interwar Poland, and a Jewish contribution to the Serbian culture.
The Wandering Jew in Czech Fine Art: Anti-Semitism, Empathy, Self-Identification
Ars Judaica. The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art , 2019
Although in German-speaking countries the earliest visual representations of Ahasver stem from the seventeenth century, we find the first depictions of the Wandering Jew in Czech fine art only in the nineteenth century. It is a complex subject reflecting Christian-Jewish relations which has not yet been sufficiently addressed in Czech art history. Initially fueled by anti-Semitic excesses at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially during World War II, the Ahasverian theme continued to appear throughout the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Czech artists are still attracted to this iconographic motif. The article analyzes the development of this motif in Czech visual culture and sheds some light on its appearance in Czech art created by artists of Jewish origin.