New York Jewish Week via JTA – Edmund de Waal thinks that objects, like families, are diasporic. They start in one place and end in another, accumulating stories.
A master ceramist who exhibits his works around the world, Edmund de Waal is the author of the award-winning bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes : A Hidden Inheritance [Le lièvre aux yeux d’ambre : un héritage caché], which chronicles the rise and fall of his European Jewish family, the Ephrussi dynasty.
The book, which is now the subject of an exhibition, which opened on November 19 at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, has captured the world’s attention with its graceful and original narration, evoking lost worlds of the Europe before the Holocaust through material objects and the stories they continue to tell.
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These objects are on display at the museum: family photos, letters, memorabilia and works of art from the family collection, including paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir .
At the heart of the exhibition is the eponymous hare, which is part of a large collection of netsuke, these tiny Japanese figurines in ivory and finely carved wood. Inherited by the author, whose father of Dutch origin was Anglican dean of Canterbury, the netsuke inspired her research and represent her family’s rise, break-up and resilience.
“There’s this thing about the tactile character, about the objects, about what’s in them,” de Waal said in an interview from his London studio last week. “I honestly feel this idea that when you make something and pass it on, there is a transfer of energy, emotion and imagination. I firmly believe that objects tell stories. If you are passionate enough, you can find the stories they can tell. “
He continues: “No story is simple. When trying to tell a complex story, like a family story, that is about memory and emotions, the things that are explained and those that are remembered, it is as much about secrets and silences as it is about things that are passed on. . “
In memorial style, the exhibit traces the history of de Waal’s paternal family, the Ephrussi, an influential Jewish family whose roots go back to Berdichev, a village in the Residence Zone, in what is today hui central and western Ukraine. In 1840 Charles Joachim Ephrussi traveled to Odessa, where he enjoyed enormous success in the grain trade, and then to Vienna, where the family further increased their wealth, prestige and philanthropy.
In the 1870s a grandson of the family patriarch, also named Charles Ephrussi, art critic and collector (a cousin of the author’s great-grandfather), acquired a collection of 264 netsuke in Paris and kept them alongside paintings by his friends, including Renoir, a notorious anti-Semite. The figurines were probably admired and handled by Charles’ friend, the Jewish writer Marcel Proust, who visited his Paris living room, before being sent as a wedding gift to a cousin Ephrussi in Vienna.
Various netsuke figurines from the collection of the family of Waal, exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan as part of the exhibition “The Hare with the Amber Eyes”. (Credit: Jewish Museum / via JTA)
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In 1938, the Nazis looted and then occupied the great Viennese palace of the Ephrussians, and family members were persecuted, exiled and killed. The netsuke were secretly hidden in a mattress by a loyal family helper. After the war, when the netsuke were rediscovered, the author’s grandmother brought them to England, and then his great-uncle brought them to Japan, where Edmund first saw and touched this “very large collection of very small objects” in nineteen eighty one.
At the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, the amber-eyed hare and other miniatures, which de Waal describes in his memoir as “seductive to the touch,” are under glass. Most are signed by the artists who created them.
“I hope that the intimacy of the exhibition will allow you to feel and feel that you are very close to them. You can’t touch them, but you can smell them, ”he explains. He describes it as an immersive exhibition.
“The delicate excavation process is part of the whole idea of the exhibition,” he says. “This is a discovery… a real attempt to tell a story”.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to hear de Waal read excerpts from his memoirs on an audio guide while learning about the netsuke as well as other objects.
These include a parokhet (curtain covering the ark of the Torah) in Damascus silk, made from a family member’s wedding dress, and nose clips, or glasses, of glass and metal. These glasses belonged to Viktor von Ephrussi, born in Odessa in 1860 and died stateless in 1945.
A Torah parokhet (curtain) of silk damask was made from the wedding dress of a member of the Ephrussi family, circa 1833. (Courtesy of the Stadttempel, Vienna, by Hermann Todesco Collection of the Jüdisches Museum Wien / via JTA)
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From netsuke, we find a persimmon with a ladybug, a snake on a lotus leaf, three mice playing and a monkey eating a peach. There is also a 1978 portrait of Waal’s father, Victor de Waal, which the author says looks like a rabbi.
Elizabeth Diller de Diller, Scofido + Renfro designed the exhibit. Daughter of Holocaust survivors, she worked for ten years with de Waal on the layout project for her memoirs.
When asked to imagine what his presentation will be like at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, with so many objects gathered in one place, de Waal replies: “It is an extraordinary, beautiful and lyrical thing to review something with a fresh look. For me, it is incredibly painful and poignant. There are things I first saw 40 years ago in my uncle’s apartment in Japan, or 50 years ago in my grandmother’s house. “
He says he continues to talk to those who have passed away. “Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean you’re no longer in conversation,” he rightly says.
Behind him in the studio are tidy shelves with plenty of books, and on a Zoom call he points out some volumes of poetry by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke that belonged to his grandmother and will not be in the exhibition. He moves the screen of his computer and points to a large installation on a nearby wall, with porcelain vessels arranged in a display case, around a poem by Paul Celan.
De Waal speaks in a poetic and uncluttered manner, like his prose and like his art.
“I always wanted to be a poet. Poetry is in everything I do. In my facilities. I read poetry all the time ”. He recently set up a poetry library for a cancer support center in England and will roll out the idea across the country.
Several years ago de Waal donated most of his collection to netsuke to the Jewish Museum in Vienna on a long-term loan.
“This is exactly the right place for them,” he explains. Referring to the power of storytelling, he continues, “They can work really hard, talking about the diaspora, about what happened in Vienna. Her family auctioned off 79 more, raising funds for refugee charities.
“We wanted to do this as long as my father, who is 92, is alive. We have decided to honor the fact that we are a refugee family. We have raised a huge amount of money. That’s also telling a story, ”he said. “You are not a passive spectator in this story, but an active participant. These stories are not over yet. “
ivory netsuke, the amber eyed hare from the title of Edmund de Waal’s family memoir. (Credit: Lostrobots [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons)
-“People say, ‘So you’ve moved on. The answer is, you can’t move on. [L’histoire] is still ongoing, troubling, unresolved. “He kept some of the netsuke.
When I ask him what a netsuke in his hands, he replies: “It’s a truly fun experience. There is an expectation of how an object will feel. You can know all about dimensionality. We move it around and we always discover something else. There is a wonderful moment of fun, when you discover a coiled rat tail, or acrobats doing amazing things with their limbs. We are always surprised by objects, that’s the joy ”.
For de Waal, writing and artistic creation are intertwined passions. Perhaps best known for his white porcelain vessels, he often performs assemblages, shifting light and space between his delicate and translucent creations. He has also created specific installations in museums and libraries around the world, notably at the Frick in New York and – right now – at the mysterious Nissim de Camondo museum in Paris.
READ: Edmund de Waal, the only guest to change the Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris
He is also the author of The White Road, which deals with the history of porcelain and its fascination with it. His latest book is called Letters to Camondo and is about that other Jewish dynasty whose members lost their freedom, property and life to the Nazis.
For the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, de Waal created an exhibition in two parts: one at the Jewish Museum of the Venetian Ghetto and the second, a “library of exile” built inside a building of the 16th century on the Grand Canal. It included nearly 2,000 books by writers in exile, in 70 languages, from 52 countries. On walls covered with liquid porcelain, de Waal inscribed the names of lost libraries around the world, including those in Sarajevo, Mosul and Aleppo, the rabbinical libraries in Lublin and Warsaw, and his great-grandfather’s library in Vienna. .
After traveling to other museums, the “Library of Exile” is now in its permanent home in Mosul, Iraq, serving as the foundation for a new university library replacing what was destroyed.
The exhibition “The Hare with the Amber Eyes” is presented at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, 1109 Fifth Avenue, 92nd Street, from November 19, 2021 to May 15, 2022.
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