CHESTNUT HILL, MA.-Beginning this month, the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College and the New Center for Arts and Culture, Boston will present The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons. The exhibition was organized by The Jewish Museum in New York, where it debuted in March and was on display until July 10.The McMullen Museum is the exclusive other venue for this critically-acclaimed exhibition, which highlights the role played by the salons of Jewish women in the development of art, literature, music, theater, philosophy and politics in Europe and America from the late 18th century through the Second World War. The exhibition will be on display through December 4, 2005.
“This compelling exploration of the emergence of modernisms viewed through the lens of Jewish salonières takes on added meanings within the context of a Jesuit Catholic University,” said McMullen Museum Director and Professor of Art History Nancy Netzer. “The McMullen is grateful to the New Center for Arts and Culture, and especially its director Shoshana Pakciarz, for proposing a collaboration, which enhances possibilities for rewarding and productive dialogue surrounding this inspired exhibition.”
The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons -An important and radical vehicle for the "democratization of the public sphere," the salon provided a context in which nobility, artists and intellectuals exchanged ideas across barriers of class, gender, nationality and religion. Salons enabled women and Jews—whose participation in official public life was restricted—to play a prominent role.
The exhibition probes the role private conversations had in fostering the careers of celebrities such as Felix Mendelssohn, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Greta Garbo.
The Power of Conversation, which was organized for The Jewish Museum by guest curators Emily Bilski and Emily Braun, focuses on the most powerful women who hosted these salons. According to exhibition organizers, the exhibition reveals these salonières as exceptional women who became major players in the society, arts and politics of their times, despite their minority status, and examines the salon as a seat of power for women and a means of social ascent for traditional outsiders.
Among the engaging women examined are: Henriette Herz, one of the first Jewish women to host a salon; Amalie Beer and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (the sister of composer Felix Mendelssohn), who convened music salons in Berlin; Gertrude Stein, who assembled a group of avant-garde writers and artists in Paris; Ada Leverson, who welcomed Oscar Wilde to her London salon; Margherita Sarfatti and Anna Kulisicoff, who established salons in Italy in the early twentieth century; and Florine Stettheimer and Salka Viertel, who hosted their guests in salons in New York and Los Angeles, respectively.
Organizers note that, through a detailed documentation of the celebrities and geniuses who attended their salons (and wrote about them), of the works that hung on the walls or debuted in their homes, and of careers and relationships made and broken, The Power of Conversation demonstrates the uniquely public domain of the private salonière.
The exhibition comprises more than 150 objects, including portraits of the salonières and their guests, manuscripts, musical scores, sculpture, paintings, drawings, books, photographs, furniture and films. Exhibition highlights include nine oil paintings by the New York-based American artist and salonière Florine Stettheimer; 14 drawings by Wilhelm Hensel which include Michael Beer, Niccolò Paganini, Goethe, Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Rahel Varnhagen (née Levin); and works by Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, Achille Funi, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley and Josef Hoffmann.
According to organizers, by the mid-20th century, movies, television and radio had largely replaced the role salons had played in facilitating cultural exchange and dialogue. In addition, the need for salons by women and Jews disappeared with political and social emancipation.
