Tours begin March 20, 2023

The Sassoons reveals the fascinating story of a remarkable Jewish family, following four generations from Iraq to India, China, and England through a rich selection of works collected by family members over time. The exhibition highlights the Sassoon family’s pioneering role in trade, art collecting, architectural patronage, and civic engagement from the early 19th century through World War II and features paintings, decorative arts, illuminated manuscripts, and Judaica.  Highlights include lavishly decorated Hebrew manuscripts, Chinese art and ivory carvings, rare Jewish ceremonial art, masterful paintings by Gainsborough and Corot, and magnificent portraits by John Singer Sargent of various Sassoon family members. The Sassoons explores themes such as discrimination, diaspora, colonialism, global trade, and war that not only shaped the history of the family but continue to define our world today. 

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Tours begin April 17, 2023 

After “The Wild”: Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection highlights works made between 1963 and 2022 by 47 intergenerational and internationally-based artists. Barnett Newman (1905–1970) is among the most influential artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. After his death, Annalee Newman, his widow, created The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation to help further the spirit of great art that Barnett Newman so clearly exhibited through the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award. Diverse in style, training, background, and age, the Foundation’s grantees—whose works comprise this exhibition—share Newman’s seriousness of purpose, as well as his unflagging drive to explore the outer limits of his own ideas.

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The Jewish Museum’s influential role in the early 1960s New York art scene is the jumping-off point for an exhibition that explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City. New York: 1962–1964 examines how artists living in the city responded to their rapidly changing world through more than 150 works of art. The exhibition includes works of art by Diane Arbus, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Melvin Edwards, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, James Rosenquist, Carolee Schneemann, Marjorie Strider, Mark di Suvero, Bob Thompson, and Andy Warhol, among many others and aligns with the years of Alan Solomon’s tenure as the Jewish Museum’s influential director. Solomon organized exhibitions dedicated to what he called the “New Art,” transforming the Jewish Museum into one of the most important cultural hubs in New York.

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The artist Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) is an icon of Jazz Age New York. Born to a Jewish family in Rochester, she studied at the Art Students League in New York City and then in Europe, where she encountered two profound influences: the Symbolist painters and poets and, on the eve of the Great War, the Ballets Russes. The exhibition featured over 50 paintings and drawings, a selection of costume and theater designs, photographs and ephemera, as well as critically acclaimed poems, to offer a timely reconsideration of this important American artist, revealing Stettheimer's singular and often satiric vision and significant role in American modern art. This virtual tour highlights the artist's distinctly personal style of painting, Stettheimer's position amidst New York's artistic elite and avant-gardes, and her continued influence on artistic practice today.

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Chagall: Love, War, and Exile explores a significant but lesser-known period in the artist’s career from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through 1948, years spent in Paris and then in exile to New York. Marc Chagall (1887–1985), one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century, created his unique style by drawing on elements from richly colored folk art motifs, the Russian Christian icon tradition, Cubism, and Surrealism. Beginning with the evocative paintings from his years in France, the exhibition illuminates an artist deeply responsive to the suffering inflicted by war—often expressed with Christian imagery—and to his own personal losses and intimate sorrows. By the late 1940s, Chagall returns to colorful, joy-filled work celebrating love.

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The Hare with Amber Eyes evokes the story of the Ephrussi family—celebrated in the 2010 memoir and The New York Times bestseller of the same name by Edmund de Waal—and showcases the breadth and depth of their illustrious collection. The exhibition explores the family’s rise to prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by a focus on the prolific collector and historian of art, Charles Ephrussi, to the inter-war years, and finally, World War II, when the family lost its fortune and collection to Nazi looting. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working closely with de Waal and the Jewish Museum, has created an interpretive installation that brings together pieces from the Ephrussi’s collections including artworks by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau, and Auguste Renoir. At the exhibition’s centerpiece is the extraordinary collection of Japanese netsuke, miniature carved sculptures of the Edo Period (17th-19th centuries), hidden by a maid from German officials in her mattress during World War II, and later returned to the family after the war. 

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During World War II, untold numbers of artworks and cultural property were stolen by Nazi forces and, after the war, an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books were recovered. This exhibition chronicles the stories of the objects looted from Jewish families during the war including works by such renowned artists such as Marc Chagall, Paul Cézanne, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Camille Pissarro.

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Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn explores Andy Warhol’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor and the tabloid world they embodied. The fact that Hollywood’s blonde bombshell and violet-eyed siren were both converted Jews was significant: It signaled a growing popular acceptance of Jewish public figures. Warhol’s portraits, of these two subjects, explore the complex, manufactured nature of identity. 

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This exhibition of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings—including examples of his striking paintings and majestic sculpture—illuminates the artist's relationship to his own Sephardic Jewish heritage and to the works of art that inspired him.

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Learn about the remarkable career of Edith Halpert, the trailblazing art dealer who championed the work of American artists, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Marsden Hartley.

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Explore the bold and innovative work of Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and others, produced during a little-known but influential chapter in the history of modernity and the Russian avant-garde.

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Explore the Jewish Museum’s rotating collection exhibition which features nearly 600 works from antiquities to contemporary art and addresses themes such as cultural identity, memory, immigration, and language.

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