11 February- 17 May 2009 : Future Anterior: The avant-garde and the Yiddish book  1914-1939 - This exhibition brings together 210 works by El Lissitzky, Marc Chagall, Joseph Tchaïkov, Issachar Ber Ryback and remarkable but no less well-known artists such as Sarah Shar and Mark Epshteyn.

They bear testimony to the birth in Russia and Poland of a Jewish avant-garde in the context of the Russian Revolution, the emergence of notions of cultural autonomy and the renaissance of the Yiddish language. The illustrated book was this movement’s main thread.

“We were a band of children at the heder, already detached from Talmudic studies for an entire generation but fed on the leaven of analysis. Having only just taken up pencil and brush, we immediately started dissecting not only the world around us but ourselves. What was our culture? What should our art be? All this was settled in a few towns in Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine…” El Lissitzky, 1923.

In “Memories of the Mogilev Synagogue”, published in the Berlin review Milgroim in 1923, El Lissitky recalls the short, intense and seminal period in which a whole generation of young Jews, who had already travelled and studied, embarked on a cultural revolution: the elaboration of a specifically Jewish art reconciling the tradition to which they were returning and the modernity to which they aspired.

Initially rooting themselves in the ethnographic research undertaken in the shtetls and synagogues of Ukraine and drawing inspiration from Yiddish and Hebraic literature and theatre, then in full renaissance and ideas of cultural autonomy, they appropriated the motifs of Jewish popular art and rediscovered the formal richness of the Hebraic alphabet.

The Future Anterior exhibition explores the emergence of an avant-garde whose prime expression was the Yiddish book. It retraces the artistic paths of the movement’s principal actors and marks out the individual courses that began in this movement of Jewish renaissance, for some towards Suprematism and Constructivism, for others towards Social Realism. It also evokes the vice-like grip which gradually asphyxiated the passions of this period and the tragic end of Yiddish culture, initially encouraged by the Soviet regime, then controlled, orchestrated and finally annihilated.

Vilna. Kiev. Sint Petersburg. Moscow. Leningrad. Minsk. Odessa. New York. Kharov. Riga. Berlin. Paris.

Remembering the future. First movement: to copy - At the beginning of the 20th century there was a reassertion of the value of Jewish heritage. Artists were drawn back to the sources of their culture…Salomon Yudovin, El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Rybock played an active part in collecting and copying traditional Jewish motifs from pinkassim (the administrative registers of Jewish communities), manuscripts, tombstones and synagogues paintings…The Dibbuk, based on the story by An-Sky, whose adaptation for the theatre was a low event for the artists of the time, are also in view in this space.

Second movement: to stylize - El Lissitzsky in Had Gadya shows his evolution towards Constructivism. Nathan Altman plays with Hebraic and Cyrillic characters.

Third movement: to acquire an individuality of one’s own - In Lodz, in 1919, a group of young artists published the review Yung Yiddish. Its manifesto proclaims the advent of Symbolism, Expressionism and Futurism.

The review Khalyastre (the band) begins with this poem (which reminds us Rimbaud):
We the young we- a joyful and singing band
Are taking unknown roads
In these days steeped in melancholy
In nights of terror
Per aspera ad astral.

The most important Jewish cultural centre was Kiev where the Kultur-Lige was created in 1918. Its aim was to nurture modern culture in education, literature, the theatre, the visual arts and music.

Marc Chagall was recognized by his contemporaries as the artist most completely embodying the new Jewish art…He left Russia in 1922.

Last movement: the end of a dream - In 1932, all cultural activities fell under the iron hand of the Central Committee which imposed the aesthetic canons of Social realism…
On August 12th 1952, Yiddish poets are assassinated by firing squads in the Loubyanka Prison in Moscow.