Jewish Art
Roman Vishniac Archive
The Magnes Collection is currently processing the Roman Vishniac Archive. Materials from the archive are not yet available.
In 2018, Mara Vishniac Kohn donated the life work of her father, the renowned photographer Roman Vishniac, to The Magnes Collection at the University of California, Berkeley. With over 30,000 images, audiovisual materials, correspondence, and memorabilia, the gift is the largest donation The Magnes Collection has yet received and the third most valuable gifted collection ever received by the University of California, Berkeley.
Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) was inseparable from his camera. The technology and art of modern photography made visual imagery the most popular and powerful medium of the 20th century, and Vishniac’s work spanned the greatest decades of photography. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family near St. Petersburg and raised and educated in Moscow, Vishniac was a versatile photographer, an accomplished biologist, an art collector, and a teacher of art history. He also made significant scientific contributions.
As a young professional, Vishniac lived in interwar Berlin, then a major center of photography and home to a rich artistic culture. His images from the 1930s reflect the era’s melding of social realism and artistic influences. Vishniac captured photographs of Jews and Jewish life in the immediate prewar years, using an innovative technique of multiple rapid shots made possible by the new 35mm film technology. He captured the drama of the moment, the person, or the event from multiple perspectives that allowed him to manipulate the images and heighten the realism into both propaganda and art.
Through his work, Vishniac provided texture and context to the experience of Jewish migration while also offering insights into universal human themes. His most celebrated photographs, portraying the plight of marginalized Jewish communities in Poland, Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia during the late 1930s, were collected for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to raise awareness and relief funds among American Jews. In unforgettably vivid images he captured the humanity, the poignancy, and the hope that is both individual and collective. These images became emblematic of a lost Eastern European Jewish past.
Photograph [2016-6-9]: Grandfather and granddaughter, Warsaw, ca. 1935-38, Roman Vishniac. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Gift of Mara Vishniac Kohn.
Vishniac’s contribution to Jewish memory, however, goes far beyond the best-known images, which are only a small part of his much larger lifetime oeuvre given to the Magnes. The archive contains thousands of photographs on subjects ranging from street life in Europe’s capitals during the rise of Fascist regimes, to immigrant and disenfranchised communities in New York City in the 1940s, to studio portraiture of eminent 20th-century intellectuals and artists. His photographs also document the land and Jews of Israel in the wake of the Six Day War (1967), and include remarkable scientific and nature photography spanning decades and including cutting-edge microphotography.
Photograph [2016-6-1]: [Violinist Bronislaw Huberman, New York] ca. 1941-45, Roman Vishniac. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Gift of Mara Vishniac Kohn.
The Roman Vishniac Archive at The Magnes embodies the essence of a museum of material culture. It is perfectly suited to expressing The Magnes’ commitment to reexamine the intersections of change on the map of Jewish migrations, traditions, and culture over time and around the world.
Prior to the family’s gift to The Magnes, Vishniac’s work was the subject of an excellent exhibition and publication project (Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, 2013-2015) at the International Center for Photography in New York. Though digitization and cataloging work supported it, the materials had not been treated holistically, nor systematically tallied and organized. The Magnes’ effort marks the first time that the materials are being managed as a single and comprehensive collection forming an archive, rather than a source for specific (and, by necessity, selective) projects such as exhibitions, publications, and websites.
After carefully moving the materials from the East Coast, where they had been stored for the last decade, the laborious, yet exciting, unpacking of boxes, collating, and assigning of codes was an essential first step and an introduction to the richness of a collection encompassing almost 35,000 items, including over 30,000 individual images.
The addition of the Roman Vishniac Archive to a world-class Jewish collection embedded within a premier public university provides The Magnes with an unprecedented opportunity to become a major center for research, exhibitions, education, and public programming about migration, especially Jewish migration, in the 20th century.
The Magnes is a museum, a center for research, and an archive of material that sustains the remembrance of turbulence and migration that marked Jewish culture and traditions in the 20th century. It raises questions about the very definition of cultural identity and heritage in today’s time of fluctuating borders and identities. The Vishniac Archive is the legacy of a world-renowned photographer, in a critical period of Jewish history, residing in an innovative museum located at a first-class research university.
Program | Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem 1947/1967
On September 5, 2023, The Magnes held an opening reception and program welcoming visitors to Cities and Wars. The program featured a curatorial introduction of the exhibition and a conversation with Magnes Curator Francesco Spagnolo and UC Berkeley Media Studies Professor Emma Fraser.
Exhibition | Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem 1947/1967
Cities and Wars brings together Roman Vishniac’s previously unseen images of Berlin in 1947 after the Second World War and Jerusalem in 1967 after the Six-Day War. The exhibition highlights the unique gaze of the artist, who considered both cities “home,” and carefully chronicles the devastating effects of war on urban life.
News | The Magnes to present new exhibition of Photographer Roman Vishniac
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life announces its newest exhibition, Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem (1947/1967), opening August 29, 2023 and featuring previously unseen work by Russian-Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac (1897-1990).
Program | Roman Vishniac. In Focus: 1922-2022
Celebrating the richness of the Roman Vishniac Archive, this 2-day event on May 1-2, 2022 combines an Open House featuring a digital display of photographs of Jewish life from Eastern and Central Europe from before World War II, as well as a day-long Symposium with internationally acclaimed scholars discussing the historical context and content of the photographs Vishniac took.
News | The Magnes receives $1 million grant for the Roman Vishniac Archive
The Magnes Collection has been awarded a $1M gift in February of 2022. Along with major gifts from other foundations and donors, this grant assures digitizing and cataloging over 30,000 items which represent the lifetime work of acclaimed photographer Roman Vishniac, given to The Magnes by his family in 2019.
News | The Magnes reopens with “Roman Vishniac. In Focus: 1922-2022”
On May 1-2, 2022 The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life reopens with Roman Vishniac. In Focus: 1922-2022, an open house, display of Vishniac photographs, and day-long symposium.
Exhibition | An Archive of Archives: Roman Vishniac's Exhibition History | New York, 1971-72
This inaugural installation from the Roman Vishniac Archive shares many of Roman Vishniac’s (1897-1990) most iconic images documenting Eastern-European Jewish life in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. This group of images were originally presented in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York (October 19, 1971, until January 23, 1972).
News | Shaping Our Memory: Images from the Roman Vishniac Archive
The Magnes Collection is home to the Roman Vishniac Archive encompassing the beginnings of modern photography and glass negatives of the late 1920s and 30s through the sophisticated and artful portraits of notable American Jews in the 1950s. It is Jewish history, American history, and world history captured in vivid images that punctuate our imagination and shape our memory.
News | Vanished no more: Giant of photography Roman Vishniac finds a home at The Magnes
Berkeley News feature announcing the gift of the Roman Vishniac Archive to The Magnes by Vishniac’s daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn. The full archive comprises over 30,000 images, including prints, negatives, and slides, along with essential primary documents about Roman Vishniac’s life and work.