The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

The First World War (1914-1918) uprooted millions across Europe, and beyond. Many Jews left Eastern and Southern Europe, bringing with them prized personal and communal belongings. In an attempt to rescue precious heritage from imminent destruction, these “memory objects” often ended up with museums, collectors, and art dealers in the West.

In 2018, The Magnes acquired the Roman Vishniac Archive thanks to an unprecedented gift by the late Mara Vishniac Kohn (1926-2018). The collection is comprised of thousands of original prints, negatives, and archival materials documenting the long international career of photographer Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), a Russian-born modernist photographer,most notable for documenting Eastern-European Jewish life in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. Vishniac’s work has been celebrated in exhibitions and publications since the 1940s. The gift represents one of the most important acquisitions by The Magnes since its founding in 1962, and one of inestimable value to UC Berkeley for insight and research into 20th century East European Jewry, and beyond. 

As this important collection is being painstakingly processed and documented, The Magnes is beginning to share new findings with the public. An archive of this magnitude is bound to reveal many discoveries, opening up new perspectives on the life and work of a globally recognized photographer, and allowing us to revisit some of the salient moments in his career. A veritable “archive of archives,” the collection also contains among its treasures substantial documentation of some of Vishniac's early exhibitions. 

Born into a middle-class Polish Jewish family, Arthur Szyk (Łódź, Poland, 1894 – New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951) lived a life framed by two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. A refugee, he ultimately settled in the United States in 1940. As a miniature artist and political caricaturist, he used motifs drawn from religion, history, politics, and culture to pair extraordinary craftsmanship with searing commentary on a diverse range of subjects including Judaism, the American War of Independence, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

Broad concerns for human rights span Szyk’s entire production. In paintings and political cartoons, he exposed the Nazi genocide, supported the Polish underground, exalted the establishment of the United Nations, and ridiculed dictators of all stripes. His unwavering denunciation of Fascist crimes in Europe, the suppression of national rights worldwide, and the endless violations of civil rights in America are rooted in the experience of marginalization that characterized Jewish life in Eastern Europe since after the First World War. It is not superfluous to state how these very same concerns appear to be all too relevant in our times as well.