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Something to talk about
‘Jewish Women and Their Salons’ at Boston College; ‘Ansel Adams’ at the MFA
BY RANDI HOPKINS

Gertrude Stein’s picture-laden flat in Paris was a famous salon for Cubist and experimental art and literature in the early years of the 20th century. Stein was a Jewish expatriate, lesbian, and radical writer with a way-ahead-of-her-times haircut, and her talent as a conversationalist (later paired with companion Alice B. Toklas’s skills as a cook) nurtured artistic geniuses from Pablo Picasso to Ernest Hemingway. As it turns out, she’s only the most famous of an impressive number of smart and chatty Jewish women who wielded their drawing rooms like tools of revolution, influencing new art, music, philosophy, theater, literature, and social change from the 1780s in Berlin to the 1950s in Los Angeles. Opening at Boston College’s McMullen Museum on August 22, "The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons" brings 14 women to life through portraits, musical scores, paintings, furniture, film, and even an audio guide that re-creates their passionate conversation.

Salons flourished in a period in which neither Jews nor women had much access to education and profession or artistic and political influence. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (sister of Felix Mendelssohn, and a gifted pianist and composer in her own right) welcomed Niccolo Paganini and Clara Schumann to her Berlin mansion in the mid 19th century. Berta Zuckerkandl spearheaded the Viennese Secession from her divine divan, entertaining and inspiring Gustav Klimt and Gustav Mahler. Florine Stettheimer, herself a wonderful painter, created with her sisters Carrie and Ettie a classy rendezvous spot for artists and intellectuals between the world wars in her New York apartment. Salka Viertel’s Los Angeles bungalow provided an outpost for the most famous European talents in Hollywood during and after World War II: Greta Garbo, Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann. These women made their mark on history through artful private kibitzing.

No one captures the physical grandeur of the American landscape like Ansel Adams, and a majestic exhibition of his photographic career opens at the Museum of Fine Arts on August 21. "Ansel Adams" is the last in a series of three major one-man exhibitions drawn from the MFA’s outstanding trove of 20th-century paintings and photography, the Lane Collection. Spanning the artist’s output from the 1920s through the 1970s, the show will be arranged chronologically, opening with Wind, Juniper Tree, Yosemite (1919), which he created when he was just 17. Rarely exhibited photographs will be seen along with the iconic images that made Adams famous.

"The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons" @ Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art, in Devlin Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill | Aug 22-Dec 4 | 617.552.8100 or www.bc.edu/artmuseum

"Ansel Adams" @ the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston | Aug 21-Dec 31 | 617.267.9300 or www.mfa.org.


Issue Date: August 12 - 18, 2005
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