nynewsday.com, April 2005

Jewish women patrons

A Jewish Museum exhibit lauds the salons hosted by well-placed women and their impact on our cultural life

The walls of Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment were famously studded with masterpieces, beneath which the artists who made them lolled and quipped, snacked and sniped. Stein collected people - Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and countless others - with as much avidity as she stockpiled art. Her home became a place where avant-garde stars of the musical, literary and musical firmaments could meet and converse.

Stein's bohemian-crammed drawing room made her the best-known Jewish salonière - a woman of taste who presides over gatherings of gifted and distinguished guests - but she was by no means the first, as a fascinating and beautifully organized exhibit at the Jewish Museum makes clear. Wealthy Jews, consigned to the fringes of high society and able to operate outside its strictest protocols, were uniquely positioned to craft environments in which people of all classes and beliefs could meet and mingle, debate with and inspire one another.

More distinctive than a rose

Stein, an American expatriate, an open lesbian, a Jew and a literary radical, ingeniously turned these grounds for exclusion into marks of distinction, and she guarded the gates of her private club with snooty ferocity: 'Who is your introducer?' a new arrival would be asked before being allowed to enter.

The exhibit opens with Stein and then jumps back to the French and German salons of the late 18th century, where friendly exchanges over tea and cookies could translate into artistic cross-fertilization. The Enlightenment and the repeal of discriminatory laws in France and Germany cleared the way for Jewish women to plunge into society's surf.

Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin were among the first to vie for admittance to the mainstream by opening their Berlin homes to motley groups of aristocrats and commoners, military officers, actors, poets and philosophers. At Levin's first salon in 1805, the talk passed from theater to opera to public lectures: 'The most daring ideas, the keenest thoughts, the cleverest wit, the drollest games of imagination followed in casual and general sequence,' according to Count Salm, an early guest.

Reconstructing gatherings

Repartee, the very essence of the successful salon, briskly evaporated into the rafters. The tragic ephemerality of talk places an obvious obstacle in the way of curators Emily Bilski and Emily Braun, who have tried to reconstruct long-ago gatherings with portraits, letters, manuscripts and artworks by illustrious salon attendees.

Plentiful and fascinating as these artifacts are, they provide only the dimmest evocation of erstwhile sparkle. Fortunately, the free audio guide fleshes out the picture with performances of music, acted bits of dialogue and quotations from guests' letters and memoirs. It all adds up to a meaty experience that's as delightful as it is enriching.

The audio is particularly effective when it comes to the Vienna salon of Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn, sister of Felix and an accomplished composer in her own right. In the 1830s, Hensel gathered a mix of family and friends, celebrity musicians, artists and poets for her Sunday musicales, in which she conducted or performed her own pieces. Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Charles Gounod and Heinrich Heine were among the regular guests. On the audio guide, actors read a poem by Heine and excerpts from Hensel's journal, after which visitors can linger in the gallery and savor her string trio as well as one of her brother's songs.

The salons were a creative trading post where friends played music for each other through the long afternoons, engaging in lyrical one-upsmanship and competitive mutual appreciation. The crowded parlor was not just the venue for the chamber music of the early 19th century - it was the forge, and the genres of piano trio and string quartet evolved to fit the room's dimensions. Even publication of sheet music was a means by which to re-create the soirée musicale in other, less artistically exalted milieus.

Fanny and Felix were baptized Lutheran when they were children. Rahel Levin and Henrietta Herz became Protestants later in life. Converting seemed the only means for Jews to avoid prejudice and advance their careers in Christian society.

Changing faith didn't shield them from slurs. 'Jews remain Jews,' Robert Schumann sneered, speaking of Mendelssohn, whose music he admired. 'They take their place at table 10 times before it's the Christian's turn. The stones we supply to build their temple of fame they then use to throw at us.'

Rumbles of anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism continued to rumble beneath the floorboards of cosmopolitan salons. The 1894 Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish captain in the French army was accused of treason, splintered the salon of Geneviève Straus. The hostess - widow of the composer Georges Bizet, and inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes in Proust's novel 'In Search of Lost Time' - found that longtime habitues, such as painter Édgar Degas, never returned to her plush parlor. Because they were already at the margins of the Christian mainstream, Jewish salons played a key role in the early 20th century rise of modernism. Berta Zuckerkandl in Vienna, Margherita Sarfatti in Rome and Gertrude Stein in Paris each cultivated the rising style of the revolutionaries, the disaffected, the violently unconventional. All collected art, and all were writers who used prose and living-room politics to advance their proteges' careers.

Sarfatti, an Italian nationalist, a Fascist and one of Mussolini's lovers, was enlisted to help shape and publicize the cultural policy of the regime. Her salon, next door to Il Duce's residence, was the crucible of support for styles ranging from Futurism to magic realism. Such a broadly inclusive taste allowed her to claim that Italian Fascism - unlike the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - fostered creative freedom.

Sarfatti's politics didn't protect her in the end. When Italy instituted its version of Germany's race laws in 1938, she fled first to Paris, then to South America. She returned to Italy after the war, unrepentant but ostracized - not for her Jewish blood but for the very connections she had tended with such care.

It's hard to know why the salon seems such a dated social arrangement today. Perhaps it was doomed by easy travel, which hurled the illustrious and celebrated into rounds of constant motion. Or maybe salons were casualties of the very democratization they promoted. Wealthy dilettantes, artists and intellectuals no longer need exclusive little clubs to find each other. The classes mingle on campuses or in office buildings, and the Internet has become a global salon anyone can wander into. But the conversation is erratic, the atmosphere sterile and the food, potluck.

WHEN&WHERE 'The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons' will be on view through July 10 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, Manhattan. Call 212-423- 3200, or visit www.thejewishmuseum.org.

Copyright 2005, Newsday, Inc.

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