New York’s Jewish Museum Makes an Exhibition of The Hare with Amber Eyes 

It’s a summary of the best-selling book, with illustrations, so is it even needed?

F irst published in 2010, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is partly history, partly an art story, partly a family memoir, and partly de Waal’s autobiography. Now this poignant, lyrical book is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. At its best, the book and the show — probing the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of a Jewish family, the Ephrussis — are about inheritance. De Waal calls himself an “odd, unsettled mixture,” as are we all. The past, and that’s mostly our families and their times, makes us. And then we make choices and remake ourselves in the context of our own zeitgeist. Though the exhibition is mostly an illustrated summary of the book, it’s beautifully presented. De Waal’s story is well worth a revisit.

The Ephrussi story starts in the shtetl, among peasants, one of whom moved to Odessa and built a business selling wheat. Newly rich in the 1850s as big Russian grain brokers, the Ephrussis got richer still from banking, first in Vienna, the financial and cultural capital of Central Europe, and then in Paris. The family, or de Waal’s branch of it, lost it all by the late 1930s through Nazi theft. Spared from death in the Holocaust, they scattered, rebuilt, and rediscovered their heritage.

The Ephrussi story, told by the museum, unfolds through art that the family collected, photographs, documents, videos, an essential audio tour, pitch-perfect design, and de Waal’s own voice. The Jewish Museum itself was once a grand family mansion belonging to the banker Felix Warburg, like the Ephrussis Jewish. A more evocative place can’t be found. The Hare with Amber Eyes is set in seven or eight high-ceilinged galleries with elegant moldings. These spaces set and reinforce the mood.

The exhibition starts with a family tree. The Ephrussi family is big, but de Waal’s book focuses on the slice leading most directly to him. There’s Charles Ephrussi, a fin-de-siècle Parisian, rich and cryptic, serious as a scholar and as a sensualist. He shares top billing in the exhibition with Edmund de Waal himself since Charles was a decisive, early patron of the Impressionists.

There’s Charles’s young cousin Viktor, doomed to run the Ephrussi bank in Vienna from the early days of the 20th century to the Anschluss in 1938. He and his wife, Emmy, are de Waal’s great-grandparents. We meet the young couple when they’re both rich, from big-shot Jewish-magnate families, and newly married. Through the Teens into the 1930s, theirs was a respectable life as high-end philanthropists, mostly of Jewish causes, and as socialites, more or less static as Austria itself was more or less chaotic.

Dispossessed by the Nazis, Emmy died in 1938, if not a suicide then certainly a crushed soul, and Viktor died in 1945, near London as a refugee. Then there’s two of their children: Elisabeth, de Waal’s grandmother, and Ignaz, or Iggie, his great-uncle. Both left Vienna in the early ’30s. Elisabeth was a Roaring Twenties, emancipated woman who wanted a law-school education. Iggie was emancipated, too. Viennese banking wasn’t his thing. Neither was a traditional family life. He left Vienna in the early ’30s, too, dabbling in business before moving to America as an interior designer. He fought in the U.S. Army during the war, eventually working in Tokyo and living as an unapologetic but discreet gay man with a Japanese partner.

Each emerges in the exhibition as more than a stock figure, but not much more. People who haven’t read de Waal’s book will probably have, unavoidably, a more confined experience than those of us who have. And those of us who have read it understand that de Waal’s book says it all, and so much better.

Each at some point stewarded a collection of 264 netsukes. What’s a netsuke? A netsuke is a carved three-dimensional figure, a couple of inches tall, usually ivory or wood, a refined sculpture doubling as a toggle on a kimono pocket or a small box. They’re precious little things made by specialist sculptors during Japan’s Edo Period, between 1615 and 1868.

There’s a cooper climbing into a half-made barrel, a woman in a bathtub, crouching gnomes grimacing or with mouths taut in creepy smiles, a man milking a cow, a crawling baby, a rat, lots of rats, and a white hare hunched on its hind legs, one of its paws raised as if to acknowledge us, his head tilted upward, looking with amber-colored buffalo-horn eyes. The netsukes secure and conceal and, of course, delight, but they also give pause. Most are charming, even sweet, but some, especially the marked figures, look like tiny totems aiming for ill.

The exhibition treats the Paris Ephrussis, mostly Charles, and the Vienna branch in different sections. At the beginning of each is a handsome oak case of netsukes in the middle. As much as the museum’s opulent galleries, they set a mood. They’re our only witnesses, after all. Photographs, documents, books, and art are snapshots of Ephrussi life. The netsukes are there more or less throughout the story. The subjects are so various that they suggest the power of fate to push and pull us in different directions. They’re silent, of course, but suggestive. The past can’t tell us everything, they seem to propose. It can only whisper bits of this or that in our ears.

Charles bought the netsuke collection in one fell swoop as a young man in the early 1870s, his dandy phase. He started to collect art, the thing rich young men did, and Paris was in a Japonisme mood. He displayed them in a purpose-built vitrine but, over time, moved on as his taste changed. He gave the netsukes with their vitrine to Viktor and Emmy as a wedding present, and thus they descended.

Every gallery section starts with a video of de Waal reading a passage from his book, setting the stage. Late in life, Iggie presented the netsuke collection to his grand-nephew de Waal as a gift. At the time the younger de Waal was an accomplished thirty-something, London-based ceramicist whose white pots were Japan-infused and also well received (as they are now) as good contemporary art. His grand-nephew was sensitive to objects, Iggie felt, had a house big enough to accommodate 264 netsukes, and was also sensitive to heritage. De Waal’s father, the retired dean of Canterbury Cathedral, heard the news and gave his son another gift: the Vienna Ephrussi family archive. Not much of an archive, though, comprising as it did some books and such bits of ephemera as a club directory.

At that moment, de Waal gave himself a mission. Knowing, more or less, his parents’ and grandparents’ story but not much else, he decided to take the deep dive into family history. Murky waters indeed.

De Waal is a great writer. That’s rare and precious for an artist. I say rare because some of the worst writing I read when I was teaching came from artists. The ideas, though, were always very good. Artists see things that art-history students, and most other students who’ve taken lots of humanities classes, don’t. By the time they’re high-school seniors, even the smart students have had blinkers cemented to their heads.

Each gallery focuses on one personality, such as Charles, or pairs, such as Viktor and Emmy. Using de Waal’s words — the audio guide is essential — as well as art and ephemera, the show presents a biography as well as an ambiance of, say, Paris in the 1880s. De Waal is a good digger. In his book, we learn about Charles’s and, later, Emmy’s romantic life. Charles never married. He’s said to be Proust’s model for Swann. Viktor grudgingly ran the family bank, wanted to be a bibliophile and scholar instead, and became a stick in the mud. Vain Emmy, a bit of a clotheshorse, had one or two men on the side.

As exquisitely as everything is presented, there’s a lot of stuff. I don’t like exhibitions with so many bits of paper, which is why I tend to dislike history-museum shows. Methodist me, I don’t respond to relics. That said, in the late ’30s, the Vienna Ephrussis ran into Nazi trouble. Documents related to the confiscation of their property and their frantic time as refugees do unsettle me, since I think the Holocaust is the very low point in human history and the pinnacle of evil. I’d feel that way in most every Holocaust-theme display, though. As we get to the Nazi confiscations, the war, and post-1945, there’s little art but lots of photographs and especially lots of dense documentation. The eyes start to blur.

The exhibition isn’t teaching me anything new. It’s de Waal’s book that takes the broad-brush Holocaust hellhole and refines or narrows it to the particulars of the Ephrussis as individuals. I suppose the show does this, but so does every show I’ve seen drawing from Nazi or Soviet horrors.

The story’s the story, so it’s not the Jewish Museum’s fault that the Ephrussi experience, as Holocaust disasters go, isn’t terrible. Yes, smashing beautiful lives and things is upsetting and always bad. Through connections that only a tiny fraction of Vienna Jews had, though, the Ephrussis got out. The postwar Austrian restitution system was stingy to them, but, at least according to the catalogue, the family’s finances took a huge hit during the First World War, when the Ephrussi bank invested in Austrian imperial war bonds. No empire, no payback. By the 1930s, the bank existed mostly to manage the Ephrussi family finances, still flush but truncated. Still, when the Nazis came, the Ephrussis were living in a palace.

The family lived to fight another day. Elisabeth married a Dutch businessman. They moved to London and went native, and that included the Church of England, though I think Elisabeth was about as observant an Anglican as she was a Jew in Vienna. Their son, Edmund de Waal’s father, became a chaplain at the University of Nottingham and then part of the English ecclesiastical aristocracy. I suspect, and this might be my Yankee Methodist prejudice, that becoming dean of Canterbury Cathedral involved something of the same attitudes and acrobatics as it did in Trollope’s time.

What I’m saying is that the English de Waals are very English. I wouldn’t call the disappearance of their Jewish identity the rustling elephant in the room. It’s unspoken because it’s so common. De Waal considers this in the book but, alas, there’s only so much nuance an exhibition with limited space can present.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Jewish Museum in New York and the Jewish Museum in Vienna. I didn’t see the show in Vienna and hear it was a straight history show with a strong emphasis on the Vienna branch. That makes sense. The New York show rights the balance to consider the Paris and Vienna narratives equally. The New York museum is, after all, an art museum, and Charles, for art lovers and scholars, is a heavy hitter. The section on Charles, a substantial part of the show, truly augments and enhances de Waal’s book.

Charles is a hard nut to crack. His older brother took over the Paris bank for his generation, leaving the aesthetically advanced Charles free to spend his time and inheritance on the arts. Charles was neither a dandy nor a flaneur but a scholar, collector, and philanthropist of the first rank. He wrote a definitive book on Dürer’s drawings. He also was an edgy collector.

Gustave Moreau’s Jason and Medea, from 1865, is in the exhibition and was Charles’s prize possession. It’s a labyrinth of a painting, a mythological subject, a nude, precise as any Academic picture but an eerie and dreamy outlier in its time, as if Symbolism came to the art fest a generation early. Charles supported Impressionist painters, even the anti-Semitic Renoir, but he wasn’t much into Impressionist boulevard or pastoral scenes. He owned Manet still lifes, themselves cryptic, and portraits of his family by Renoir.

In Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, not in the show, never owned by Charles, but the zenith of Impressionist painting, Charles is there. He’s in the background but distinctive, wearing black coat and top hat amid women in frocks and men in T-shirts. He’s too serious a connoisseur and avant-garde philosopher to fritter an afternoon on wine, women, and Brie.

Inheritance, of course, doesn’t mean only a stock portfolio and Granny’s barely used Mercedes. Heritage is intangible, essential, and usually ignored or unknown. De Waal, as a maker of things, starts his story feeling responsible for the netsukes and what his father called “the family archive,” puny as it seemed. Knowing more about his family is his way of approaching the question “how did I get here?” No one springs fully formed from the head of Zeus these days.

His book has some well-done, even poetic passages. “Melancholy,” he writes, “is a sort of vagueness, a smothering lack of focus.” True. “And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude.” Each one has presence. As a group, they’ve been through a lot. They deserve “this kind of exactitude in return.” This line doesn’t make it into de Waal’s narration in the show. There are hundreds of passages in the book I underlined years ago for their beauty and emotional pull. One or two make it into the video component.

The Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron designed the exhibition. They’re top-flight and, I imagine, expensive. They ruled with a light touch. The netsuke cases are handsome. Photographs are framed in homey wood frames, some placed freestanding as they would be, say, on a piano.

Visually, the show is at its best in conveying the different ambiance of upper-crust life in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s and Vienna at the same time, when the Ephrussi family built a Ringstrasse palace, and into the Teens. Paris is lighter, airier, freer, and more colorful. The Vienna palace is vast and heavy. Like most of the Ringstrasse project, it’s historicist in style. In Vienna, the Ephrussis owned dark art by Jan van Goyen and Philips Wouwerman. Splashes of color in their ceiling paintings are Rococo Revival. Charles is Jewish by identity but not practice. Viktor and Emmy are involved in synagogue doings.

Charles, Viktor, and Emmy are the show’s main characters, both in ink and in objects. They’re historical figures and lived in times of Old World magic, for better or worse. Most people fasten on what life in Paris was like, at least among the rich. Imperial Vienna has its own cachet. The show moves carefully and slowly, never tediously, through these days and in considering these figures.

Elisabeth and Iggie come at the end when time, at least time as measured by the exhibition, seems to move more quickly. Both are very modern people, more like us. To me, that makes them more and not less intriguing. Iggie became an American citizen in the 1940s, but, in 1965, living in Japan, he renounced his citizenship and became an Austrian citizen again. I wonder why. The Austrians were rotten to him, his family, and certainly the country’s Jews. What was the allure?

I’m curious about the phenomenon of museums mounting exhibitions based on popular books and movies. This year, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is hosting a new version of the Harry Potter exhibition that traveled America for years in the 2010s. It’s showing props, costumes, video clips, and photographs. I saw one Harry Potter movie and read half of one novel, so I consider myself covered in the Harry Potter department. I think this and other Harry Potter shows are for relic lovers and groupies. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth ran at the Smithsonian in the late 1990s.

New York and London theater produce new plays and musicals based on movies. They’re commercial in part because audiences already know the story. Viewers are assured ahead of time that they’ll like it and won’t be newly, much less uncomfortably, challenged. The Jewish Museum brings a master’s touch to everything, and this explains why its Hare with Amber Eyes works as well as it does. As much as I enjoyed the show, the book soars as a work of art. Why meddle with it?