Exhibition "Joann Sfar. La vie dessinée" at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme

Born in Nice in 1971, Joann Sfar finds in drawing more than a refuge, a way of living and seeing the world, a veritable "drawn life". A relentless worker, Joann Sfar explores the themes of drawing as a "human science", childhood, friendship, joy or death, the body and sexuality, while constantly reflecting on his own practices through personal notebooks.

The mahJ exhibition evokes the artist's youth in Nice (recently retraced in La Synagogue), his arrival in Paris and training at the École des Beaux-Arts, and his encounters with his studio partners: David B., Christophe Blain, Émile Bravo, Emmanuel Guibert, Mathieu Sapin, Marjane Satrapi, Riad Sattouf, Lewis Trondheim...

We discover his literary masters (Romain Gary, Joseph Kessel, Pierre Dubois...) and the different facets of his work: fantasy, magic and monsters (Petrus Barbygère, Professor Bell, Grand Vampire), drama (Klezmer, Chagall) and music (Serge Gainsbourg, Georges Brassens...).

Joann Sfar at the heart of an exhibition at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme : Photos and reviews
For the very first time, Joann Sfar, author, cartoonist and filmmaker, is the subject of a complete exhibition retracing his work. Join us on October 12 to discover "La vie dessinée" at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme. [Read more]

The exhibition also focuses on children's books (with a fun room for young visitors featuring Petit Vampire and Le Petit Prince), the designer's creative process, his inspirations (tools, papers, artists admired), his view of everyday life (collaborations with Paris Match) and his works in progress.

Through Joann Sfar's most emblematic creations, the exhibition highlights the coherence of his work: from countless personal notebooks to those of Klezmer, from childhood stories to erotic plates about the painter Pascin. With The Rabbi's Cat at its center, the exhibition is that of an artist who has put a Jewish voice - cultural rather than religious - at the heart of all his stories, drawing on the history of Judaism for many of his sources of inspiration and alerting his readers to the rise of anti-Semitism.