Elizabeth Diller Is Retelling Edmund deWaal’s Story — and Her Own - The New York Times

Designing a show at the Jewish Museum in New York has illuminated corners of hidden history in her life, the architect says.

In Edmund de Waal’s home in South London stands a 19th-century vitrine once in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

19, that carving, and the vitrine, will go on view at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in an exhibition based on de Waal’s book, “The Hare With Amber Eyes.”.

To evoke the book as it traces the fortunes and fate of the influential Ephrussis — de Waal’s ancestors on his father’s side and one of the great Jewish banking families of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries — the museum has turned to the architect Elizabeth Diller.

“Liz is the great dramaturge of space,” de Waal said, speaking on Zoom from his studio, a tall mullioned window visible behind him.

For Diller, the collaboration with de Waal in illuminating the many corners of hidden history in his book has opened up significant aspects of her own past.

“Rather than looking at it as a museum, we’re looking at it as a domestic setting,” Diller said.

The high-ceilinged museum spaces will contain many of the same art, objects, furnishings and ephemera that animated “The Hare With Amber Eyes.” Recorded passages from the book read aloud by de Waal will elucidate and enhance the exhibition for visitors as they pass from one display to the next.

The design, Diller said, amounts to an exercise “that also shows the inside of Edmund’s mind.”.

In keeping with this idea, the design has jettisoned the traditional succession of lengthy wall texts and curatorial labels, instead weaving the exhibition’s numerous works into what Diller refers to as Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities.

“Edmund dug into his past,” Diller added.

“This has been a way for Liz to acknowledge her past,” said Claudia Gould, the director of the Jewish Museum.

Framed on a Zoom call by a lakeside view at the weekend home she shares with her partner and husband, Ricardo Scofidio, in upstate New York, Diller said, “I never knew my grandparents.

While the Nazis began the process of evicting de Waal’s great-grandfather, Viktor von Ephrussi, and his wife, Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla Ephrussi, from their art-filled residence on the Ringstrasse, sending them into an exile cut short for the increasingly fragile Emmy by her likely suicide, her own mother, Diller said, “went to work as a steelworker, and then as a nanny.

To capture this, Diller commissioned the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan, who is based in Paris, to photograph the interiors in the present, their pasts hidden by their current repurposing into offices and retail space

“There’s the sense of historical loss,” Diller added, “and there’s the loss from Covid.” In one of the large-scale photographs, in the Hotel Ephrussi, a stanchion holding a dispenser for hand sanitizer stands guard at the foot of a grand marble staircase

At the same time, both Diller and de Waal said that the present places the exhibition within an inextricable political context that informs the personal element they have in common