The Jewish Museum building on 5th Avenue and 92nd St, was once the Warburg family mansion; it has been adapted into a museum, expanded and has kept it’s grace and beauty.

The exhibit has William Steig’s  creative, original, delicately colored, beautifully drawn, drawings from his New Yorker cartoons, and from his wonderful children’s books.

The museum information about the work and the artist is unusually good too. Steig’s Bronx childhood and his life in New York, have the familiarity of listening to family story. Part of the exhibit includes his notes with the animators of Shrek and the animators drawings.

Also,  Steig’s gentle voice fills the gallery, from a video interview. Visiting kids had stories read to them in special story rooms at the exhibit. It is wonderful to be absorbed into Steig’s esthetic and humor. Did you know that schrek means “fear” or “scream” in Yiddish? 

Upstairs, there is an absolutely not to be missed video of I.B.Singer. The project was funded as a documentary but the film-maker/photographer, Bruce Davidson, and Singer wanted to produce Singer’s story called “Mrs. Pupko’s Beard”. They produced this ”documentary” in which Singer narrates his story, and we see the story acted out, and meet Mrs. Pupko and her great beard. We get to enjoy what is best about being completely idiosyncratic.

When you watch this video, don’t miss the details of the background in the shots of Singer feeding the pigeons on Broadway: there is the Upper West Side before the banks, drug stores and big mall stores took over the shops. 

The Camille Pisarro show had some startling information about some of the Impressionist painters. They respected Camille Pisarro as a founder of Impressionism, and even called him “Pere Pisarro”.  

When the Dreyfus Affair happened, some sided with Dreyfus: Pisarro, Monet and Cassat while “Renoir, Cezanne and Degas sided with the French government and even made anti-semitic comments against Pisarro, their former friend and colleague.”  This is something one would not learn in another museum.