Haunting Modernity

In Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern, historian Charles Dellheim recounts the story of a commission that could have gone terribly awry. In 1900, Josse and Gaston Bernheim, the sons of respected Parisian art dealer Alexandre Bernheim, wanted to celebrate their engagement to two sisters, Mathilde and Suzanne Adler, by asking Pierre-Auguste Renoir to paint their fiancées’ portraits. The problem was that the Bernheims and their fiancées were Jewish, and R