A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo
Letters to Camondo
is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de
Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in
Paris, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest
private collection of French eighteenth-century art.
The
Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, “the Rothschilds of
the East,” who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became
philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high
society, as well as being targets of antisemitism―much like de Waal's
relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected. Moise de
Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son,
Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was
bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered
by the Nazis.
After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic
artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he
began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are
deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art,
the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.
