Magic is all about misdirection, illusion and mystery. The magician entrances us with his sleight-of-hand, animating everyday objects’eggs, handkerchiefs or playing cards. The conjurer amazes us with supernatural feats’appearing, disappearing and tempting the gods with death-defying stunts. We don’t get to know everything, which leaves us as fascinated as ever. The Skirball Cultural Center is hosting two exhibitions that open the book on this mysterious art, introducing some of the great magicians, describing their appeal, while keeping their ‘secrets’ safe. Almost any conversation about magic brings to mind Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist whose daring feats and powerful persona captivated audiences at the turn of the last century and still live on in the 21st century. ‘Houdini: Art and Magic’ explores his life, career and lasting influence, and ‘Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age’ traces the contributions of Jewish magicians to modern magic. The Skirball’s focus on the innovators of magic’s Golden Age, 1875 to 1948, identifies the accomplishments of Houdini’s predecessors and contemporaries, many of whom are unknown to us today. The Herrmann brothers, Compars and Alexander, established the image of the magician that persists today’tuxedo and tails, the showmanship, the tricks. Sons of an itinerant conjurer, the brothers developed a style that relied on personal charm and dexterity rather than apparatus. Compars, the oldest, built his success performing in London and other capitals of the 1850’s Europe The brothers traveled to the United States at what turned out to be a turbulent time, the outbreak of the Civil War. Nevertheless, Compars gave five weeks of sold-out performances in New York, earning $35,000 ($900,000 today), and moved on to Washington, D.C. In ‘Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age of Magic,’ Richard Hatch relates a performance for President Lincoln wherein Herrmann solicited the president’s assistance in shuffling the cards. Lincoln declined, passing the cards instead to his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, with the comment, ‘This gentleman shuffles the cards for me at present.’ When Compars asked the president for the loan of a handkerchief, Lincoln provoked more mirth by responding, ‘You’ve got me now; I ain’t got one!’ The Dutch Jewish Bambergs rivaled the Herrmann dynasty. The magic passed from father to son for more than 200 years, spanning six generations and ending with David Tobias Bamberg, who died in 1974. The exhibition follows history, including the fate of the Jews in World War II Germany, when no magic could erase the Nazi purge. Two men’s lives are highlighted: Herbert Levin and Gunther Dammann, both amateur magicians living in Berlin. As their activities became more constricted, Levin turned his hobby into his profession, performing as ‘Nivelli’ and opening several magic stores in Czechoslovakia, until the Nazis seized him and sent him to Auschwitz. Despite the devastating loss of his wife and child, who perished in the camps, Levin managed to survive the ordeal by performing magic for the guards. Dammann, an independent scholar and amateur magician, remained in Berlin where he began researching the lives and contributions of Jewish magicians, eventually compiling a number of these biographies into a book. By September 1942, Dammann’s liberty came to an end. He was transported to a concentration camp in Latvia, and subsequently murdered. The Skirball exhibition includes 170 artifacts, including posters, broadsides, correspondence, magic kits, automata, apparatus, costumes and film and radio recordings. In keeping with the museum’s mission ‘to explore the connections between 4,000 years of Jewish heritage and the vitality of American democratic ideas,’ the contributions of Jewish magicians seem a perfect fit. From a list of the 100 magicians who most influenced 20th century magic, 18.5 are known to be of Jewish heritage (counting Teller, of the team of Penn & Teller, as the .5). As with many in the profession, Houdini (n’ Ehrich Weiss) was inspired by a master, the French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin. After reading his ‘ Memoirs of a Conjurer’ he vowed, ‘I want to be like that guy.’ Upon embarking on his career, he changed his name to Harry Houdini as a tribute. The son of a Hungarian rabbi, Houdini, who emigrated with his family in 1874 from Budapest to Appleton, Wisconsin, found his way into the American mainstream by breaking into the entertainment culture. This was a choice that Jews and other immigrants found more open to them than many more hierarchical businesses. By the time he was 13, the family had moved to New York City and Ehrich began work at a necktie factory, which ironically led to becoming ‘Houdini, the mystifier,’ whom his friend Will Rogers called ‘the greatest showman of our time by far.’ He and a fellow worker created a magic act called the ‘The Brothers Houdini.’ When the two went their separate ways, Harry and his brother Dash, who became a well-known professional magician, Hardeen, teamed up as ‘The Houdinis’ until Harry and Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, ‘Bess,’ formed a professional and matrimonial partnership. His fame grew through daring feats that relied on his seemingly superhuman strength and stamina and Houdini became a one-man phenomenon. His celebrity was meteoric, drawing huge crowds eager to see him flail upside down in a straitjacket or be tossed, handcuffed, into an icy river in a padlocked crate. His unfaltering confidence in testing the edges of risk fueled his appeal. ‘Failure would be a drowning death,’ he’d proclaim, and freed himself every time to wild ovations. Houdini was a master at burnishing his own star. A savvy media hound, he starred in a number of melodramatic silent films, from 1919 to 1923, and fraternized with a wide circle of influential Americans, including President Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin and Sarah Bernhardt. In a twist of fate, Houdini died in a decidedly quotidian way’not from a daring trick, but of peritonitis, brought on by appendicitis. But his legend lived on in magic generations to come. The Skirball exhibition displays his enduring influence in the work of visual artists, clips from several Hollywood and TV movies and the acts of contemporary magicians, including David Blaione, David Copperfield, Doug Henning and Penn & Teller. ’Masters of Illusion’ and ‘Houdini: Art and Magic’ will be on display through September 4, accompanied by a program of live performances, lectures and family programs.
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