The impish artist Danielle Durchslag smiles at me over our Zoom conversation — and breaks into song.

It’s not just any song, either. It’s an improbable love song, written by the great composers of Cabaret, Kander and Ebb. And it is a love song to cake.

Properly speaking, it is an affectionate and funny tribute to that most quintessential of American cake brands, Sara Lee.

For more than 50 years the Sara Lee Corporation was synonymous with the desire of American housewives to buy something appetising from the supermarket, put it in the freezer, and then whip it out to impress family and friends at every occasion. The ultimate convenience dessert. Pah, take that, Betty Crocker

Durchslag sings: “There’s a lady living somewhere/Where it is, I do not know/But I long to write and tell her/That I love her so/I believe I might do mayhem/Yes I might destroy myself/If I ever found her missing/From my grocer’s shelf…

“Sara Lee, Sara Lee/ Your brioche just fractures me/ Give me a taste of your Cherry Danish/I love my mother but you can’t compare/ Not with Sara Lee”.

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Danielle Durchslag

Who, says Durchslag, doesn’t want to talk about cake? But we are in fact talking about Sara Lee and cake because the company, founded by Durchslag’s great-grandfather, Nathan Cummings, in 1935, became the source of her family’s great wealth — and that wealth, specifically as it relates to Jews and being one of “the one per cent, of extreme privilege”, is the focus of Durchslag’s playful, creative, and inventive art.

This week, during London’s annual Frieze week, Durchslag opened her first solo art show outside America. Chosen is a curated selection of video and film pieces, together with still-life installations, on display at the Four Corners Gallery in Bethnal Green until October 15.

The event follows hard on the heels of a visit by Durchslag and her husband to the Biennale art shows in Venice.

The core video in the London show is her short film Eleanor of Illinois, featuring the Broadway and West End star Judy Kuhn and the dialogue of the “uber-WASP” Katharine Hepburn, in the watershed film The Lion in Winter.

Durchslag’s central thesis, which filters through most of her work, is that when Jews came into serious money — as did the heirs to the Sara Lee fortune, and the heirs to other multi-millions — they aped their non-Jewish counterparts. This, she calls “WASP drag”, or Jews “cos-playing” non-Jewish aspirations. So Eleanor of Illinois is a rich Jewish matron expecting her disaffected daughter home for Pesach. And — as imagined by Durchslag — this is a

Seder night with all the non-Jewish trappings. A three-row pearl necklace at her neck, Eleanor nervously adjusts cutlery settings at the Seder table, but you can pretty much bet your boots that this is a table at which lobster is going to be served.

seder bonnet

Danielle's seder bonnet

Durchslag and her older sister, Rachel, grew up in Chicago. Their father, Stephen, was an important lawyer in the city, while their mother, Ruth, became first a well-regarded therapist and latterly “a freelance rabbi”, having no specific congregation, but going where she is needed.

Stephen Durchslag is known for having the most impressive collection of Haggadot, thought to be the largest private collection in the world, and now bequeathed to the University of Chicago.

“According to my parents, at a very young age, something like five or six, I approached them one evening and made an announcement, that I was going to move to New York City and become a visual artist. And I did. One of the blessings of my life is that I’ve always known that I wanted to be someone who makes creative work.”

With a grin, Durchslag acknowledges that she hardly fits the popular image of a starving artist in a garret — “I am bereft of garrets,” she jokes.

More seriously, she says, when she began her art studies after graduating from the prestigious Wellesley College, she was “by no means the only trust-fund kid at my art school. In this country, public support for the arts is nowhere near what it should be. As a result there are a lot of artists like me, who live off trusts, and that’s how we’re able to survive.”

Her art, she says, is very much wrapped up in issues of class identity and the haves and have-nots.

And she is rare among the well-heeled artists, who, she suspects, might not want to highlight their financial circumstances out of fear that they could be seen as “inauthentic” — in other words they are so convinced that the only true authentic artist is one who is poor and suffers in the aforementioned garret that they cover up their own affluence.

Durchslag has chosen to incorporate what she calls her financial “blessing” in her art, and quotes her grandmother, who repeatedly told her and her sister: “With privilege comes responsibility.” This mantra has become Durchslag’s, too.

She notes that “without the money I have, I wouldn’t be able to create the art I do; and also, in America, if you’re making work that has any challenging content about Jewish life, it’s basically impossible to get funding from Jewish institutions. So I’m doubly lucky.”

As she makes clear in Eleanor of Illinois, and other video work, Durchslag believes that the newly rich Jews of the 20th century took their cues as to how to behave from their WASP counterparts. “I joke and say, oh, our angora was softer, our pearls whiter, our wood darker… we really borrowed and emulated rituals from people who didn’t want Jews in their echelon.”

She is acutely aware of “a kind of hot-to-the-touch aspect of even discussing Jewish wealth”, noting that it forms a distressingly large part of conspiracy theories promulgated by antisemites.

But while today’s Jews are raised in a considerably more assimilated society than Durchslag and her sister, she still receives large numbers of unsolicited responses from young people, wrestling with their Jewish identity in a non-Jewish world.

“These tensions about being Jewish and having a lot of money have not gone away.” Particularly after the death of George Floyd, she says, massive concerns opened up in American society.

She fielded numerous questions from young Jews who wanted to know how to present themselves as “progressive, but winners in an unfair lottery”.

For herself, Durchslag says: “I love being Jewish. It is the centre of my life.” She and her husband, who is Muslim, are deeply involved in the New Jewish Culture Fellowship in Brooklyn, on whose behalf she frequently hosts Rosh Hashanah meals or Seder nights. “It’s a group of passionate Jewish artists making passionately Jewish work, all of it deeply progressive. That community has really given me a social home for my Jewishness.”

She describes herself as “obsessively Jewish” and says part of her art focuses on “public Jewish joy” — of expressing Judaism in the wider society. This year, for the first time, Durchslag decided to embrace the spirit of the hugely popular New York Easter Parade by making a very specific Seder Bonnet, with the aim of “bringing Jews into a public space, as celebrants”.

The unashamedly Jewish headgear was an instant and popular hit on the streets of New York — bringing Durchslag plaudits from Jews and non-Jews alike.
It’s a fair bet that next year’s Easter Parade will feature more Pesach-related millinery. We might even see Durchslag marching down Fifth Avenue, singing the Sara Lee song.