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Jesekiel Kirszenbaum – Exhibition in Solingen

From 31st March to 5th May 2019, as part of the theme year on Else Lasker-Schüler and "The Storm", the Zentrum für verfolgte Künste in the Solingen Art Museum presented an exhibition of around seventy paintings and drawings by the Polish-Jewish painter, Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum (also: Jesekiel Dawid, Jechezkiel David, Kirschenbaum, 1900-1954). The exhibition was also part of the Rhine-Ruhr Jewish Cultural Days. Kirszenbaum was born in Staszów in the Congress Poland ruled by the Russians. He moved to Duisburg in 1920 to work as a miner in the Ruhr area, used the wages he had earned to study at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923/24, and then moved to Berlin. Here he became an active member of the Berlin art scene and worked as a caricaturist and illustrator for the Berlin magazines Ulk, Der Querschnitt and Die Rote Fahne, as well as the Munich-based Jugend. Herwarth Walden (1878-1941), director of the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, wanted him to follow up the pre-war success of the gallery with Marc Chagall and exhibited his works in 1927. But the hoped-for major breakthrough failed to materialise. In 1929 he became a member of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists in Germany ("Asso") and exhibited regularly with this group. In 1933 he and his wife Helma, née Joachim, fled from the National Socialists to France. Six hundred works were destroyed in his Paris studio and his wife was murdered in Auschwitz. He died in Paris in 1954. The exhibition in Solingen was the artist's first solo exhibition in Germany since the 1930s. Works by Kirszenbaum can be found in the possession of the family, in private collections and in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, in the collection of the Jewish Historical Institute/Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma in Warsaw, in the Frans-Hals-Museum in Haarlem, in the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva, in Israel in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in the Israel-Museum in Jerusalem and in the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod, in Paris in the Centre Pompidou and in the Fonds national d'art contemporain.

Studying Maimonides, Berlin 1925. Indian ink on paper, 50 x 32 cm. Private owner

Press material / The Kirszenbaum estate, Tel Aviv

In 1948/49 Kirszenbaum travelled to Brazil to try to forget the memories of the sad mood and devastation in Europe. There he found not only a friendly welcome, but also a tropical world that inspired him to paint the country and its people in swathes of pure colour. These were still in the manner of the Fauves, but were also influenced by indigenous painting, and even visionary colour experiments (ill. 28, 29). During this time, in 1948, he even had exhibitions at the Galeria Domus, the leading art gallery in São Paulo, and in the same year at the Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. After his return to Paris, which had now become his real home, he became a French citizen in 1949. He subsequently travelled to Morocco in 1950 and to Italy, where he expanded his artistic interests to include nature, particularly exotic fruits and plants. His "Still Life with Fruit" (1952) is reminiscent of motifs by Paul Cézanne, but is nearer to Pablo Picasso in its moderate Cubism (ill. 28).

Between 1951 and 1953 Kirszenbaum fell seriously ill with cancer and died in Paris in 1954. For experts and art lovers the first retrospective of his work in Germany after almost ninety years at the Zentrum für verfolgte Künste in Solingen opened up a completely new view of a work that combines numerous aspects of modernism. Indeed it brought a hitherto unnoticed Bauhaus student into the public eye. Further exhibitions with a larger circle of lenders and more intensive scholarly work are eagerly awaited.

Axel Feuß, April 2019

We should like to express our gratitude to the Zentrum für verfolgte Künste (Solingen), Mr. Nathan Diament (Tel Aviv) and Ms. Anna Taube (Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv).

Further reading:

J.D. Kirszenbaum (1900-1954). The Lost Generation, edited by Nathan Diament and Caroline Goldberg Igra, Paris 2012

Johanna Linsler: Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum, entre aspiration révolutionnaire et mémoire du shtetl/Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum, zwischen revolutionärem Streben und Erinnerungen an das Schtetl, in: Anne Grynberg/Johanna Linsler (editors): L’Irréparable. Itinéraires d’artistes et d’amateurs d’art juifs, réfugiés du „Troisième Reich“ en France/Irreparabel. Lebenswege jüdischer Künstlerinnen, Künstler und Kunstkenner auf der Flucht aus dem „Dritten Reich“ in Frankreich, Magdeburg 2013, pages 265/290-313

J.D. Kirszenbaum (1900-1954). Retrospektiva/Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue: Muzej Mimara/The Mimara Museum, Zagreb 2018