JACOB MARKIEL WORKSHOP FUND
Wednesday April 12, 2023 - 2:30 pm
Public exhibition :
Tuesday, April 11 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Wednesday April 12 from 10am to 12pm
Information :
marseille@debaecque.fr
Jacob Markiel comes from a modest family in Lodz (Poland) and starts working at a very young age.
One day while he was drawing, his father surprised him, tore up his drawings and shouted at him that he had the dybbuk (diabolical soul that incarnates in the being) in him. His mother intervened and enrolled him in Isaac Brauner's drawing classes. His childhood was marked by this decisive encounter. At the age of sixteen, the artist Marek Szwarc recommended him to the Polish art critic Willem Fallek.
A student at the Krakow School of Fine Arts, he obtained a scholarship and arrived in Paris in the fall of 1934 and enrolled at the Beaux-Arts in the studio of Louis Roger.
The sculptor Naoum Aronson welcomed him and introduced him to Baron de Rothschild.
He returned to Poland from time to time and exhibited in Lodz in 1937.
When war was declared, he joined the Foreign Legion and was taken prisoner in Germany. He escaped and returned to France to join the Free Forces, but was arrested on denunciation. First interned in Drancy, he was deported to Auschwitz.
When he was liberated in 1945 and returned to Paris, he was welcomed by the painter Dobrinsky, and reunited with his wife Esther, with whom he lived and who supported him all his life. He began to work again, first at the Beaux-Arts in Souverbie's studio, then he took a small room near the Gare de l'Est.
During these years he frequented the post-war Montparnasse and met Kremègne, Dobrinski, Schreter who spent long evenings talking with him and whose portraits he painted.
He later found a studio in the Cité Falguière, an artists' quarter, until 1967.
Because of his training he admired and understood all the great masters of the past, from the Italian primitives to Rembrandt or Velasquez, but he did not ignore what Chardin, Millet, Corot or Cézanne and Van Gogh did next.
Throughout his life Markiel observed nature, to be inspired by it, never to copy it. He said that a beautiful still life was one that represented the essential things, a piece of bread, a book, a glass of wine.
These portraits, modest and intense, were celebrated after the war and earned him the First Prize for Portraiture in 1952 at the Galerie d'Orsel.
Markiel liked to show and share his painting and was a regular at the Salon des Indépendants, also exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français.
Numerous monographic and collective exhibitions have honored his painted work in Paris, in the regions and abroad: Galerie Katia Granoff, Anna de Banguy, Galerie d'Orsel, Galerie Helof, Galerie Aleph, Galerie Tkim-Quynh, Galerie Aktuaryus, Galerie Everarts, Galerie Montador, Orangerie des Jardins du Luxembourg, Fondation Taylor, Fondation de Rothschild.
This remarkable and unprecedented group of works constitutes a unique opportunity to rediscover an essential painter of the School of Paris, profound and accurate, with a restrained expressive sobriety, far from any desire for seduction.
