Johnny Friedlaender (1912-1992) - Senza Titolo

Johnny Friedlaender
Follow
France
• 1912
Johnny Friedlaender, one of the masters of contemporary engraving, was born on June 21, 1912 in Pless, Upper Silesia, to a family of Jewish origin. After World War I, Upper Silesia was annexed by Poland. The Friedlaenders later emigrated to Brelsau. From 1928 he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau, where Otto Mueller was one of his teachers, and he produced his first engravings. From 1930 to 1933 he moved to Dresden, with brief stays in Berlin and Paris. In 1933 he was interned in the first Nazi concentration camp. Amnestied, he left Germany in 1935. His escape led him to Czechoslovakia, where he presented his first solo exhibition of engravings, before taking refuge in the Netherlands. He arrived in Paris in 1937. André Lhote assisted him at Nouvelle Revue Française. In 1938 Friedlaender worked as an illustrator for the weekly Marianne. He was arrested from 1939 to 1943, like Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer or Ferdinand Springer; he lived in several internment camps, worked with the Resistance in southern France. Johnny Friedlaender enlisted in the British Army, was captured but escaped. The German people's failure to resist Nazi ideology and the fact that he was forced to flee his country and enlist to fight it constitutes a major rift in his life. He would try to exorcise the pain by making ten engravings, the “Images of Calamity.” When peace returned, the artist moved to Paris. In 1949, with engraver Albert Flocon, also a German-born refugee, he founded the Ermitage engraving workshop, frequented in particular by Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, Zao Wou-Ki and Nicolas de Staël. He held his first private show at Galerie La Hune, where he subsequently exhibited every year. This event earned him an enthusiastic article by Christian Zervos in the magazine Les Cahiers d’art. He became a friend of Jacques Villon, a Cubist painter and engraver. In the same year he produced the etchings for La Saison des Amours by Paul Éluard. In 1966 he was named professor at the University of Salzburg. It was during this period that he resumed painting, which he had abandoned in the Forties. From 1951 he exhibited in numerous museums in Europe, the United States, and South America. Naturalized as a French citizen in 1952, he represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1958. In 1959 UNESCO offered Johnny Friedlaender the opportunity to teach engraving techniques in Rio de Janeiro. He died in Paris on June 18, 1992.

Rare materia lithography, intaglio; very limited edition, only 60 copies worldwide, copy 29/60.
Includes a stunning handmade frame with a copper finish.