Boris Taslitzky, Art in Step with Its Time
“I have had a splendid life. A life of luxury. The luxury of being where the blows fall, when human dignity is at stake.”
Boris Taslitzky, 2004.
This spring, the La Piscine museum in Roubaix featured a selection of masterpieces by Boris Taslitzky. The exhibition narrative retraces the turbulent and politically active life of this outstanding artist. It provides an unsettling account of the 20th century, when painting and drawing were the media of choice for committed artists. Boris Taslitzky was one of them: a member of the French Communist Party, whose enthusiasm and tribulations he embraced, he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp as a political activist rather than as a Jew, thus avoiding certain death upon arrival –unlike his mother, who was gassed in Auschwitz.
When Taslitzky returned from Buchenwald, Louis Aragon published some of the drawings he had produced secretly in the camp, enabled by internal complicities. Some of these pieces on display in Roubaix show the exhaustion and suffering of daily life as well as the portraits of Taslitzky’s unfortunate fellow prisoners.
Boris Taslitzky “exorcized” the war by applying brushes and colors to huge surfaces, providing the viewer with a strange mix of visual beauty and horror. His treatment of the subject matter enables the emaciated bodies in silent despair to illuminate the space.
Much though he managed to “return” to life, Boris never forgot those horrific months. His political struggles and his paintings always took a stance to defend the interests of the oppressed, oppose abuse, and witness and attest to poverty, misery, and the exploitation of men. The report he produced on Algeria in 1952, with his sketchbooks under his arm, is an example. In the glances, the poses, and the toil, everything is said.
Boris Taslitzky, for whom “each brush stroke must be an affirmation of human solidarity,” advanced through the century tirelessly bearing witness to the working class condition, the Popular Front, the conflicts, and, later on, to the social struggles –particularly those of the miners– during the postwar period of economic growth known as Les Trente Glorieuses.
What Taslitzky shared with Picasso was a love of art and of work. Picasso invited him to visit, and, attaching a photograph of his painting La mort de Danielle Casanova (1949), Taslitzky wrote to him, in 1950: “I never went to visit you, as you had suggested when we met at the Peace Congress, but it was only out of shyness.” However, we know that they did eventually meet, and the master loved to share his discoveries, his new quests, and his latest acquisitions with Taslitzky.
Taslitzky was also one of the signatories of a joint letter sent to Picasso on April 24th, 1952, along with Paul Eluard, Jean Rollin, Jean Amblard, Pierre Daix, and several others, reminding comrade Picasso that “Having met in a study committee, the communist visual artists and critics wish to greet their comrade in arms with trusting affection and with respect for the great painter who has put his talent to the service of peace and Socialism.” Those were the times of Soviet realism and of utopias, before the crisis of the Stalin portrait in 1953.
Taslitzky enjoyed including nods to Picasso in his paintings, as in Le Déjeuner des pêcheurs (1949), in which we glimpse a peace dove on a page of l’Humanité. Towards the end of his life, in the quiet of his light-filled studio in the 13th Arrondissement, the painter, draftsman, writer, and Party member loved to recall the encounters and events that had marked his life. With its delicate presentation, the exhibition at Roubaix has paid him a magnificent and well-deserved tribute.
Boris Taslitzky, L’art en prise avec son temps (Art in step with its time).
La Piscine, Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André-Diligent, Roubaix, March 19- May 29, 2022.
Illustration : Le Déjeuner des pêcheurs, 1949.
Collection particulière, photo Alain Leprince.
Collection particulière,
photo Alain Leprince.
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