Henri Epstein

1891 - 1944

Born in Łódź on June 20, 1891 Henri became a significant painter of the School of Paris in the 1930’s

Henri Epstein lost his father, a bookseller, at the age of three and grew up with his mother, who encouraged his early penchant for painting. He began training at Jakub Kacenbogen's School of Drawing in Łódź where he studied with Zygmunt Landau)before joining the Munich Academy of Fine Arts until he was 19 years old.

During the great War he served in the Polish army. He finally moved to La Ruche in 1913 until 1938, where he befriended Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Pinchus Kremegne. Whilst in La Ruche he attended the courses of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Although Epstein’s early work was influenced by Fauvism, he then adopted an expressionist technique. He illustrated Gustave Coquiot’s Vagabondages (publisher Ollendorff) in 1921 and Pierre Bonard’s Les Rois du Maquis (publisher André Delpeuch) in 1926. He also probably contributed to the Jewish artistic journal Machmadim published at La Ruche and to Renaissance, a magazine in which he wrote articles in Yiddish.

Artistically Henri Epstein was first noticed by the police commissioner and collector of paintings Léon Zamaron who saw him as the "most talented" painter of his time. The choices of Leon Zamaron had a great influence on Jonas Netter who purchased several of Epstein’s paintings. Jonas Netter, was a prolific and discerning collector who’s collection included over 120 pieces of work.

Henri Belbeoch and Florence Clifford estimate that it was from 1930 that, with his patron Dr. Gilles, Henri Epstein made several trips to Brittany Belle-Île-en-Mer and Concarneau, However, he also repeatedly pained the port of Marseille.

In 1938 Epstein bought a farm near Epernon, which became his refuge during the Occupation. On 23rd February 1944 he was arrested there by three Gestapo agents. Despite appeals by his wife, the daughter of painter Georges Dorignac and his friends, Epstein was sent to Drancy camp on 24th February 1944. He was deported on 7th March 1944 in convoy number 69, and killed in Auschwitz.

Flowers Still Life. 1938-40. Oil on Canvas

Historical Context

Auschwitz

The Auschwitz concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) and administrative headquarters, in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II–Birkenau, a combined concentration/extermination camp three kilometers away in Brzezinka; Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labor camp seven kilometers from Auschwitz I, set up to staff an IG Farben synthetic-rubber factory; and dozens of other subcamps.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, sparking World War II, the Germans converted Auschwitz I from an army barracks to hold Polish political prisoners.[3] The first prisoners, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries, arrived in May 1940, and the first gassing of prisoners took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I in September 1941. Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to the camp's gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, at least 1.1 million died, around 90 percent of them were Jewish . Approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, and up to 15,000 gay men. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died because of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.

In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), approximately 12 percent of whom were later convicted of war crimes. Several, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities at the camp, and their failure to bomb the camp or its railways remains controversial. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape from Auschwitz, 144 successfully, and on 7 October 1944 two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners assigned to staff the gas chambers, launched a brief, unsuccessful uprising.

As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march. The remaining prisoners were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust.