Henri Epstein

HENRI EPSTEIN (Lodz, 1892 - Auschwitz 1944).
"Military men", ca.1904.
Mixed media (watercolor and gouache) on paper.
Signed.
Measurements: 18 x 25 cm; 29 x 33 cm (frame).

Henri Epstein was born into a Jewish family in Lódz, Poland, in 1891. His father died when he was three years old and he was raised by his mother, who encouraged his interest in painting. He studied at Jakub Kacenbogen's drawing school in Lódz and later at the School of Fine Arts in Munich. Epstein visited Paris in 1912 before enlisting in the Polish army, and then returned to Paris, where he settled in the artists' colony La Ruche (the hive) between 1913 and 1938, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Although Epstein's early works were influenced by Fauvism, he later adopted an expressionist technique. He exhibited at both the Salon d'automne and the Salon des Tuileries. He illustrated Gustave Coquiot's Vagabondages (1921) and Pierre Bonardi's Les Rois du Maquis (1926), as well as contributing to the first textless Jewish art magazine produced in Paris in 1912, Machmadim (The Precious Ones). Epstein bought a farm near Epernon, which became his refuge during the occupation, until February 23, 1944, when he was arrested by Gestapo agents. Despite the appeals of his wife (daughter of the painter Georges Dorignac) and friends, Epstein was sent to the Drancy detention camp on February 21, 1944. He was deported on March 7 in convoy number 69 and killed in Auschwitz, in German-occupied Poland, in June. In 1946 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Paris.