Text dedicated to Boris Taslitzky, on page 342 of the exhibition catalogue "Picasso and war" .
According to the painter Boris Taslitzky, his whole life was marked by war
1. After the 1905 revolution, his parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated, settled in France. His father died fighting in the French army during the First World War. Taslitzky studied at the École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris, where he was a student of the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. In 1935, he joined the Communist Party and illustrated Ce soir, the daily newspaper created by the PCF. He places his art at the service of political causes, in particular with his work
Les Grèves de 1936, in response to current events.
Mobilized in 1939, Taslitzky was taken prisoner in 1940. After escaping, he joined Le Lot and entered the Resistance: he made leaflets and clandestine newspapers. Arrested in 1941 as a communist, he was imprisoned in the internment camp of Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe (Tarn), where he painted a series of frescoes on barracks, which earned him the title of "Maitre de Saint-Sulpice" by Aragon. His mother was arrested in 1942 and deported to the Auschwitz camp, where she died. Transferred to the Buchenwald camp in 1944, Taslitzky managed to recover drawing material
2 and produced nearly two hundred sketches and drawings as well as five watercolours which are all testimonies of the camp's activity: the waiting, the comrades, the chores... then his release. Taslitzky sent this corpus to Aragon, which published it in 1946 under the title "Cent onze dessins faits à Buchenwald".
After the war, as a great figure of socialist realism, he rubbed shoulders with Picasso in the PCF and the Peace Congresses. Their correspondence ceased after a letter dated November 14, 1956
3, in which Taslitzky invited Picasso not to support Hélène Parmelin's text criticizing the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Picasso's name will finally appear alongside ten other signatories in this open letter dated November 20 (CAT. 252).
Taslitzky participates in the Art et Résistance exhibition and the Autumn Fairs. The 1951 one was marked by the scandal of the exhibition of his work
Riposte in Port-de-Bouc4, an evocation of the dockworkers' strike against the Indochina war and its repression by the police forces: the police commissioner had the painting removed on the grounds that it "offends national sentiment". Six other works are also concerned, including the portrait d'
Henri Martin in a convict made under a pseudonym.
In 1952, Taslitzky was invited by the French Communist Party to Algeria with the painter Mireille Miailhe to visit the districts of Oran and Constantine. His drawings and dated notebooks allow us to follow his journey and constitute an exceptional testimony to the living conditions of the middle and working classes
5, their culture and their lifestyles. The drawings and paintings produced on this occasion are presented at the Algeria 52 exhibition and grouped together in publications
6.
Witness and actor of the 20th century, Boris Taslitzky has mixed his artistic and political commitments all his life.
Clotilde Forest
1 Isabelle Rollin-Royer, [
online]
2 Richard 1995, p. 224.
3 AMNPP, 515 AP/C/167/4/3(1).
4 Boris Taslitzky,
Riposte à Port-de-Bouc, 1951, oil on canvas, 82.7 × 122.0 in, Londres, Tate Gallery, inv. T07431.
5 Gervereau-Rioux-Stora 1992, p. 211.
6 Taslitzky-Miailhe-Dubois, 1953