Roubaix 2022 PRÉSENTATION







frThe exhibition Boris Taslitzky, Art in touch with its time, scheduled from 19 March to 29 May 2022, has been extended until 19 June due to its great success, with more than 63,000 visitors to the Piscine-Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent de la Ville de Roubaix.

Highslide JS
Invitation card to the Exhibition Boris Taslitzky Art in touch with its time, in the Piscine-Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent de la Ville de Roubaix

Highslide JS
Invitation card to the Exhibition Boris Taslitzky Art in touch with its time, in the Piscine-Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent de la Ville de Roubaix


Both witness and protagonist in the greatest upheavals of his time (Spanish war, Popular Front, Resistance, deportation, anti-colonial fights, ...), Boris Taslitzky (1911-2005) would say that his whole life had been marked by war. Aware of his responsibilities as both a man and an artist, Taslitzky aligned himself with the great tradition of historic painters, from David to Courbet via Delacroix and Géricault, Goya and Daumier, and espoused a 'realism with a social content' who has less to do with bearing witness than with telling the story of history in the making. In touch with his time, this "revolutionary romantic" never ceased to defend the utopia of better days for the working class and gives us a moving and poignant testimony of humanity.

Comprising around fifty paintings, often monumental in size, and numerous drawings, along with a tapestry, this first major exhibition devoted exclusively to his work is above all a snapshot of a 'committed' or 'concerned' artist, through the lens not only of his huge compositions devoted to the political causes of his generation, in the tradition of Davidian history painting, but also portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The focus is on his works between 1930 and 1970 and is structured around a few key themed and chronological sequences, such as the drawings produced in Buchenwald in 1944-1945, the huge paintings inspired at Liberation by the hardships of war (especially La Pesée à Riom or Le Petit Camp), the representations of industrial labour and trade union struggles in the late 1940s (based around the famous portrait of the Les Délégués group), reactions to the Vietnam War in 1951, the reportage carried out in Algeria in 1952 or the series of 63 ink drawings depicting the radical change experienced in the working-class suburbs of north-east Paris between 1965 and 1972.

In the historical contextualisation room, based on an idea from Pierre Buraglio and with the approval of Claude Viallat, a contemporary counterpoint will bring together a number of works by artists that have some aesthetic or idealogical affinity with Boris Taslitzky.

Curator of the exhibition: Alice MASSÉ and Bruno GAUDICHON