Joachim Weingart
1895 - 1942

After finishing high school in Lvov, Joachim Weingart studied drawing in the School of Artistic Craft in Weimar in 1912, and in 1914, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The industrialist, Karol Katz, who was also a lawyer and a collector, as well as a member of the Society of Lovers of Jewish Art in Lvov, acknowledged his artistic talent. Katz provided financial support to Weingart and with his help, the young painter traveled to Berlin in 1916 for the first time. Returning to Drohobycz and Lvov, he remained there during World War I. He again went to Berlin between 1922 and 1923, where he attended with Alfred Aberdam and Zygmunt Menkes, a private school run by the sculptor Aleksander Archipienko.

In 1923, the artist went to Paris and shared a room with Menkes. They lived at the Hôtel Medical, which was actually a wing of a hospital in which artists rented rooms for their studios. Eugeniusz Zak and Marc Chagall were also living there at the same time. Weingart, together with Menkes, Aberdam, and Leon Weissberg formed The Group of Four. An exhibition of their work, arranged by Jan Śliwiński, was held in 1925 at the gallery "Au Sacre du Printemps." Renting a studio of his own, Weingart experienced a period of impressive artistic success when René Gimpel acknowledged his talent and signed him to a contract in 1930.

His career was brought to a standstill, however, when his divorce proved to be a devastating personal tragedy. Suffering from major depression, he withdrew from an active social life and completely isolated himself from the outside world. He painted with such constant intensity and without any regard to his well being that his health began to fail and he had to be hospitalized. It is said that while he was in the hospital, the Germans arrested him in March of 1942. Confined to an internment camp in Pithiviers, he was subsequently deported to Auschwitz.

Influenced by a prevailing expressionistic trend, Joachim Weingart belonged to the younger generation of the School of Paris artists. His art evolved similar to other Lvovian painters of the time who all had similar stylistic tendencies. He began by portraying children, and in these works depicting misery; critics noticed an affinity for artists from Vienna like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, who impacted his early paintings. After he arrived in Paris, the human figure in his pictures was interpreted in a neo-classical style that was expressed in his scenes of family life and paintings of mothers with children. His palette consisted of cool hues with characteristic shades of pearl grays and whites. Areas were framed by distinctive contours and space was filled with rising vertical elements that made the compositions look monumental.

His talent as an Expressionist is especially seen in his still lifes with flowers, nudes and genre pieces that were completed in the 1930s. At times, his painting was frenzied as he often changed the direction of his brushstroke and thus caused a re-shaping of the picture's rich organization and content. The harmony of composition in his still life, so typical of Cézanne, seemed to deteriorate as he replaced value details with defined areas of contrasting colors. With orange and red dominating, contrasted by light blue and muted white, his figures seemed to occupy the entire space of the painting and only occasionally could an active chromatic background be seen. In some of the works he created in early 1930s, remote connections with Fauvism can be seen, but in terms of artistic characteristics, it was Chaim Soutine who seemed to have the most influence on Weingart. Soutine similarly worked under the pressure of emotional stress that verged on madness, which resulted in dramatic distortions of the canvas's image.

Weingart had two one-man shows: one in Lvov (1923) and another in Warsaw (1932). He made his debut in 1925 in Paris at the Autumn Salon and at the Salon of the Independents where his work was shown at the latter in 1927 and 1930. He contributed to the exhibition of Polish art at the Galerie Éditions Bonaparte (1929) and at the International Exhibition in Paris (1937). After the war, his works were on view in a group exhibition of artists-victims of Holocaust: in Tel Aviv (1968) and Haifa (1978 and 1996).

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: