The Artist's Legacy

"It was perhaps Symcho's greatest triumph to have survived brutality without losing his sensitivity."
                             - Henri Michaux, friend and patron

"How strange the discovery, when in exploring the depths and secrets of painting, one discovers one's own self."
                              
                              -Symcho Moszkowicz

The art of Symcho Moszkowicz carries the weight of Holocaust history in a unique way - His paintings chronicle human emotions, not merely the events that caused them.

He was a holocaust victim whose art elucidates not only the collective suffering of his generation, but the spirit of the survivors, and he accomplished this using methods available only to the consummate abstract painter. 

In this respect he is unique. There is no other artist, abstract or otherwise, who shared both his experiences and his particular aesthetic. Although the holocaust and the war profoundly affected many artists around the world, there remains only one painter whose personal experience was so central to his art that he was referred to by his national press as "The Expressionist Voice of the Holocaust." 

Thus, in the arena of abstract art Symcho Moszkowicz stands alone, and his art is a completely original legacy.

Janet Schneider, former director of the Queens museum writes, "Moszkowicz's experiences during the war indelibly marked his moral, metaphysical and aesthetic commitments, and as such, his personal history cannot be separated from an understanding of his art." Although similar observations can be made of a number of great artists from other periods, it seems that only Moszkowicz emerged from the holocaust to create such an artistic legacy. 

In an unusual twist of fate, this legacy has been preserved nearly in its entirety. After the artist's death in 1966, his only surviving family member made it her mission to preserve all of his works in one place. For decades she tracked down his art works and acquired them when they were available. Although she allowed them to be exhibited several times and donated a small number to major museums, she was unable to find a suitable institution capable of accepting the entire collection according to her conditions.

As a result, the great majority of Symcho Moszkowicz's works will be available for viewing for the first time since 1966. A small number are already shown on our "Gallery" page."

ABSTRACT EXPRESS is proud to present this unique artistic legacy. In keeping with the wishes of the late Teresa Syrop Moszkowicz, we welcome inquiries from museums, cultural institutions and curators of major collections concerning the acquisition of the entire collection.

IN MEMORIUM

In 1969, with the help of the artist's sister Teresa, the Galerie Lambert mounted a memorial retrospective of Moszkowicz's work. Here is a translation of the text from the introduction to the catalogue, written by Francois Pluchart, art critic for COMBAT:

"It was in Stockholm that I met Moszkowicz for the first time. Exhibitions had already established his talent. He was beginning to know celebrity. The Swedish press had made sort of a symbol out of him. But he had seen and suffered too much, had risked too much in his life to accept whatever looked like complacency to him. Sacrificing his nascent popularity he made a sojourn to New York and later came to settle in Paris."

"Up until his death in 1966 he never changed his uncompromising attitude which, despite his exemplary generosity of spirit, made him mostly unaccesible to everyone but the friends whose morals he expected to correspond to his own. Let it be enough to say that here again he suffered much. But Moszkowicz knew how to accept suffering as the very condition of man. He had lived through the horror of concentration camps. He had given up his employment in order to devote himself to painting. He accepted the most precarious of material conditions in order to express what was choking his heart and mind. Nothing could diminish his serenity, his passion for beauty, harmony and life. He had an immovable faith, a sort of mysticism, an indestructable belief in man upon whose perfectability he was betting."

"It is no wonder that Moszkowicz devoted so much of himself to portraits, where he showed totally new and personal conceptions. At the time portraiture was a category which one might think was exhausted forever, condemned by the wear and tear of time and the relentless competition of photography. But it was human souls rather than portraits that Moszkowicz painted. Using deliberately rudimentary technical means and with truthfulness that was sometimes frightening, he knew how to express the essentials of a man. Moszkowicz's landscapes are like his portraits. One finds in them the same psychological clarity, the same chromatic subtlety. They are literally inhabited. As an iconoclastic artist and solitary man, Moszkowicz gave through his work and his life an incomparable lesson in courage and greatness."

And finally, here is an excerpt from the memorial written for the catalogue by Teresa Moszkowicz-Syrop, the artist's sister:

"Symcho Moszkowicz had the rare courage not to separate his own way of life from ideas he expressed in his art. He always placed the spiritual over the material. After his death the message in his painting prevails. He did not paint for the sake of painting, but to reveal his profound truth. He lived for his art and died for it."

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