The Master of Saint Sulpice - William Davie
A gut-wrenching crescendo appeared at the very end of Jean Claire’s sprawling thematic exhibition Inferno at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, in 2021. Examining the image and role of hell through the ages, Boris Taslitzky’s painting Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald (1945) was situated alongside an enviable murderers’ row of artists. This included Hieronymus Bosch, Auguste Rodin, Sandro Botticelli, Francisco Goya and Gustave Doré, as well as modern and contemporary artists like Otto Dix and Anselm Kiefer, to name but a few. But it was Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald, a representation of hell on earth, made by man, which vividly and chillingly stayed in our mind’s eye long after the others faded into obscurity.
Le petit camp à Buchenwald, 1945
© Bertrand Prévost - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP
Taslitzky’s inclusion in Inferno also announced the dire need for what became Boris Taslitzky: Art in Touch with its Time at La Piscine, Musée d’art et d’industrie in Roubaix, France; a fascinatingly comprehensive retrospective of an artist who operated well outside of the usual market and institutional parameters.
Save for a few significant works held in major museum collections, Taslitzky’s work has found a niche within minor French museums focusing on communism in France, of which he was an ardent, lifelong member. If Taslitzky is known, however, it is because his life is inextricably linked to the holocaust. But in viewing the retrospective, what is made agonisingly apparent is just how irrevocably reconfigured his oeuvre is by those events as well.
In seven pencil portraits, seen roughly one third of the way into the retrospective, we are immediately drawn to their eyes; a window through to the soul, so it is said. We search what were likely their final gifts of humanity before it was callously stripped away from them. Taslitzky drew them while imprisoned in Buchenwald. In each one he studiously renders his male subject through crosshatching, eliciting a great warmth and tenderness that almost belies their circumstance.
The impetus Taslitzky had to create and document at a time of crisis reinforces to us the vital, critical impact that he intrinsically believed art could have on its viewer. Testament to this is the nickname Taslitzky acquired shortly after the war: Master of Saint Sulpice. It came about once it was known that Taslitzky would rally other prisoners together in order to help him paint ad hoc frescos on the walls of the cells and the chapel in the concentration camp at Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe in southern France, where they were imprisoned. They were “a hymn to Liberty,” wrote André Wurmser in L'Humanité in 1959.
Seen together like this, the Buchenwald portraits possess an alluring disarmament that provides a dramatic and contrasting foil for what we see in the following two rooms.
Here, in two monumentally scaled paintings that viscerally confront us, Taslitzky reaches for and arguably surpasses the emotive and artistic heights seen in canonized bellwethers such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Goya’s etching series The Disasters of War series (1810-1820), both of which jarringly depict the atrocities and suffering created through war.
The first is La Pesée mensuelle à la prison centrale de Riom (1945). Three meters tall, it shows larger than life skeletal prisoners, sickly yellow in a weigh-in room as they help each other to strip naked, too weak to do it alone due to starvation. Their intense vulnerability and humiliation is made even more tangible by the prominence of their scrotums seen hanging below their pelvic bones. On a wall a sign reads: silence is obligatory.
The second is Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald (1945); five meters long, and even more evocative and powerful than it was in Inferno, given its company. It shows the grounds of the concentration camp primed with activity, recalling the compositional traditions seen in French history paintings, of which Taslitzky was a devoted student. The focal point seen in the centre of the painting is a prisoner pushing a wooden cart piled high with decomposing bodies. Around him, prisoners and guards collect dead bodies lying naked on the ground, scrotums prominently painted. As they do, some have to fend off guard dogs as they try to feast on the bodies, while groups of skeletal prisoners that have flooded out of the two prison blocks that flank the image, huddle together watching in disbelief.
But what stops us from recoiling in disgust at the subject matter is the dynamism and at times, lurid beauty Taslitzky imbues into these paintings.
In La Pesée mensuelle à la prison centrale de Riom he carves the vaulted ceiling and architecture of the room out of fiery oranges and blood-reds that contrast with the shock of midnight blue he renders the floor. In Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald, the sole area of white seen in the centre of the image in the oversized shirt of the prisoner pushing the cart holds our initial focus. Quickly, streaks of scarlet clothing elsewhere emerge in our periphery like a constellation among the larger areas of limp greens, worn blues. Added to this is an undercurrent of exaggerated movement in the form of skewed perspective, which at times makes it feel as if we’re viewing a hallucination through a fish-eye lens.
By virtue of this artistic licence Taslitzky ensures that the unspeakable is able to be discussed, and what should never be forgotten, will never be forgotten.
But as curator Alice Massé demonstrates by having these works appear so early in the retrospective, Taslitzky’s trajectory was different than most artists. Artistic growth and evolution was not at the forefront of his practice. Rather, his artistic skill was a tool to be honed in order to further convey his message. After the war, he frequently used the holocaust as a lens in which to bring other social injustices glaringly to light. All the while, the works that he produced about his time imprisoned in various concentration camps, particularly Buchenwald, loomed as a spectral warning: this is the heinousness mankind is capable of achieving under the right circumstances.
A striking example of this is Riposte (1951). Here, we see a brutal clash between dockworkers and armed police who were breaking up their strike in Port-de-Bouc, near Marseille, France. Taslitzky employs a realistic colour pallet that, particularly in areas showing exposed flesh, swinging arms and punching fists, rendered in stabs of muted ochres and pastel pinks, subtly recalls the grandiosity of Rococo painting and echoes the minute inflection of Tiepolo’s brushwork. The cobbled dock twists up at the sides like a piece of paper that has been set alight, emphasizing the momentum of the brawl and echoing the dizzying perspective warp seen in Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald. Joining the melee on the right are two police dogs also like the ones seen in Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald. Dogs became Taslitzky’s go-to symbol for Nazism and the evils he faced with it. Here, he uses them to clearly illustrate his position on the authoritarian efforts of the government and the police to strong-arm the dockworkers. Taslitzky proudly stands with their refusal to load ships with troops and supplies that were to be sent to the French colonies in what was then known as Indo-China in an attempt to quash attempts at their gaining independence from France.
In other series we notice some variation and experimentation. For example, the trousers of the striking miners seen in Les Délégués (1947) appear as if it were the result of a frenzied burst of brushwork which was then hastily worked over. While in Tremblement de terre Algérie (1955) which depicts scenes from the decolonisation of Algeria, which Taslitzky and painter Mireille Miailhe were invited to witness and record by the Algerian Communist Party in 1952, his brushwork is noticeably faster and looser. It brings to mind the fluidity of Cecily Brown’s fence-hopping between figuration and abstraction. But these forays never come at the expense of or overshadow the socio-political implications Taslitzky is compelled to expose. Instead, he stays within his self-imposed parameters as an artist; always looking, always translating through mark-making.
In the works that constitute Taslitzky’s second act, those created after the war, an underlying tension persits. They were made during the rise and golden age of documentary photography which leveraged the concurrent rise of general-interest magazines like Time, Life, Holiday, and Look. Taslitzky’s approach to social commentary as it was might be seen by some as being in vain, even futile. These magazines reached millions of people throughout the world. They were the platform where collectives such as Magnum Photos, which was founded in Paris in 1947, exposed audiences to what were soon heralded as the definitive images of the second half of the 20th century. How could a painting or drawing compete?
An answer materializes in an ever-prescient selection of ink drawings from Taslitzky’s Banlieue series that began in 1965 and ended in 1972, that closes the exhibition quietly and philosophically.
Along with painting public murals in a vein similar to those he had painted in the concentration camp at Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe, Taslitzky was tasked with capturing the change in five housing projects being built in what was then known as the “red belt.” These housing projects, located on the periphery of Parisian suburbs, were working class and held strong communist sympathies. Their arrival caused a rapid and seismic change in the landscape physically and promised a better way of life for the people that lived there as France lurched out of the shadow cast by the war.
The drawings are executed with a taut precision akin to technical drawings. Initially we notice families walking arm in arm through a square and children playing in large grassy areas. But soon we are drawn to those showing crumbling buildings and industrial complexes uncomfortably abutting and encroaching onto residential areas. In another, a smashed car is left abandoned on the side of a street. Devoid of sheen or utopian sentiment and austere in their honesty, in viewing them now, there is a ghostly hollowness elicited by his precise, svelte mark-making over expansive areas of untarnished paper that echoes the failure of the way of life promised through these housing developments to materialize. Taslitzky’s now-loaded lines poetically come alive with connotations and interpretations in such a way that photography simply cannot match.
As I reconcile the fate of these areas as we understand them today, with their beginnings outlined here, scenes from Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically acclaimed film La Haine (1995) crash through my mind’s eye. I promptly recall an article that talked of a proposal for mass evictions and reconstruction of Copenhagen’s Mjølnerparken, a largescale red brick housing project on the outskirts of the city that is almost entirely populated by immigrants and riddled with crime and unemployment. It came to mind, I realize, because it had been categorized as a “ghetto” by the Danish government on their annual “ghetto list.” It was one of 28 low-income neighbourhoods across Denmark that were seen as “irremediable urban disasters” that year, wrote Feargus O'Sullivan at the time. In turn, I think of the ghettos created by the Nazis, at the vilification and alienation aimed towards Jews and other people considered racially or socially inferior. The poignant, gut-wrenching imagery of Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald flickers in my mind, working symbiotically with the other frames of reference as I continue to examine the last of Taslitzky’s ink drawings.
As I finish, the abhorrent threshold that Taslitzky saw mankind pass through and so achingly depicted in Le Petit Camp à Buchenwald, to give such terror a face, suddenly doesn’t seem so abstract and ahistorical as it once did.