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On 23 February, the City Gallery in Wrocław opens a retrospective exhibition of Michel Fingesten – painter, illustrator, but above all a printmaker and ex libris artist fluent in various techniques. The exhibition is the first in Poland to showcase the oeuvre of this artist, unjustly forgotten by history.
Michel Fingesten was an artist of Jewish origin, born on 18 April 1884 in Bukowitz, a village near Bielsko-Biała in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. His never-completed art studies – pursued first in Vienna and then in Munich under the tutelage of the famous German symbolist Franz von Stuck – were punctuated by numerous journeys, including to North America, Australia and Asia. In 1913, he settled in Berlin, where he got actively engaged in the city’s cultural life, including being a member of the Neue Secession group and contributing to then-significant magazines such as “Marsyas” and “Kunst der Zeit”. In 1933, Fingesten was one of the first to be denounced as a “degenerate artist”. In 1936, he managed to emigrate to Italy. He was, however, interned four years later in the Civitella del Tronto camp in the province of Teramo, and then transferred to Ferramonti-Tarsia in the Calabria region a year later. The artist died on 18 October 1943, less than a month after the Americans liberated this extremely rigorous camp.
Fingesten was a proliferate artist throughout his life. While he worked in drawing and painting rather episodically (particularly important are his Spanish landscape-inspired gouaches made between 1927 and 1928), printmaking was a permanent and unchanging part of his life. The artist developed technical proficiency in almost all printmaking techniques, with aquatint, etching, drypoint, mezzotint, linocut and lithography being his forte. One of his favourite printmaking forms was the ex libris – it is estimated that Fingesten made around 2,000 small artworks of this type.
Working in such a multifaceted and experimental medium as printmaking gave the artist the impetus for formal and aesthetic exploration. Thus, Fingesten’s works encapsulate the hallmarks of the significant modernist transformations taking place in European art at the turn of the 20th century, reverberating Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.
A distinctive narrative style characterises Fingesten’s art – full of humour, often ironic, yet simultaneously filled with understanding for human frailties. Although the artist revolved around classical themes, such as portrait, nude, still life and landscape, his most significant works balance on the borderline between joyful vitalism and the will to greedily experience both the pleasures of life and the drama of existence. The spectre of inevitable death always loomed in the background, gaining particular intensity when confronted with the harsh realities of the early 20th century. The recurring theme in his artistic investigations is the ambiguity of human nature, torn by contradictions and based on the struggle between two opposing drives – the drive for life (Eros) and the drive for death (Tanatos).
The exhibition is on view until 29 March 2024.
The exhibition curated by: Mirosław Jasiński, Jan Plácak, Oskar Plácak
The artworks come from the collection of Galerie Ztichlá klika (Prague – Czech Republic).
The exhibition is organised under the patronage of the Mayor of Wrocław Jacek Sutryk and the Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Poland JE Břetislav Dančák, as well as in cooperation with the Czech Centre in Warsaw, the Ossolineum National Institute in Wrocław and the Bente Kahan Foundation project the “Unfinished Life”.
