The life of Isaac Celnikier spans cities whose names resonate today as much for being centers of Jewish life as for becoming traps, abysses that swallowed their inhabitants: Warsaw... Bialystok, tested countless times by Russian pogroms before its ghetto was erased by the Nazis. Isaac Celnikier was born in Warsaw in 1923. Orphaned of his father, he was placed in Janusz Korczak's orphanage, where he stayed for four years. He would later reference Korczak's sacrifice several times in his engravings.

At the invasion of Poland, he fled with his mother and sister to Bialystok, where Jewish refugees poured in and a collective of 120 Jewish artists had formed; he connected with some of them. In 1943, he was deported. Thus began the harrowing journey from camp to camp: the names must be recited—Stutthof, Birkenau, Buna, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg—names often conveniently summed up as Auschwitz, but which were each a separate stage of unfathomable horror.

Upon his liberation from the camps, Isaac Celnikier returned to Bialystok, looked back to see what had survived, and paid tribute to those who had been massacred. But there was little life left to be found on that land, only silence.

His journey took him to Prague, where he trained under Emil Filla, the leading figure of Czech Cubism between the two wars. In 1952, he returned to Warsaw and became one of the founders of the dissident artist movement Arsenal. He discovered that, in post-war Poland, he was a dissident on two fronts: as an artist and as a Jew. In 1957, he left for Paris permanently.

Despite his training, the sources of his painting are rooted more in the substance of the Expressionists. In Paris, he discovered Soutine with awe, seeing in him the quintessential Jewish artist. However, he did not hide that his true guide—the one he constantly pursued in his engravings and who inspired his portraits—was Rembrandt. He explained that, beyond his admiration for Rembrandt’s genius, he was grateful to him for being the first to paint Jews as they were, without caricature or the idealized, antiquated image of the Jew as a fantastical figure excluded from the world.

The urge to speak through painting was so urgent for Celnikier that he began painting and drawing immediately after the war. I want to mention a 1955 painting, now housed at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, titled Ghetto, where the figures stand out against a background devoid of depth, a vertiginous whiteness gradually consumed by a menacing darkness. A man in his prime and a woman no longer young are lifting a disjointed body, while a child, turned toward a potential, incredulous spectator, drowns us in his extinguished gaze. This child, robbed of his childhood, bears witness before the children who will pass before him.

In this painting of the Ghetto, reminiscent of certain "Entombments," everyone is still together: men and women, parents and children, young and old, already consumed by destruction but still human, not yet annihilated by the Nazi obsession that separated sexes and generations to extinguish all possible or real life.

Isaac Celnikier shared that the anti-Semitic events of 1968 in Poland, which coincided roughly with an extended stay he spent in Israel, hastened his decision to work on the extermination of the Jews. The avoidance of twenty-five years gave way to reality. He then undertook several series of engravings on the Shoah, of which Mémoire Gravée is only an excerpt. These works plunged the artist into a confrontation with the stages of hell: torture, humiliation, transports, selections, executions, revolts, and massacres.

From the outset, Celnikier chose his form of representation, and it would never leave him: as a patient portraitist, he filled each engraving with men and women collectively murdered.

Reinterpreted and reappropriated, one can see in his work echoes of Goya’s The Disasters of War series, as well as the monumental works The Third of May and The Second of May. This reference is rich with meaning: it is a tribute to art that perpetuates the memory of the horrors of the Spanish insurrection, just as Picasso would later immortalize the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. Isaac Celnikier might tell you himself: for him, Guernica is an emblematic work of the art of memory. But I should add that in his engravings, his formal sources are simultaneously his meaning: the chiaroscuro structuring each plate serves as a lesson in darkness, a meditation on the unfathomable and on humanity.

It took more than forty years for Isaac Celnikier to finally confront, through painting, his memory of the house of the dead. For the Birkenau Triptych, Celnikier found a new palette, a relationship of colors worked like grisaille, and a formal composition that erases the space around the bodies, pressed together until their last breath. As in The Jewish Brides, there is no model, no landscape, no setting—only men and women, nothing but them, absent from the world.