Léon Delarbre (French pronunciation: [leɔ̃ dəlaʁbʁ]; 30 October 1889 – 20 May 1974) was a painter, museum curator, and World War II resistance fighter.
[3] Too old to be mobilized for World War II, he joined the Volontaires de la Liberté, a group active in the French Resistance, in 1941.
The conditions of his environment required Delarbre to forgo his previous interest in drawing landscape, figure and still-life subjects in an academic manner; instead, in a "radical and conscious shift", he drew the human suffering he witnessed.
[2] Delarbre's sketches made during World War II, now categorized as "evidentiary Holocaust artwork",[8] are frequently used to illustrate the horror of concentration camps.
[9][10] Delarbre drew on paper scraps and printed ordinances, often interrupting his work in the manufacturing of small arms in order to sketch.
[11] Especially notable is his famous drawing of the Muselmann character, a type for the camp prisoners who were doomed to die and had resigned themselves to their fate.
[12] Two of his drawings from Dora are in the permanent exhibition at Buchenwald,[13] the camp where he also sketched the so-called Goethe Oak, under whose "charred limbs" he used to sit and compose verse.