Théo Tobiasse

[1][2] Youngest son of Chaïm (Charles) Eidesas and Brocha (Berthe) Slonimsky from Kaunas in Lithuania, Théo Tobiasse was born in Jaffa in Mandatory Palestine in 1927, where his Jewish parents had lived since 1925.

The family encountered material difficulties and decided to return to Lithuania, then left for Paris in 1931, where his typographer father found work in a Russian printing press.

[3] Tobiasse showed early provisions for drawing and painting, and during a visit to the Specialized Exhibition of 1937 held in Paris, he was amazed by the Fairy Electricity by Raoul Dufy.

[3] He enrolled at a private course of commercial art of Boulevard Saint-Michel, but had to quit nine months later when his family, after narrowly escaping the roundup of the Velodrome d'Hiver in July 1942, was forced to hide in an apartment in Paris for two years.

At the Liberation of Paris, he quickly started a career as an advertising graphic designer with the art printer Draeger,[4] and also produced tapestry cartoons, theater sets and window displays for Hermès rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

He won the 1961 “prize for young Mediterranean painting” and Armand Drouant offered him a first contract and exhibited it at the Galerie du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1962.

The reliefs, glazes and colors of The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, in particular, opens up new technical possibilities he explores in his paintings back to his workshop.

[8] From 1964, Théo Tobiasse developed a more personal iconography drawn from his own memories of his childhood in Lithuania, the wanderings of a family looking for a land of asylum and the Shoah.

In collaboration with Pierre Chave, lithographer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Théo Tobiasse developed a technique for making lithographs from eighteen to twenty colors that he produced for many original editions published in France, Sweden and the States -Unis: Songs of Songs (1975), Paris, Fleur de Bitume, Hommage à HC Andersen (1980), Parfum d'Odalisque (1982).

[15] The American dealer, Kenneth Nahan Sr., met in 1978, encouraged Théo Tobiasse to join other French painters in the United States that he represented, notably Max Papart and James Coignard [ref.

It develops cut and painted wooden or steel panels for large formats and public orders, including: In 1992, a retrospective exhibition of Théo Tobiasse's work was organized at the castle-museum of Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Chaïm Potok visits Saint-Paul's studio on several occasions, devotes a monograph Tobiasse: Artist in Exile published in 1986 in New York, and there meets the writer James Baldwin, his friend and neighbor in 1987.

The Garden of the Psalms, a suite of seven stained glass windows created in the workshop of master glassmaker Alain Peinado, is inaugurated at the Israelite community center on the Esplanade in Strasbourg on the occasion of the bicentenary of the emancipation of the Jews.