Bidspirit auction | Joachim Weingart (1895-1942) – Still

Joachim Weingart (1895-1942) – Still Life with a Vase of Flowers – Oil on Canvas - Still Life with a Vase of Flowers. Oil on canvas. Signed. 32.5X 41.5cm. Frame: 51X58.5 cm. Joachim Weingart (1895-1942; also: Weingarten), Jewish painter born in Drohobych, Galicia, associated with the artists of the ”School of Paris”. As a young man, he studied art in Weimar and Berlin – where he worked alongside Alexander Archipenko – and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1922, he returned to Berlin, where he befriended the Jewish painters Zygmunt Menkes and Alfred Aberdam. The three subsequently moved to Paris and lived for a time at the Hôtel Médical, where Marc Chagall was also staying at the time, and founded the artists' group Groupe des Quatre. Weingart was known for his still lifes, such as the present painting, as well as for his nudes and figurative compositions, made in the Modernist style characteristic of the period. In 1942, Weingart was arrested by the Nazis in his Paris studio and interned at the Pithiviers transit camp. On 17 July of that year, he was deported to Auschwitz and was apparently murdered shortly after his arrival at the camp. Ten works by Weingart are held in the Oscar Ghez de Castelnuovo Collection, devoted to Jewish artists who perished in the Holocaust and now forming part of the collection of the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa. For further information about Weingart, see: Annika Friedman, ”Joachim Weingart”, in: The Ghez Collection – Memorial in Honor of Jewish Artists, Victims of Nazism, University of Haifa, 2019, pp. 67-69.