Georges Despaux. Drawings and Scenes. Buchenwald 1944-1945
earlier presentation of the exhibition in Tweebronnen, Leuven, 2006
During the workshop the exhibition Georges Despaux - Drawings - Buchenwald 1944-1945 is shown in the workshop venue at Lamot 'Schatkamer - Tresor Room'.
This exhibition by 'Kunst en democratie' is sponsored by the Province of Antwerp and is free accessible for all visitors.
Exhibition Layout : Stijn Cockx, W&K Sint-Lucas Architectuur
Georges Despaux – Drawings – Buchenwald 1944-1945
Notes by Rik Vanmolkot jr.
Exhibition in Lamot, Mechelen
during International Architectural Workshop Dossin-Mechelen
14/03-18/03/2007
‘Je n’irai pas au paradis, ce n’est fait et inventé que pour
les constipés bien pensants et j’ai toujours pensé tout de travers.’
Georges Despaux
(letter to H. Vanmolkot 29.11.1967)
Georges Despaux (1906-1969) made 180 drawings (100 portraits, as well as scenes) in Buchenwald 1944-1945, where he became befriended with Henri Vanmolkot (1921-1969), when they met in the direst of circumstances in the “small camp” of Buchenwald mid 1944. They both survived and kept some contact.
George Despaux was arrested (nobody knows why) on February 1, 1944 in the South of France (Bayonne, the French Bask country where he originated from) and taken to the transit camp of Royallieu (for non-Jewish people) near Paris. Of the many ten thousands of people that were taken from there to the concentration camps, one transport was sent to Auschwitz - the one with Despaux on 28 April 1944 - and after 10 days onwards to Buchenwald.
That is where he met H. Vanmolkot, who was arrested on February 17 in Leuven, Belgium, where he lived and studied (4th year of medicine), arrested for so-called 'antifascist behaviour' as president of the largest student associaton. He was sent to the local concentration camp of Breendonk in Belgium where he got very ill and then transported early May to Buchenwald. He recovered eventually although he stayed in the “small camp”.
The story goes that both men owe their life to each other. Vanmolkot had to work as an assistant doctor in the barracks of the handicapped, sick and dying people. Despaux (who limped) most probably was affected to the photo lab of the SS (some of his drawings are made on stolen photo-paper).
Out of gratitude and surely also because Despaux became a bohémien after the war (he left wife and 5 kids end 40's) he gave the drawings to H. Vanmolkot in the 60's. He called him “the only friend he had left in the world”. He lived a real life of vagabond, seldom a fixed address, always from here to there, painting, drawing, sculpting, doing hard physical labour, making cartoons, dolls etc etc he also was an inventor and magician.
Rik Vanmolkot jr. partly reconstructed his life, which was not so easy as his family had no contact with him any more after the 40's :.his daughter (now 63) came to the opening of the exhibition in May 2006 and found there the life of her father whom she never knew and of whom almost nobody in the family had any recollection. Afterwards she told she could now die in peace and that the biggest void in her life was now filled.
Part of this friendship is at the basis of the 25-page introduction R. Vanmolkot wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition of his drawings which recently ended in Leuven/Belgium, The exhibition was curated by Naomi Teresa Salmon, an audiovisual artist from Israël living in Weimar in Germany. Of the 180 drawings made on garbage paper or notebook paper and bits of photo paper, there are about 100 portraits (35 of which the name could be retrieved and some details about the persons, among them a portrait of H. Vanmolkot), the rest are scenes from the daily life and death in the camp.
The exhibition itself will be shown again:
- in Mechelen during the International Architectural Workshop Dossin-Mechelen
- in Weimar/Buchenwald most probably in spring 2007.
- Probably also in Aalst
It comprises tables, frames (75 drawings are shown out of 180), DVD’s (about the places where Despaux lived and worked, about Buchenwald, and a DVD with all 180 drawings) and the supporting documentation. The drawings are owned by Dr. Leo Vanmolkot.
Hereafter follows a small curatorial note of Naomi Salmon. In this curatorial note she refers also to our earlier collaboration (with the association Kunst en Democratie) for the project 'Leben Terror Geist', an exhibition about 73 artists and intellectuals that were imprisoned in Buchenwald (people from all over Europe, also Jewish people, f.e. Imre Kertèsz the nobel literature prize winner of 2002, Eli Wiesel, Bruno Bettelheim, Jorge Semprun, and many other well known people, but also many unknown people, such as Despaux). It shows their lives with some objects and audio material also for some of them, and we learned how the survivors coped with the 'Buchenwald experience' afterwards. This exhibition was shown in Mechelen, Belgium in 2003.
On The Im/possibility of a Biography
Curatorial Notes by Naomi Tereza Salmon
„A person is nothing but the form of his childhood’s landscape.”
(Shaul Tchernychowski, Jewish Poet)
My first encounter with Georges Despaux's work was at the new permanent exhibition of the Art Museum in the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar, Germany, which opened in 1998, complementary to the drawings of José Fosty and Boris Taslitzki. The second time was while working on the concept for the “Leben - Terror - Geist” exhibition about intellectuals from the concentration camp, an installation I curated for the Culture City of Europe 1999 events in Weimar. Later it was shown at the Goethe Museum in Weimar and then, in cooperation with “Kunst en democratie” in Brussels, to set the exhibition in Mechelen, Belgium in 2003.
The idea behind the “Leben - Terror - Geist” exhibition was to research and show the lives and work, as well as ideas and thoughts of those who went through the extreme experience of being detained in a concentration camp. Compared to other (altogether 73 Biographies were chosen for the Exhibition) quite famous inmates such as George Semprun or Eli Wiesel, there is very little known about the biography of Georges Despaux, about his life altogether. We can only look at his drawings and try to learn more about him through his own creation, his way to capture what he saw, sketches of the camp inmates, friends, situations, meticulously exact drawings of barracks, and a small amount of caricatures and animal studies as well as some landscapes drawings and wood carvings from the time after the war. Why show the life and work of such a person, of which only a handful of childhood photos exist, who himself, according to hearsay, eliminated a lot of his own work? And how to expose his work, which is so valuable in the search for the testimony of a sublime individual experience, without over-exposing the person himself, invading his privacy beyond his own wish? Without any chance to certify our assumptions, suppositions, suspicions or even rumors? How to deal with the fate of a man of whose reason for being arrested we cannot even be sure about?
Following the years after the “Leben - Terror - Geist” exhibition, some of the biographies, such as those of the artists Josef Szajna or Boris Lurie, were expanded and on the occasion of 60 years of Liberation on May 8th, 2006 the exhibition space at the Tweebronnen in Leuven (Belgium) - built by Henry van de Velde) was chosen to show the fragmented evidence of the life and work of George Despaux.
Georges Despaux was born on October 3rd 1906 in Salies de Béarn, and died on December 19th 1969 in the same place, his place of birth. Quite a remarkable thing, concerning the many places he was forced to go to, as well as freely stayed at. It seems like he never found his own place, always depending on friends and reliable family members. A video work tries to follow him to the places in which we know he has been to or made drawings of, tracing his perspective, his possible exact angle of the view, the precise location.
Exposing the research process to the public eye, exchanging the usual scheme of ‘pictures on the wall vs. documents on tables’: it are the drawings that are put on the tables and the state of research, possible connections between places, persons and stories that is placed on the walls, thus giving the visitor the possibility to see the rough seam side of the story, and to build his/her own portrait of the man, a rhizomatic mind map of a life we couldn’t and maybe even wouldn’t want to conclude or can be axiomatic, or even certain about, yet a life worth exposing, because of these facts exactly, thus not trying to salve the puzzle of the man he was, but rather through looking at the same views to maybe perceive something about the shape of a person, who went through an extreme experience and came back to draw his own childhood landscapes.
