The Center for Persecuted Arts Solingen and other museums and institutions are celebrating artist Else Lasker-Schüler on the occasion of her 150th birthday in 2019. The life of Lasker-Schüler born in Wuppertal Elberfeld on February 11, 1869 was a total work of art. As a woman, she broke all social conventions. As Prince Jussuf of Thebes, she created an alternative personality for herself. Through a network of relationships, it had a great influence on the art scene of the first half of the last century. Long established but always living in a precarious financial situation, she was expelled from Germany in 1933. After a short break in Switzerland, where she was denied residence, she fled to the British protectorate of Palestine and lived in Jerusalem until the end of her life. She died on January 22, 1945.

The close connection between poetry and visual art, expulsion and exile as a human destiny, Jewish life and the Orient as a mystical place are all topics of our exhibitions and events. The exhibition “Jesekiel Kirszenbaum” was created in collaboration with the Mimara Museum in Zagreb, Croatia and Kirszenbaum's two nephews, Amos and Nathan Diament, supported by the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv and the Jewish Cultural Days Rhine-Ruhr.

When Jesekiel Kirszenbaum exhibited in the Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” in 1927, Herwarth Walden wanted to land a scoop with him, building on the successful exhibitions with Marc Chagall from the pre-war period. It's a good idea. Chagall and Kirszenbaum come from the same Jewish imagery of the Galician shtetl. Kirszenbaum is no stranger, worked as a miner in the Ruhr region and thus financed his studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The big breakthrough that Else Lasker-Schüler's ex-husband had hoped for did not happen. However, Kirszenbaum became part of the Berlin art scene, worked as a cartoonist for Ulk, Querschnitt and Die Rote Fahne, and from 1929 on regularly exhibited as a member of the ASSO (Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists in Germany). Kirszenbaum becomes part of Berlin's Bohème, whose heart was Else Lasker's student. An artistic highlight is his participation in the exhibition Women in Need, which is causing a sensation in Berlin.

In 1933, the Jew Kirszenbaum and his wife were forced to flee from Berlin and both went to Paris and went underground in Limousin in 1939. After the Shoah, Kirszenbaum is a severely traumatized person. His wife Helma murdered in Auschwitz. 600 works of art destroyed in the Paris studio. Patron Alix de Rothschild supports him. He starts painting again, but his pictorial world is now completely different: The Shoah irretrievably destroyed the world of the Jewish shtetl in Galicia. Kirszenbaum dies in 1954.

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