It’s a bizarre story, even for the art world.
In 1986, a promising 25-year-old Belgian artist named Stephane Mandelbaum was ever so slightly adrift. He’d left home and settled in a Jewish neighborhood in Brussels. Although he’d grown up in a secular household — his father was the son of Polish Jews who fled the Nazis, his mother was Armenian — he’d become preoccupied with Judaism as a teenager and had begun to teach himself Yiddish.
As he struggled to make it as an artist, he began to pick up work for what seems to have been Brussels’ criminal underworld. His first known job was a theft of netsuke figurines, a type of Japanese miniature sculpture. After that, Mandelbaum was recruited to steal an Amedeo Modigliani painting from a wealthy woman in the suburbs.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Incredibly, he managed to pull off the heist, only to discover the stolen painting was a fake. In a sequence of events that’s still debated (the phrase “mysterious circumstances” is often used), Mandelbaum seems to have insisted on being paid for his efforts, at which point he was shot in the head, acid was poured over his face, and his corpse was dumped in a desolate section of the city. No one was ever charged.
Mandelbaum wasn’t a famous artist during his lifetime, but his death briefly occupied the French and Belgian headlines. It took another 30 years for anyone to start seriously paying attention to his art.
Now, after a small show of his work at the Pompidou in Paris in 2019 and a subsequent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt (MMK) last year, Mandelbaum’s work will be introduced in the US at New York’s Drawing Center in SoHo. (The show will be a modified version of the MMK’s.) Stephane Mandelbaum runs through Feb. 18.
“At first, I really wanted the exhibition to be additive and provocative,” says Laura Hoptman, the Drawing Center’s executive director, as she walks through the show. “Additive, because this is a completely unknown voice we’re adding to the art discussion,” she continues, “but I also wanted to broaden the notion of history, memory, trauma and identity.”
NAZI PORTRAITS
There are roughly 60 works on paper in the show, along with a single painting. Sixteen pieces are large — about 5 feet tall — and they run the gamut from portraits of friends and family members to exquisite albeit defaced renderings of the Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Rohm. Many of the works include lewd elements. “They could be considered juvenilia in a way,” Hoptman says, “but who makes these 5-foot-tall ginormous drawings of Nazis if you’re not trying to do something in a public way? There’s a tremendous maturity as well as certain adolescent qualities.”
In between are pictures of Mandelbaum’s heroes (the painter Francis Bacon, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, the filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Pasolini) and a few uncharitable self-portraits.
Over the years, Mandelbaum’s story flared up in the French-speaking public interest, then subsided. There was a documentary done by a friend released in 1995, and a novel, Mandelbaum ou le reve d’Auschwitz (Mandelbaum or the Dream of Auschwitz) by Gilles Sebhan, came out in 2014.
There have also been a few monographs of his work in French. “It’s a lot, actually, for a 25-year-old artist who had a short career,” Hoptman says. “It’s astonishingly a lot. But if you trace back to the people who were doing it, it usually goes back to either the family, his friends during the time or the Zlotowski gallery” in Paris, which represents his estate.
After the Pompidou exhibition, Mandelbaum’s reputation began to grow. The Zlotowski gallery has brought several of his pieces to art fairs, and a flurry of his work has begun to show up at auction, though the results have been mixed. The most recent piece up for sale — a drawing at a small auction house in Brussels estimated at €4,000 to €6,000 (US$4,300 to US$6,400) — failed to find a buyer. But in May, a pen on paper drawing on notebook paper sold at a different Brussels auction house for €18,500, well above its high estimate of €5,000.
It’s Mandelbaum’s raw talent combined with his conflicted relationship with his Jewish heritage that gives the New York show a contemporary topicality, says Hoptman.
“Maybe there will be an excess of sympathy, in a way, for his struggles,” she says. “Or maybe it will engender some sort of righteous anger. But it certainly is about grappling with who you are, and who you want to be.”
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she