San Francisco, CA
The incredible story of a Holocaust victim's lost and rediscovered art
A Yiddish author and journalist from Galicia who settled in Paris, Hersh Fenster made a promise to a young group of artists in Paris during World War II. If he were to survive the war, he’d do everything he could to tell the story of the Jewish members of the School of Paris, a revolving group of artists who gathered in Europe’s art capital in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to revered artists like Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall, the group included many little-known artists who, like Lokachov, had fled persecution in their native countries to pursue careers in the human-rights haven of Paris.
Fenster kept his promise, and in 1951, he published a book in Yiddish titled Our Martyred Artists, telling the story of 84 School of Paris artists, most from Eastern Europe and Russia, who perished in the Holocaust. Unlike Chagall, who wrote the preface to Fenster’s book, Lochakov and the other perished Jewish artists did not have the time or luck to become famous.