![]() ![]() 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 Röhm. There are roughly 60 works on paper in the show, along with a single painting. “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.” ![]() ![]() “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. (The show will be a modified version of the MMK’s.) Stéphane Mandelbaum runs through Feb. 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. It took another 30 years for anyone to start seriously paying attention to his art. Mandelbaum wasn’t a famous artist during his lifetime, but his death briefly occupied the French and Belgian headlines. 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. Incredibly, he managed to pull off the heist, only to discover the stolen painting was a fake. After that, Mandelbaum was recruited to steal an Amedeo Modigliani painting from a wealthy woman in the suburbs. Also read: How did the figure of Kali become a symbol of resistance in Bengal?Īs 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. 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. He’d left home and settled in a Jewish neighborhood in Brussels. In 1986, a promising 25-year-old Belgian artist named Stéphane Mandelbaum was ever so slightly adrift. It’s a bizarre story, even for the art world. ![]()
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