Max Wechsler

Max Wechsler was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1925. After Kristallnacht (Reichspogromnacht or Reichskristallnacht), he was sent to France and managed to reach Paris with an uncle in January 1939.

His parents and grandparents, who had remained in Berlin, were deported and murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

During the Occupation, via the Éclaireurs israélites de France (EIF) network, he was taken in at the Maison des enfants de Moissac, then, after the invasion of the southern zone, crossed into Switzerland on 23 January 1943 and joined the Davesco camp, near Lugano.

At the end of the war, he chose to settle in Paris, France. A stateless person, he obtained French nationality in 1980.

He started out at the newspaper Vaillant as an illustrator and graphic designer, a job he pursued part-time until the early 1990s, mainly for Presses de la Cité. His meetings with the painter Serge Fiorio during the war, when he was living in Moissac, and then with René Moreu, who was editor-in-chief of Vaillant, were to prove decisive.

In the 1950s and 1960s, in a surrealist vein, he painted fantastic compositions made up, according to Pierre Gaudibert, of "organic deployments [...] expansion of coils, swellings, cracks", and constituting "symbolic figures bearing witness to a work of suffering" for A. Pacquement. These works were exhibited by Pierre Gaudibert at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the first ARC event in 1968.