Léo Maillet (1902-1990): The Broken Mirror Presentation by Erik Riedel, Frankfurt am Main (Germany)

Curator Erik Riedel will present the work of the painter and graphic artist Léo Maillet, who changed his original name Leopold Mayer in exile, reflecting the numerous fractures in his biography.

After his dramatic escape from a deportation train bound for Auschwitz, Maillet lived in the French Cévennes under a false identity from 1942 onwards. He painted and drew with the simplest of materials. Some years later, he took up the works he had created during his flight and persecution and transformed them into paintings and etchings. The resulting works are, on the one hand, artistic reflections of his own work and, on the other, confrontations with his own persecution. The fact that Maillet began the latter just a few years after the end of the war is rather unusual. Both among survivors and in the context of the emerging culture of remembrance, intensive processing of the Shoah only began in the late 1970s.

Erik Riedel is head of exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and curator of the museum’s Ludwig Meidner Archive. The archive consists of the artistic estates of Ludwig and Else Meidner and several other artists who were forced into exile. Erik Riedel has curated numerous exhibitions on 19th- and 20th-century art, for instance on Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Ludwig and Else Meidner, Charlotte Salomon, and Arie Goral. Apart from several exhibitions catalogues he has published the catalogue raisonné of Ludwig Meidner’s sketchbooks and the conference proceedings “Ludwig Meidner. Expressionism, Ecstasy, Exile” (2018), as well as the catalogue raisonné of Ludwig Meidner’s paintings until 1927 (2023).

This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression” organized by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York.

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