As an extension to the exhibition “Leonard Freed. Photographing a World in Disarray” exhibition, the Jewish Museum of Belgium joins the Brussels Street Photography Festival (BSPF) in celebrating the city of Brussels!
From February 21 to March 17, discover Eyewitness in Brussels, featuring the photos of the 21 finalists in this photography competition on Brussels. In particular, you can visit this exhibition honoring street photography during Museum Night Fever on Saturday, February 23, 2019.
Painter, enameller and illustrator Kurt Lewy (1898 – 1963) was born in Essen, Germany, where he taught graphic techniques at the Folkwang Schule from 1929 to 1933. With the advent of Nazism, this Jewish artist was dismissed from his post. Two years later, he fled Hitler’s Germany and settled in Brussels.
Incarcerated as an enemy subject by the Belgian authorities in May 1940, Kurt Lewy was interned in the Saint-Cyprien and Gurs camps. In 1942, he managed to escape and returned to Brussels, where he hid for some twenty months. In June 1944, he was arrested by the Nazis, who interned him in Mechelen until the Liberation.
After the Second World War, Kurt Lewy abandoned the figurative themes that had until then guided his production, which was marked in its early stages by German Expressionism. He turned to abstraction, which he explored until his death. Concerned with “eliminating the superfluous, the ephemeral, the chaotic”, his geometric research freed him from the anguish caused by the nightmare of war and his isolation as an emigrant.
Drawing on the heritage of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, as well as works from the Antwerp gallery Callewaert-Vanlangendonck, this exhibition brings out of the shadows a key, but now forgotten, figure in post-war Belgian painting. It reveals a body of work that, as a precipitous step in the evolution of 20th-century art history, shows a path from figuration to abstraction.
This exhibition is organized in partnership with Galerie Callewaert-Vanlangendonck. On view from September 11, 2020 to April 18, 2021 at the Jewish Museum of Belgium.
The Jewish Museum of Belgium is pleased to present the first catalog published since the 1980s on the artist Kurt Lewy. Extending the Kurt Lewy Towards Abstraction exhibition, this trilingual catalog (French, Dutch, English) is on sale at the museum reception desk.
Further information > info@mjb-jmb.org
Minorities, war, revolution, racial discrimination, work, pleasure, policing, poverty, art and everyday life are at the heart of this “documentary photographer’s” work. Leonard Freed seeks to understand the reasons that drive individuals to do what they do, by focusing on key moments in the world’s political history, which he accompanies as a committed witness. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict (since 1948), the civil rights movement in the United States (1954 – 1968), Germany during the Cold War, or the revolution in Romania (1989): far from choosing his subjects randomly, Leonard Freed uses his photographs to denounce the world as it is.
Come and (re)discover, through the singular eyes of a major 20th-century photographer, the events that have marked contemporary history.
This exhibition is accompanied by an educational guide and a press release.
