The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw is hosting an exhibition entitled ‘Small remnants from Solna Street’. The exhibition is devoted to the post-war, youthful work of Isaac Celnikier, a great Jewish artist who survived the Holocaust.

For the first time, the exhibition features works that were created immediately after the war – cartoon illustrations to Avrom Rejzen’s short stories and David Sfard’s poems. Among the works shown in the exhibition, one can see inspiration and references to the works of Celnikier’s masters: Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, van Gogh and, above all, Pablo Picasso and Francisco Goya.

The exhibition is an attempt to read Celnikier’s biography in illustrations to Yiddish stories and poems. We show how these drawings, created before his departure from Poland, can be read as sketches for large-scale paintings already created in France, and referring to a single original, images from the ghetto fixed in the artist’s memory.

Izaak Celnikier was born in Warsaw in 1923, and as a child he stayed at Janusz Korczak’s Orphans’ Home. When the war broke out, he and his family left for Białystok, and from 1941 he stayed in the local ghetto. After the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto, he went through the German camps in Stutthof, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg and Dachau. After the war he studied monumental painting, and in 1957 he went to Paris on a scholarship, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He died in 2011.

Not long before he left for France, Celnikier started working with the publishing house Idisz Buch. He created illustrations for Yiddish publications: Ojsgewełte werk (Selected Works) by Abraham Rejzen and Lider (Poems) by David Sfard – publications so far untranslated into Polish. The illustrations, which Celnikier never saw in the final publication because they were published after his departure from Poland, contain coded content referring the viewer to the artist’s biography.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński