Description:
A small silver and gold seahorse like figure floating
Label Text:
If not for two wooden boxes that somehow miraculously survived WWII we would have never heard of the artist John Elsas.
What may have started as a way to entertain his grandchildren after retirement, grew into a daily obsession resulting in a collection of 25.000 works by his hand.
John Elsas’s late artistic calling started at about 74 after a career as a stockbroker. His collage work is like no other work, quirky, playful, sarcastically didactic with at times serious political undertones. Created in one of the most artistically and politically potent interwar years in Germany during the Nazi takeover he started his artistic career around 1925 lasting to the day of his death in 1935.
Elsas a German Jew (Born: Jonas Mayer Elsaβ) saw early on the posing looming threat of the rising Nazi party. His death in 1935 at least prevented him the horror of Nazi Germany and the extermination of one of this daughters, Irma who was killed in Concentration camp Theresienstadt. The elder daughter Fanny managed to escape the same fate since she was living in Neutral Switzerland at the time. Elsas body of work survived even though it stayed with Irma during the war and did not arrive until after 1945 in Switzerland.
While Elsas did not seem to take himself nor his artistic career all that seriously he nevertheless ended up being quite prophetic in regards to his work as an artist. He wrote:
“Es gehen die Elsas Bilder in die weite Welt hinein, wenn Elsas erst gestorben is, dann werden sie was Besseres sein.”
(Free transl.: Elsas pictures will be known all around the world after Elsas has died. Then they will be acknowledged. (Hkdv)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2018.58.4 |
