Shelomo Selinger


Shelomo Selinger is a sculptor and artist, living and working in Paris since 1956.

Biography

Shelomo Selinger was born to a Jewish family in Poland in the small town of Szczakowa near Oświęcim. He received both a traditional Jewish upbringing and a Polish public school education. In 1943 he was deported with his father from the Chrzanów ghetto to the Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany. Three months later his father was murdered and Shelomo remained alone in the camp. His mother as well as one of his sisters also perished during the Holocaust.
Shelomo Selinger survived nine German death camps: Faulbrück, Gröditz, Markstadt, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Dresden, Leitmeritz and finally Theresienstadt, as well as two death marches.
He was discovered, still breathing, on a stack of dead bodies when the Terezin camp was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army. The Jewish military doctor who pulled Shelomo out of the pile of corpses transferred him to a military field hospital where he was taken care of and where he came back to life. He recovered his health but lost his memory and for seven years was completely amnesic to his past sufferings and horrors.
In 1946 Shelomo Selinger boarded the Tel Haï, a ship leaving La Ciotat and headed to the then British Mandate Palestine with a group of young death camps survivors who, with the help of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, had crossed illegally the borders of Germany, Belgium and France. The ship was seized outside the territorial waters of Haifa by the British Royal Navy. The passengers, none of whom had a legal immigration certificate, were interned in the Atlit detainee camp.
After his liberation from this camp, Selinger joined the Beit HaArava kibbutz near the Dead Sea. During the 1948 Palestine war he participated in the Sodom battle, while his kibbutz was destroyed. Shelomo Selinger then was one of the founders of the Kabri kibbutz, in the Galilee. That's where in 1951 he met his future wife, Ruth Shapirovsky, who came to the kibbutz as a volunteer worker with her Haifa high school class. They were married in 1954. At that time Shelomo began to fill in the gaps in his memory and started to sculpt.
In 1955 Shelomo Selinger was awarded the Norman Prize of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. A year later he enrolled in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He studied traditional clay modelling with the sculptor Marcel Gimond, but did not abandon his own personal style and continued carving directly on working materials with hammers, sledge hammers and chisels.
Too poor to buy his own working materials, Selinger went hunting for stone blocks in the slum belt of Paris and came back with a very dense and hard bloc of granite capable of capturing and reflecting light. Granite became his favourite stone. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși introduced him to Vosges' sandstone and gave him a grindstone made of this reddish stone, a symbolic present to Shelomo as a successor to Brâncuși's direct carving technique. Selinger also carved wood, using mainly easily available firewood.
After spending three years in the Beaux Arts school, he started attending what he calls the "best school" of all, the museums of Paris. Primarily he spent time at the Louvre, and the studios of the greatest Parisian sculptors of the time, for example Ossip Zadkine, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Joseph Constant.
A sculpture named "Motherhood", inspired by his wife and the birth of their son Rami, earned Selinger the Neumann Prize of the city of Geneva. It was the first acknowledgement of his talent in Paris. This work is now part of the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Thus Selinger—a survivor of the German death camps of World War II—has become a renowned sculptor of birth, rebirth and life itself.
The Jewish Museum of New York discovered Selinger in 1960, putting seven of his sculptures on show, but it was the Paris art gallery owner Michel Dauberville who really recognized Selinger's genius and continuously encouraged and promoted him when he became the owner of his parents’ gallery, the Galerie Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. He exhibited Selinger's work in 1962, 1963 and 1965 and continued with showings in 1972, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1996, 2002 and 2006 and 2009.
Further recognition came to Selinger in 1973 when he won first prize in an international competition with his monument titled "The Gates of Hell" in memory of those who had passed through Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris during World War II. Drancy was a major transit point for Jews arrested by French police and German occupation forces, destined for rail transport to Auschwitz and other death camps. 77,000 French Jews were deported via Drancy, including 11,204 children.
Many other awards followed. In 1973 Shelomo Selinger was named Chevalier to the prestigious French Legion of Honour by President François Mitterrand. Since 2006 Selinger bears the title "Officier de la Légion d'Honneur".
Currently living in Paris with his devoted wife, he never hesitates to tell his story of survival and to show his work for those who wish to see it. He works with marble, granite, stone, and wood. Most of his creations are of loving embraces or those that emit some type of remembrance. His work is very popular since he uses all of his own tools and his imagination is his muse. An extremely nice man, incredibly gifted, and a genius with his hands.

Citations

Major works

Selinger's work on the Mémorial national des Déportés de France in Drancy, in rose coloured granite, took two years of carving by hand and was unveiled in 1976. The Mémorial de la Résistance in La Courneuve followed in 1987. In the meantime Selinger created the Requiem pour les Juifs d'Allemagne in Bosen, Saarland and the Monument aux Justes parmi les Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Selinger started treating monumental statuary in open space in 1964 with his sculpture L’Esprit et la matière n° 1, erected in Saint-Avold, followed by L’Esprit et la matière n° 2 in Wissembourg. The superb white marble Moise ou la Victoire de la lumière, set up in Aranđelovac has kept its head but the prophet's rays were destroyed by lightning.
Some of his other important open-air monuments are La tauromachie at the bullring of Le Bouscat in 1974, La Danse, a group of 35 flower boxes created in 1982, stretching from the place Basse of the Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, to the La Défense, covering an area of 3.600 square meters and the Groupe de 13 sculptures in the Tel-Hai Industrial park in the Galilee, a part of the :de:Tefen-Skulpturengarten|24 granite and basalt sculptures bought by the Open Air Museum of Tefen. These works are on display in Tel-Aviv, in Omer or in Lavon. Since 1998, Le prophète Elie towers over the Mount Carmel dominating Haifa.
Selinger's sculptures comprise today more than 800 works in all possible materials and sizes, granite, red granite, sandstone, marble, bronze, oak, blackwood, cherry wood, ash tree or beech. Forty-eight monumental open-air statues are exhibited in public places. Five of these monuments are dedicated to The Holocaust and the Résistance.
On the 103rd anniversary of the 1906 rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, the first deputy mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced the creation of a new association. The association proposes to launch a national subscription campaign for the erection of a statue of Émile Zola on the Place Alfred Dreyfus in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The sculptor will be Shelomo Selinger.
Selinger's graphic works in Indian ink and/or charcoal number thousands. Part of his drawings represents his concentration camp experience, but most of his works are real celebrations of life. Shelomo Selinger’s works were exhibited in about forty museums and galleries all over the world.

Prizes and distinctions

Filmography