Publishing Department

We present to the readers the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Minor Remnants from Solna Street. Isaac Celnikier and the Holocaust Experience.” 

ISAAC CELNIKIER was an illustrator, painter, and printmaker born in Warsaw in 1923. He was a pupil of Janusz Korczak. His art was dedicated to commemoration of the Holocaust.  Confined to the Białystok ghetto in 1941, he was subsequently deported to German camps Stutthof, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg, and Dachau after the ghetto’s liquidation. In April 1945, he was found by American soldiers amidst a pile of bodies near Dachau. After the war, Celnikier pursued studies in monumental painting in Prague. From 1952 to 1957 he lived in Warsaw. In 1957, he left for Paris, where he lived and worked until his passing in 2011.

In 1957, Isaac Celnikier created illustrations for two Yiddish publications: Avrom Reyzen’s Oysgeveylte verk and Dovid Sfard’s Lider. He never saw these artworks in print because they were published after he had emigrated to France. In a letter to his friend Aleksander Lewin, he called the collection of works he left behind “minor remnants from Solna Street, [which] are […] of no greater importance.” These works contain encrypted meanings that allude to the artist’s biography, embodying anti-fascist and pacifist ideas. They convey Celnikier’s personal experience of the Holocaust, creating a parallel narrative to the texts they illustrate. Even though they were written earlier, the artists interpreted some of them as prefigurations of the Holocaust. Celnikier produced these illustrations after the war, mostly during the so-called Polish thaw. In addition to political changes, these years brought an opening to Western art. This first, post-war period of the artist’s oeuvre – combining Socialist Realism with aesthetics of the Arsenal exhibition – bears witness to the Jewish experience of the war, emigration, and identity dramas.

The publication accompanies the exhibition Minor Remnants from Solna Street. Isaac Celnikier and the Holocaust Experience.

You can buy the book in our Bookstore

Publication date: 2023

Publication co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage