Léon Delarbre

Léon Delarbre (1889–1974) was a painter, museum curator, and World War II resistance fighter. After a career as a museum conservator and teacher in his hometown of Belfort, he joined the French resistance in 1941. Arrested in 1944, he was held in a series of concentration camps where he sketched scenes from camp life. These drawings have been widely used to illustrate the horrors of camp life.

Delarbre was born into a family of watchmakers on 30 October 1889, in Masevaux in the Oberelsaß(he later commented that he was the grandchild, the child, and the father of a watchmaker.) and jewelers. In 1904 the family resettled in Belfort, in the part of the Haut-Rhin that remained French after the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871). Léon apprenticed with his father to become a jeweler, and studied the basics of painting.

In 1911, Delarbre joined the garrison of Versailles, and took advantage of his proximity to Paris to prepare for entry in the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts. Admitted to both in 1913, he chose to attend the "Arts Decos", but simultaneously studied oil painting with R. Collin at the Beaux-Arts. His studies were interrupted by World War I.

After demobilization in 1919, he joined with his brother Albert in taking up his father's jewelry business in 1921. Throughout this period he painted and participated in exhibitions. From 1925 to 1933, he collaborated (with Bersier, Conrad, Lecaron, Cochet and Le Molt) in the decoration of the renovated theater in Belfort. In 1929 he became the curator of the Belfort museum, and in 1935 he founded the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Belfort, where he taught until his death. Among his students was a young Nicolai Michoutouchkine.

Too old to be mobilized for World War II, he joined the Volontaires de la Liberté, a group active in the French Resistance, in 1941. He was arrested on 3 January 1944 while hiding in his sister's apartment with his family; his daughter described the arrest, which took place in front of his children, and how a German Feldwebel tried to comfort her by saying "Krieg gross malheur!" At first incarcerated in Belfort and Compiègne he was deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mittelbau-Dora. With the help of friends he managed to procure paper and pencils to depict scenes from the camps, saving the materials by keeping them close to his body while being moved from camp to camp, until he got to Bergen-Belsen, his last stop, where he was liberated by the Allies. The conditions of his environment required Delarbre to forgo his previous interest in drawing landscape, figure and still-life subjects in an academic manner; instead, in a "radical and conscious shift", he drew the human suffering he witnessed.

...
Wikipedia