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Max Lazarus (1892 Trier, Germany - 1961 Denver, Colorado)


A 2010 retrospective show of Max Lazarus's work planned by the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift Trier in Germany (City Museum) [www.museum-trier.de].

Max Leon Lazarus was born July 12, 1892, in Trier, Germany, as a son of a Jewish family. His father ran a coal merchant's business and apprenticed his son to a housepainter’s business. After this apprenticeship, he attended the painting class of Prof. August Trümper in the local art school for arts and crafts. From 1910 to 1912, he studied with an artist in Duesseldorf. In 1913, he stayed in Munich for six months, then went to Berlin and Weimar where he worked as a decorator and made contact with young Expressionist artists.

In World War I, he became a soldier and was deployed from 1914 to 1918 as a war draftsman at the western front, where he drew maps for the German army. He was injured during a mustard-gas attack. After his return to Trier, he opened a business as a housepainter but also continued his artistic painting. In 1920, he founded the Trier Artists’ Guild, an association of artists, which had several exhibitions in Trier and the region. Max Lazarus also had a very successful one-man show in Luxembourg in 1930. During this time, he created impressive paintings and lithographs with motifs of his hometown and the region around Trier. Most of them were lost during World War II and the time of National Socialism.

Before leaving Trier, he was one of the first Expressionist artists in the area and was commissioned to paint a mural on the ceiling of the Trier synagogue. He did this job very well, so he received commissions to paint the synagogues of Merzig, Neumagen, Langen/Hessen and Luebbecke/Westfalen. All these synagogues were destroyed during the “Night of the Broken Glass” in November 1938 or during WW II. Under the Nazis, Max Lazarus was forced to give up painting. He had to sell his house and worked in secret, painting portraits to provide subsistence for his family.

His friends urged him to emigrate, but he waited until September of 1938. Like most of the other Jews in Germany, he couldn’t believe that something so cruel as the terror that followed could ever happen in a civilized country. Disgraced by the Nazis in November 1938, the Trier synagogue was destroyed by 1944 bombings and his mural was lost. Other of Max's works in Trier were also  lost either destroyed by the Nazis or during the World War II. Three of his sisters and his uncle were killed by the Nazis in Lodz, Sobibor and Auschwitz.

When he fled to the USA, Max went first to St. Louis, where some members of his family had resided since 1909. Max made his living in St. Louis painting custom furniture in the Dutch Provincial style for a famous cartoonist who worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Daniel Fitzpatrick (1891-1969, twice rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize). An architect in St. Louis, Frederick Dunn (1905-1984), hired Max to design custom wallpapers and wall paintings for his commercial projects. From 1939 through 1942, Max took part in several exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum and another show in 1940 in the Young Men's Hebrew Association of St. Louis. He was a member of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild.

Although he was able to start a new career in the U.S., fate again became unfriendly to him. His health was fragile as a result of his mustard-gas injury in World War I, and he contracted tuberculosis. Thus, in 1942, he had to leave St. Louis and move to Denver, which was famous for its clean air and was a center for the treatment of lung diseases. He was hospitalized in the sanatorium of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society in Denver (now the home of the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design).

After his rehabilitation, Max was employed as an art teacher at the sanatorium and took part in several exhibitions around the U.S., mostly with woodcuts or prints – for example, the Annual American Wood Engraving and Block Print Exhibition of the Philadelphia Art Club in 1946; the Fourth Southwestern Print and Drawing Exhibition of the Texas Fine Art Association in 1951; the Wichita, Kan., Art Association’s twentieth annual Graphic Arts Exhibition; and the Fine Art Festival of Kansas State College, Manhattan, Kan. in 1951. After a lingering illness, he died December 9, 1961 in Denver.

For more information please visit Max Lazarus (1892 Trier-1961 Denver) German-American Expressionist Painter and  [www.museum-trier.de] Museum Trier: Einstieg

Other sources:

Denver - Best Of - Best Denver Art-World Mystery - The missing work of Max Lazarus (2002)

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Copyright (c) 2008 Rosalie E. Leposky and Dr. Baerbel (Barbara) Schulte.