You can see a portrait of a young man drawn in pencil. The person is shown from chest height, has a narrow face, dark drawn lips and bangs falling over the right eye. The man is wearing a white shirt with a striped tie and a dark jacket.
Stéphane Mandelbaum, P. de Max, 1984 (detail), MUSEUMMMKFÜR MODERNE KUNST
STÉPHANE MANDELBAUM
“I wanted to write my life in life.”
—Pierre Goldman
Driven by fascination as well as by contempt, Stéphane Mandelbaum (1961–1986) produced hundreds of portraits within a short creative period of just ten years. The subjects include Arthur Rimbaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Bacon, Pierre Goldman, his grandfather Szulim, and his father Arié Mandelbaum, but also National Socialist criminals such as Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm. Portraying them small and singly or larger than life-size, Mandelbaum sought to capture the essence of their characters with a ballpoint pen, oil paint, or a graphite or colored pencil, often adding scribbles, texts in French, Yiddish, Italian, or German, or collaged newspaper clippings. His Jewish descent, Belgium’s colonial history, but also the nightlife and underworld of Brussels, permeated his work at ever deeper levels and ultimately shaped his life—always driven by the questions: Where do I come from and what can I be?
The retrospective Stéphane Mandelbaum is the third exhibition to take place posthumously.
Information in IS
The exhibition is called Stéphane Mandelbaum.
The name sounds like: Stee-fan Mandelbaum.
A French writer called Pierre Goldmann once said:
I wanted to write my life in life.
This sentence means:
I wanted to live my life
As if it were a book.
This sentence is also true for Stéphane Mandelbaum’s life.
Stéphane Mandelbaum was an artist who liked to draw and paint.
He was born in Belgium.
And lived from 1961 to 1986.
He worked as an artist for only 10 years.
Because he died when he was very young.
During that time Stéphane Mandelbaum created many works of art.
He drew portraits of hundreds of people.
A portrait is a drawing or painting of a person.
Stéphane Mandelbaum drew many different portraits.
For example:
— Arthur Rimbaud.
His name sounds like: Arthur Rim-bow.
He was a French poet.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini.
He was an Italian writer and actor.
He also made films.
— Francis Bacon.
He was a British painter.
— Pierre Goldman.
He was a French writer and political campaigner.
— Szulim Mandelbaum.
His name sounds like: Sue-limb Mandelbaum.
He was Stéphane Mandelbaum’s grandfather.
— Arié Mandelbaum.
His name sounds like: Aah-re-er Mandelbaum.
He was Stéphane Mandelbaum’s father.
— Joseph Goebbels.
His name sounds like: Yo-seph Gir-balls.
He was a German politician and mass murderer at the time of National Socialism in Germany.
That was from 1933 to 1945.
— Ernst Röhm.
His name sounds like: Air-nst Rer-m.
He was a German politician and criminal at the time of National Socialism in Germany.
Many of these people fascinated him.
But he found some of them brutal and despised them.
Stéphane Mandelbaum drew some portraits using a pen.
But he also used pencil.
And sometimes even coloured pencils.
For some portraits he used oil paints.
Some of his portraits are very small.
Some of his portraits show body parts that are larger than life-size.
In many portraits he used cuttings from newspapers.
Sometimes he wrote on the portraits in different languages.
For example in:
— French.
— Italian.
— German.
— Yiddish.
Many Jewish people still speak Yiddish today.
The Yiddish language is almost 1000 years old.
Stéphane Mandelbaum used cuttings from newspapers and text
to tell us more about the people in his portraits.
At the same time he was also thinking deeply about different subjects.
For example:
— His Jewish family.
— The history of Belgium.
Mostly about the time when Belgium ruled over parts of Africa.
— Night life in Brussels.
— Crime in Brussels.
These are important subjects in all of Stéphane Mandelbaum’s works of art.
These subjects influenced his life.
This is the 3rd exhibition on Stéphane Mandelbaum’s life since he died in 1986.