Dante Elsner: ‘Just to survive today’
1920-1997

ALICE BLACK is delighted to announce Dante Elsner (1920-1997): ‘Just to survive today’, the first significant solo exhibition of the late Jewish émigré artist. Mounted in collaboration with the Elsner Estate, it will preview in London on 5 September 2024. The exhibition will explore Elsner’s relationship to paint, ink, ceramics, and existentialism which shore the legacy of this post-war survivalist’s practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by the launch of a new biography (Dante Elsner) and an associated book of poetry (Colours of Mourning), written by the artist’s granddaughter, Maia Elsner.

Dante Elsner was born in Kraków, Poland, in 1920 and died in London, at the age of 76 in 1997, leaving behind more than two thousand pots, paintings, and works on paper. Elsner’s life as an artist cannot be separated from the turmoil of the 20th century in central Europe. The conceptual, spiritual and material tenets of his practice embody the artist’s personal responses to the traumatic upheavals of his time.

In 1942, at the age of 22, Elsner lost his entire immediate family in 3 days, the chance survivor of the rounding up of Polish Jews which led to the deaths of his parents and his only brother at Sobibor & Belzec Nazi death camps. After escaping capture himself, he hid in the forest for two and a half years, subsisting on snails and berries, until emerging in late 1944. Upon the liberation of Poland by the Soviet Army, Elsner entered Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, in Kraków – a chaotic but invigorating environment where his classmates were fervently committed to making sense of their youth lived and lost to the experience of war. However, Elsner quickly felt troubled by the totalitarian compulsions of the new Soviet-led government in Poland and requested asylum in Paris in 1948, which he was granted.

Elsner’s ten years as a refugee in Paris were desperate. He slept in an attic room with no running water and ate in a soup kitchen for the very poor. He tried to make ends meet by drawing individual stills for early animated films. Any extra money was spent on materials and when he ran out, he painted on his shirts. Destitute and near suicidal, Elsner found meaning in his daily scrutiny of great works of art he encountered in the Paris museums, in particular the Louvre. Elsner credited these works as saving his life by reinstating in him a belief in humanity which had been decimated during the war. In 1958 Elsner moved to London and married Renée Wistreich and together they had three children, the eldest of whom died in infancy. The succeeding 40 years were dedicated to Elsner’s own unique form of spiritualism and artmaking, the two of which went hand in hand. Each day, Elsner would wake before 6am and meditate to fine-tune his perception, then immediately begin potting and painting. Each brush stroke and turn of clay was a continuation of the meditation – a manifestation of a lifelong inner search.

Elsner’s practice centred on the belief that the creative act could be a persistent struggle and a form of inquiry and self-assessment, one that he regarded as an index of integrity. This ethos led Elsner to eschew oil paint for ink on Japanese mulberry paper, and graduate from stoneware to Raku, the latter in each case representing a less forgiving material. Just as ink is unable to rewrite its history in the way oils may be deployed, the hues and shocks revealed through Raku glazing are a record of irreplicable spontaneity. Elsner was interested only in strokes and marks which sprang from an inimitable energy of spirit.

This path, away from the ego, resulted in large open spaces in the artist’s works on paper. These charged voids enable the viewer to complete the image with their own projected stories. In the scroll-like compositions, the large space left at the top represents heaven, the smaller space below earth, with the image where both artist and viewer reside the conduit between the two. This interest in channelling continues to materially resonate in Elsner’s preference for the Japanese Zen brush, designed to paint with the whole body, over the European brush, designed to be manoeuvred through the wrist alone.

Just as the spiritual teachings which founded the basis for Elsner’s meditation practice sprang from an East meets West ideology, Elsner was inspired by such potters as Bernard Leach (1887-1999) and Shōji Hamada (1894-1978), and European refugee artists Hans Coper (1920-1989) and Lucie Rie (1902- 1995). The artist’s journey with clay did not begin until his fifties when, after consulting the I Ching, he began his self-taught investigation into ceramics, stoneware, and Raku. Building a kiln himself, imbuing clays and glazes with scavenged soils and ashes, Elsner’s pottery practice brimmed with the same corporeality which defined his painting. Vessels were beaten until new growths and ridges formed, stamped, and slashed to the edge of their limits; Elsner’s experimentation aimed above utility, reaching beyond to retain something of the human condition. Only those pots which embodied a multiplicity of characteristics from each angle survived the artist’s edit.

The attempt to find an antidote to despair was Elsner’s life’s work. Elsner believed it was easy to make critical and satirical work, and the greater demand was to create something life-enhancing which encompassed and transcended aversion and desire. Daily, with tremendous vigour and commitment, he strove to understand what had happened to him and to move beyond what he’d experienced. This effort was a personal journey to enable him finally to face death. In 1992, Elsner had a heart bypass and spent a week recovering watching sunsets from St. Mary’s Hospital near Paddington. He would later donate paintings to St Mary’s which might specifically help the process of healing. He continued to make pots until 1996 when he became too frail. Weakened by illness, Elsner died on 27 September 1997.

Throughout his life, Elsner never lost the mistrust of authorities and institutions that he’d inherited from the war, and so he rarely showed his work. For decades, it has remained packed in boxes and stored away. ‘Just to survive today’ brings together the most comprehensive overview of Elsner’s 50-year output of pots, paintings and works on paper. Destroying over 80% of all he made in his lifetime, what remains represents a singular vision of how to live.