Gabriel Zendel (ježov 1906 – Paris 1992) “interior With Piano - 1946” Signed Oil/canvas 65x46

Gabriel ZENDEL (Ježov 1906 – Paris 1992) “Interior with piano” Oil on canvas signed lower left Dated 1946 Dimensions: 65 x 46 cm Gabriel Zendel was born on January 6, 1906 in Jezov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ježovy in the Czech Republic) into a family of Polish origin. His father Joseph Zendel was a bookbinder, his mother was Ryfka Jaskerowicz. He was the eldest of three children. His vocation as a designer and painter was evident from childhood and was always encouraged by his parents: “his father was a bookbinder: thanks to him, he found a climate favorable to his aesthetic tastes,” confirms René Barotte. The family moved to Paris where Joseph successfully opened an art bookbinding workshop on Avenue Jean-Jaurès. Gabriel Zendel continued to draw from it the taste for craft work to which he reserved a very significant part in his work: in 1920, Nadine Nieszawer specifies, he was his father's assistant while having his easel in the back room. 1925-1929: he entered the Institut d'Esthétique Contemporaine, where Paul Bornet gave him, in all the techniques of the trade, a solid training (notably copper engraving, wood engraving and the printing of proofs) which was interrupted by military service in Morocco in 1926-1927. Subsequently, apart from oil painting, he also practiced drawing, watercolor, gouache, engraving, lithography and even ceramics. In 1939, he married Agathe Schneider, a milliner, at the Paris 8th City Hall. They did not have children. In 1940, arrested by the Germans, he escaped and settled in Cannes where he was welcomed by his friend Baron Raymond de Balazy. He returned to Paris in 1944. In 1948 and 1949, he made a decisive trip to New York where he entered into a relationship with the Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1951, he settled in a studio in the Cité Montmartre-aux-artistes. From then on, his painting, definitively figurative, attracted a large number of collectors. Also in 1951, he began to spend long stays in a small village in Burgundy, with his wife's family. In 1960, he acquired a country house in the village of Clamerey where he would henceforth reside in the spring and summer, devoting all his time to painting in a large studio open to nature. A homebody by nature, and enjoying himself above all in the very warm surroundings of his homes, surrounded by his loved ones. On September 29, 1992, Gabriel Zendel died suddenly in Paris. Zendel's work went through three phases: A classical period but surrounded by a strange atmosphere, in the 1930s; A post-cubist period but also influenced by Fauvism, from the 1940s to the mid-1950s; The so-called Clamerey period, by far the longest, representing the blossoming of his research and including in particular quite exceptional work on the subject, from the mid-1950s to the end of his days