Eugène Fidler (1910-1990): "The fishermen"; Oil on canvas signed lower right; dim: 46 x 55 cm. Eugène Fidler, born in Bălți (current Moldavia) on January 10, 1910, and died in Roussillon (Vaucluse) on September 30, 1990, is a French painter and ceramist. Eugène Fidler is one of the Vallauris ceramists and is also known as a collagist and watercolor painter. His works have been acquired by collectors around the world and he has exhibited in France and abroad.Eugène Fidler was born in 1910 in Bălti, then a Russian city of Bessarabia. His sister, Aline, who would become a pianist, was born in Warsaw in 1917. The following year, his family moved to France. He then followed primary and secondary studies in Switzerland, Germany and at the Lycée Masséna in Nice, until 1928. He was naturalized French in June 1929. From 1930 to 1937, he pursued artistic studies at the École nationale supérieure des fine arts in Paris, then at the Académie Julian. In 1940, he married his first wife Edith Giler, who fled Nazi Germany with her family and settled in Mougins, where he learned and worked in ceramics with her. In 1943, he fled the coast when the German occupiers arrived to take refuge in Roussillon, in Provence. He then paints and works ceramics with his wife Edith. They produce buttons, necklaces and earrings. He exhibited under the false name of Fournier to escape anti-Jewish laws. There he met Samuel Beckett and the painter Henri Hayden, both also refugees. When Provence was liberated in 1944, he returned to Mougins. Edith and he produce utilitarian ceramic objects (ashtrays, vases, dishes, candlesticks…). In 1947, their eldest daughter, Catherine (known as the author of Cathie Fidler) was born. But three years later, he divorced and left to work in Paris. In 1952 Eugène moved to Vallauris where he exhibited regularly, notably at the Nerolium. There he met the one who became his second wife in 1956: Edith Ramos Da Costa, originally from an island in the Açôres, (Terceira), Edith had come to France from Portugal to learn ceramics in a workshop in Vallauris (that of René Maurel ) for a year, their daughter Nathalie was born in 1956 in Cannes. Edith will then work alongside her husband only after their installation in their house in Roussillon-en Provence in 1969. They will, always together, make frequent trips mainly to Spain, the Balearics, as well as Portugal and the Azores. Eugène Fidler painted and worked ceramics in his studio in Roussillon-en-Provence until his death in 1990. In painting, Eugène Fidler worked in many techniques including oil, watercolor, engraving, linocut, the graphite pencil, and even the felt tip, but it is that of collage that he has used the most. Independent of fashions and trends, he has developed his own artistic style, drawing inspiration from his mythology and his personal universe, as well as the discoveries caused by his travels. Source ART-ANGELUX