Johnny Friedlaender biography

Johnny Friedlaender is a printmaker and artist of Polish origin naturalized French. He was born in Pless, Poland in 1912. He graduated from the high school in Breslau where he also attended the Academy of Fine Arts studying with Otto Mueller.
In 1930 he moved to Dresden, briefly staying in Berlin and Paris where in 1933 he was arrested as an opponent of the regime but released after a few months due to lack of evidence. In 1935 he fled to Czechoslovakia, settling in Ostrava where he held his first solo engraving exhibition.
In the following years, he made numerous trips between Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and France where in 1939 he was arrested again and, following various vicissitudes, confined in a series of concentration camps from which he was finally liberated in 1944.
He moved permanently to Paris where he opened the engraving studio l’Ermitage, in which he collaborated with numerous young artists such as Arthur Luiz Piza, Brigitte Coudrain, Rene Carcan, Andreas Nottebohm, and Graciela Rodo Boulanger.
Engraving became his main expressive medium to the point that he specialized in the technique of etching aquatint, of which he was a pioneer.
At the same time, he collaborated as an illustrator for several newspapers including Cavalcade and Carrefour. In 1947 he became a member of the Salon de Mai, a position he held until 1969.
In 1948 he met the painter Nicolas de Staël and held an exhibition in Copenhagen at the Galerie Birch. The following year he exhibited at the Galerie La Hune in Paris. In the following years, numerous exhibitions followed in Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Rome, São Paulo in Brazil, and Paris. Johnny Friedlaender died in Paris in 1992.