Emile Lahner

Emile Lahner (1893-1980) was a Hungarian-born painter who moved to Paris in 1924 and became part of the School of Paris, the group of international artists working in the city between 1900 and 1940. He was born in a village in Carpathian Ruthenia, then in the Kingdom of Hungary and now in Ukraine. Orphaned as a child, he first trained as an engineer, a career he abandoned in 1921 to study at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest under János Vaszary.

After the upheaval that followed the First World War, he settled in Paris, where he studied Delacroix, Van Gogh and Monet and worked with Antoine Bourdelle. During the war he took refuge in the Dordogne, whose famous cave paintings inspired a series of primitivist works. After the liberation of Paris he exhibited more often and, in 1948, designed a chapel in El Affroun, Algeria. The project sparked a lasting interest in stained glass and its refractive qualities, which shaped his later abstract work.

In the early 1960s he received critical recognition with an exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Castel in 1961. His style blends influences from Art Nouveau, Constructivism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Primitivism. He continued to exhibit until his death in 1980.