Johnny Friedlaender

Johnny Friedlaender (Pless, Prussian Silesia, 1912 – Paris, 1992) was a German-born artist who became a French citizen, and whose works were shown in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan and the United States. He worked in oils and watercolours, but his preferred medium was aquatint etching, a technically demanding process in which he became a pioneer. He also taught younger artists from his Paris studio.

Early years in Germany and Czechoslovakia. The son of a pharmacist, he studied at the Breslau academy under Otto Mueller and graduated in 1928. After moving to Dresden, he exhibited there, then spent time in Berlin and two years in a Nazi concentration camp before emigrating to Czechoslovakia, where he settled in Ostrava and held his first solo show of etchings.

Exile in Paris. He fled to Paris in 1937 as a political refugee with his young wife, an actress. Between 1939 and 1943 he was interned in a series of camps and survived. In 1944 he began the etching series Images du Malheur; in 1947 he produced Rêves Cosmiques and joined the Salon de Mai, a post he held until 1969. He acquired French nationality in 1952. His friendship with painter Nicolas de Staël, begun in 1948, marked these years.

International recognition and legacy. He exhibited in Tokyo, Milan, Copenhagen, São Paulo and New York, and in 1957 received the Kakamura Prize in Tokyo. After a Paris retrospective in 1978, he received the Lovis Corinth Prize in 1981. His students, including Arthur Luiz Piza and Arne Haugen Sørensen, carried on the printmaking techniques he had championed.