Claude Weisbuch

Biography of Claude Weisbuch

Claude WEISBUCH was born in 1927 in Thionville, in the north of France. As a student, and then as a professor of engraving at the School of Fine Arts in Nancy, he exhibited his paintings as well as his engravings from the 1950s. Because this painter is a tireless engraver, he revives the ancestral art of copperplate, respecting the secular rules but energizing them with his own personal energy.

France, Europe, and then the world (notably Japan) quickly recognized him as one of the major artists of his time. He does not seek to belong to any school, wanting to be himself, free to evolve far from fashions and styles, faithful to his love of drawing, faithful to his favorite subjects. At the heart of Weisbuch's work is music, opera, theater, equestrian grandeur, but above all, there is the STROKE: rapid, dynamic, passionate, the stroke of the sketch that becomes a finished work.

His subjects are alive because Weisbuch refuses to freeze them for fear of losing the essence of their being. Thus, they become inhabited, whether it be the musicians whose bows multiply, or the actors in this theater of gesture that he loves so much because they are life as Weisbuch loves and conceives it: always in motion because it must never stop...

Claude Weisbuch passed away on April 13, 2014, leaving behind an impressive body of work due to its coherence and achievement. Engraver, lithographer, and draftsman, he offered lovers of the stroke an intact passion, always renewed by the greatness of his gestural ambition.

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES