| Ludovic Lucien Madrassi was born in Paris in 1881. Lucien Madrassi was the son of the Italian sculptor Luca Madrassi (1848-1919). A pupil of Raphäel Colin, Paul Leroy, Gabriel Ferrier, Gervais and Gérôme, he became a member of the Salon des Artistes Français in 1906. Lucien Madrassi is remembered primarily as an Orientalist, having travelled and worked in both North and sub-Saharan Africa; his first trip to Algeria and Tunisia was made in 1912, and after he won the Prix d'Afrique in 1920 he travelled through Senegal, making a series of portraits that were exhibited at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris the following year. Lucien Madrassi illustrated two important books, both by the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud. His 51 drypoints for La Randonnée de Samba Diouf (1927) revisited his African motifs, but the other title, Un Royaume de Dieu (1925), was quite different. Lucien Madrassi made 86 etchings for this major work. Madrassi went to Krakow in 1924 specially to research these intimately-observed etchings, which depict the lives of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian Jews in the Pale of Settlement. These etchings form a precious record of the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe; Madrassi could not have imagined that he was recording a way of life soon to be brutally extinguished. We have not been able to ascertain whether Lucien Madrassi was himself of Jewish origin, though the existence of mss material by him in the Henry Hurwitz/Menorah Association Collection in the American Jewish Archives, dating from 1946, suggests that he most probably was. In 1928, shortly after making his remarkable etchings for Un Royaume de Dieu, Lucien Madrassi won the Prix Puvis de Chavannes (which was founded in 1926, and is awarded by the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts). He was also appointed a Peintre Officiel de la Marine in 1930. Madrassi also wrote on art in the revues Rolet and Le Journal. There is a Musée Lucien Madrassi in Saint-Saturnin (Puy-de-Dôme). Lucien Madrassi died in 1956. |
