The strength of his drawings and paintings is intimately linked to his life. We can read Mandelbaum’s iconoclastic work as the diary of an artist, who, on the one hand, creates himself as a romantic character, and on the other hand follows a quest for identity driven by his Jewish heritage.
“Painter and bandit” headlined Le Monde, “So great, so tragic” let us title, Several books have been dedicated to him including that of Gilles Sebhan in 2014, Mandelbaum or the dream of Auschwitz (New Impressions).
The portrait published today by CFC Editions by the writer Véronique Sels, born in 1958 and already author of five books, allows us to rediscover the strengths and ambiguities of Stéphane Mandelbaum.
The Stéphane Mandelbaum exhibition at the Jewish Museum
The book is based on the biographical elements of the artist and the testimony of those close to him. She chose to make it a fictional autobiography (where everything is true), punctuated throughout by the beginnings of sentences in the style of Pérec “I am. I was born. I am Pasolini…”. An incantation that captures Mandelbaum’s compulsive search for his identity.
A designer and painter, he imagined his first funeral at the age of 4 and produced his first large-format self-portrait at the age of 15, showing himself hanging from a meat hook, with a splash of blood in place of his genitals. A painting which foreshadowed his romantic and dramatic life.
Brilliant designer
He was the son of the painter Arié Mandelbaum who was a long-time professor at the Uccle School of Arts before becoming its director in 1979 until 2004. Arié Mandelbaum also had a superb exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. In Véronique Sels’ book, this artist father appears with great empathy towards his son.
Stéphane Mandelbaum was therefore already at 15 years old, a gifted artist, fascinating and himself fascinated by the black suns which aspired to the adolescent: Pierre Goldman the writer who slipped into banditry, Pasolini murdered on the beach of Ostia, Francis Bacon, Rimbaud, Oshima and The Empire of the Senses. But also the repulsive figures of Goebbels and Rhöm.
Severely dyslexic, he attended the Snark pilot school in La Louvière. The book tells the life of the Mandelbaum tribe (with his brothers Arieh and Alexandre), haunted by Jewish dramas, crossed by the libertarian utopias of 68.
In his most provocative work, Stéphane Mandelbaum mixed pornography and Nazism, as if he were to create through drawing this double transgression evoking what was not then mentioned in Jewish families: deportation as taboo as the sexual taboo. He, the dyslexic, came to learn Yiddish.
It was in drawing and then in ballpoint pen drawing, scribbled like a Basquiat-like gesture, on the edges of art brut, that Mandelbaum’s genius grew.
His obsessions are omnipresent in the margins of his drawings and portraits, where graffiti and writing seem to want to symbolically defile the subject and show the fundamental ambiguity of things.
The biography of Stéphane Mandelbaum by Gilles Sebhan
We still see him when he draws at the end of his life, the customers and prostitutes of bars in Matonge. He already announces in his sentences thrown on paper, his imminent death as he insults the whole world.
All his beautiful portraits of the tutelary figures – his father, his uncle, Bacon, Rimbaud, Pasolini – or his fantasies – Goebbels – are striking, as they go to the essential.
We know how he was overtaken by his incessant need for adrenaline, caught up in a fantasy of banditry and the underworld and lost himself in shady circles which would ultimately destroy him. Participating in trafficking in African art and in two burglaries, he was assassinated on the orders of the person who ordered the theft of a Modigliani painting. Children found his disfigured body near Namur. He was only 25 years old. His inner demons had caught up with his real life. Véronique Sels’ book pays him a superb tribute.
Portrait of Stéphane Mandelbaum, by Véronique Sels, Éditions CFC, 143 pp., €18
