Anna Garcin-Mayade, a painter of deportation to discover at the Michelet museum

The life of Anna Garcin-Mayade (1897-1981) suddenly changed on October 31, 1941. She was then a drawing teacher in Épinal, in a girls’ college. On the airwaves, Charles De Gaulle asked the “French people to remain still for five minutes”. In his class, his students, except three of them, had wanted to respect these five minutes of passive resistance. Anna had agreed.

“All her life, Anna Garcin-Mayade thought she had been denounced by one of her students. In reality, it was the director of the establishment, who had informed the prefect of Vosges,” explains Thierry Pradel, director of the Michelet museum.

The artist, standing on the right, signed his deportation number: 39.119

Anna was an artist, she was a communist, she lived alone. His descent into hell will really begin in November at the Epinal remand center, then in the prisons of Troyes and Chalon-sur-Marne. On May 13, 1944, she was sent to Germany, heading to the Ravensbrück camp. She will remain there until the end of the war. “During the deportation, she drew the horror of the camps. But at the time of liberation, the Swedes burned his drawings for hygiene reasons. We had to fight against the spread of typhus,” says Thierry Pradel.

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Paintings as testimonies

For more than a year, the Michelet museum attempted to bring together all the traces left by the painter during her life, shared between Pongibaud (Puy-de-Dôme), where she was born, and Brive where she lived after the war.

“After the war, she gave drawing lessons again. On an artistic level, she made it her duty to tell the reality of the camps. She wanted to convey the unspeakable through painting,” analyzes Lucie Boyer, deputy director of the Michelet museum.

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In a ghostly style, Anna Garcin-Mayade depicts the bodies undergoing deportation, the hard work under the gaze of the soldiers. Her paintings are like dreams, with faces, sometimes very detailed, sometimes veiled, like a memory that is fading, or like the reality of a prisoner who has lost her identity, her humanity. “In addition to the moral duty that she made to bear witness, there is also a form of therapy, of an outlet in her painting” underlines Lucie Boyer.Texts accompanied some of his drawings. PV photo.

Her former students testify

But the life of Anna, who in the first part of her life rubbed shoulders with Suzanne Valadon and August Renoir in Monmartre, cannot be summed up by her testimony of deportation. The exhibition allows you to discover the artist’s environment and his luminous oil paintings. Here colorful landscapes of Pongibaud. There, a painting representing washerwomen at work near a river, which strangely echo the deportees of Ravensbrück.

As a snub to her personal story, Anna Garcin, who believed all her life that she had been denounced by a few students in 1941, is also told in this exhibition by her post-war students who were marked by His lessons. At the Michelet museum, the fight against oblivion is not only pictorial, it is also audible.

Pierre Vignaud