This website and blog are being launched today to mark what is presumed to be the 75th anniversary of École de Paris sculptor, Moissey Kogan’s death at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland on 13 February 1943.
Kogan was one of 998 prisoners (no. 290) on convoi 47 from Drancy transit camp. It left the station at Drancy-Bobigny, Paris, at 10.15 am on 11 February, and arrived two days later at Auschwitz. Given Kogan’s age – he was 63 – he is likely to have been sent immediately to the gas chambers.
This project has been a long time in the making. It seems appropriate that it should be now that I make more easily available the years of research I have undertaken on Kogan’s life and oeuvre.
I hope that this unjustly neglected artist will receive greater recognition than he has to date. He enjoyed high esteem as an artist amongst his avant-garde peers, dealers and collectors in France, Germany and the Netherlands during his lifetime. However, no country has taken him under its wing since his murder at Auschwitz. There have been sporadic small exhibitions, but this great omission shamefully follows his persecution as a Jew and as an avant-garde artist, and only compounds the partial destruction and distortion of his oeuvre from 1933 and after his death. His papers were destroyed after he died, and many of his works are lost or in unknown private hands. There is no foundation in his name, and no plaque or Stolperstein yet honours his existence. I have submitted a page of testimony to Yad Vashem, but I plan to do more.
I hope you find these pages interesting.
May Kogan’s soul rest in peace. May his memory be a blessing.