Eliezer Alcheh, one hundred years later
The celebration of painter’s birth centenary gives us an occasion to re-examine the facts, events and structures that guises his works over the years, and to outline both his artistic legacy ands the image of his artistic presence. The image of Eliezer Alcheh largely overlaps with the image of the twentieth century-both the painter and the century he lives in were dynamic, marked by seismic changes and great tragedies, full of ordeals but also of significant achievements.
Eliezer Alcheh was born in 1908 to the family of Natan Alcheh and Duda Pincas. His maternal family had already produded a painter – Julius Pincas, who studied at the art schools and academies of Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Paris, and displayed his works at the Salon d´Automme under the name Jules Pascin, Eliezer Alcheh, also makes the choice to study abroad. Between 1928 and 1933 he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied painting under Prof. Karl Kaspar and graphic art under Prof. Adolf Schinnerer. Documentary photos from that time show him in front of an easel in the studio or in the company of fellow student from different parts of the world. A significant number of Bulgarian artists from the period received their education at the Munich Art Academy. The Academy must have allowed great freedom of thought and individual choice of expression, as Alcheh’s aesthetic outlook differed from that of his compatriots. The painter’s closest friend in Munich was Kiril Tsonev. This remarkable painter, who would eventually become one of the outstanding name in Bulgarian art, adviser his younger colleague in his choice of teachers, helping him to adjust to the foreign environment and to feel the unique spirit the Academy from the very beginning. As Bronka Gyurova writes in her memoirs of her husband, Alcheh kept his respect and love for Kiril Tsonev throughout his life.
Munich in the first decades of the twentieth century was not only a universally recognized centre of the arts but also the centre of the avant-garde. Some of the ideas born in this city would go to dominate the galleries and museums of Europe and the USA. This is where Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc prepared and published in 1911 the most comprehensive review of avant-garde are at the time – the book Der Blaue Reiter, followed by an exhibition of a group of same name. it continued the first
