José Fosty Clandestine drawings from the Buchenwald concentration camp

Born in Dalhem in 1919, José Fosty was destined for an artistic career but, at the age of 19, he enlisted. Wounded, he was evacuated to Paris; then, at the time of the Belgian capitulation, he returned to Brussels and joined the information and actions service of the resistance known as "Braverie". He distributed clandestine newspapers. Denounced, he was taken to the Gestapo headquarters in October 1942, then the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he survived for three years, from 1942 to 1945. The cultural resistance was organised around painters, musicians and poets and he met the members of the French Communist Party. Once the war ended, he rubbed shoulders with Paris Cocteau and Léger. He returned to Visé and started to manufacture wooden toys, before becoming a night sorter at the Régie des Postes. He continued to produce his surrealist painting works. At the end of the nineties, José Fosty donated 151 line drawings to the Cabinet des Estampes. These were sketched in pencil on whatever media he could find. At Buchenwald, the artist had secretly sketched hundreds of prisoners reading, sleeping, writing, resting or at work; he had captured some places too, like the laundry, the refectory, the crematorium and the watchtower. His camp mates inspired some of his portraits: the cartoonist René Salme, the poet André Verdet and the violinist Maurice Hewitt. Only the sketches that were produced after September 1944 were preserved; some 300 others were destroyed by bombing. RR