Donation Max Wechsler

From 20 November 2025 to 28 June 2026, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents a display devoted to the artist Max Wechsler (1925–2020), following a recent donation to the museum. Nine works from the donation will be shown in the permanent collections, with free admission, tracing nearly sixty years of artistic practice and formal exploration. The display marks an important milestone in the relationship between the artist and the museum, which began in 1968.

Max Wechsler’s first solo exhibition was held in the ARC department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in November 1968, at the initiative of Pierre Gaudibert. It featured his fantastical compositions with their Surrealist echoes.

Nearly sixty years later, the donation now received by the museum—initiated during the artist’s lifetime and finalised with his wife, Christine Fleurent—cements this longstanding dialogue. The diversity of the donated works reflects the breaks, returns and transformations that marked Max Wechsler’s career, from imaginative figuration to conceptual abstraction.

Born in Berlin, Wechsler was sent to Paris in 1939 to escape Nazism, before being permanently separated from his family, who perished at Auschwitz. After the war, he became an illustrator and graphic designer for the newspaper Vaillant, work he continued alongside his artistic practice until the early 1990s. His early paintings, influenced by Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet, earned him critical recognition. He then stopped painting between 1972 and 1977, before returning fully to art in a new form.

From the late 1970s, he turned towards abstraction, then abandoned colour and the paintbrush altogether in 1984. The typographic letter became his material, and black-and-white photocopies, scissors and glue his new tools.
In these fragmented works, writing appears as a trace, a remnant, a sign of a history that cannot be told. Through enlargement, distortion, erasure and the deconstruction of characters, the letter becomes a presence at once spectral and enduring.

Wechsler writes: “The letter, constantly transformed and dismantled, resists, proving indestructible. […] I like to bring together in this way that which will remain forever unknown and that which, nevertheless, will remain indelible.”