Donation Max Wechsler

From 20 November 2025 to 28 June 2026, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris will present a display devoted to the artist Max Wechsler (1925–2020), as part of the donation recently made to the museum. Nine works from this donation will be exhibited within the permanent collection, freely accessible, tracing nearly sixty years of creativity and formal inquiry. This display marks an important milestone in the history of the relationship between the artist and the museum, which began in 1968.

Max Wechsler’s first solo exhibition was organised by the ARC department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, under the impetus of Pierre Gaudibert, in November 1968. At that time the artist presented fantastic compositions with surreal resonances.

Nearly sixty years later, the donation now received by the museum — initiated during the artist’s lifetime and finalised with his wife, Christine Fleurent — seals this historical dialogue. The variety of works offered bears witness to the ruptures, reprises and transformations that punctuate Max Wechsler’s career, from imaginative figuration to conceptual abstraction.

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

From the late 1970s he turned to abstraction, then in 1984 he abandoned colour and the brush altogether. The typographic letter became his material, and the black-and-white photocopy, the scissors and the glue his new tools. In these fragmented works, writing appears as a trace, a vestige, the sign of a history that cannot be told. Through enlargements, distortions, erasures and the deconstruction of characters, the letter becomes a presence at once spectral and permanent.

Wechsler writes: “The letter, endlessly transformed and destructured, resists; it proves to be indestructible. [...] I like to associate in this way the part that will be forever ignored with that which, on the other hand, will remain indelible.”