Dante Elsner

Early life and the war

Dante Elsner was born in Kraków, Poland, on 15 October 1920 and died in London, at the age of 76 on the 27th of September 1997. His life as an artist cannot be separated from the turmoil of the 20th century in central Europe; in many ways it represents a series of personal responses, as a Jew and a man of intense spiritual convictions, to the upheavals of his time.

In 1942, at the age of 22, he survived the rounding up of Polish Jews that led to the deaths of his parents and his brother. At that point, his life was governed by numerous attempts to hide from the Nazis. For much of the time he lived alone in the forests of Eastern Poland, eating snails, roots and wild berries, with occasional visits to the local Jewish ghetto before its liquidation; at other times, he was with partisans in the Polish resistance, but did not stay long as there was significant danger of such groups turning anti-Semitic and of betrayal. During his time in hiding, he developed a sharp sensory awareness of his surroundings and of the skills and self-sufficiency that he would need to remain alive, but also a deep personal belief in the value of life and in the essential spiritual potential of human beings.

Development as an artist

In 1944, at the liberation of Poland by the Soviet Army, he entered art school in Kraków – a chaotic but invigorating moment when the young were desperately committed to making up for the lost years of their early youth during the war. However, he felt deeply limited by the totalitarian compulsions of the new communist government in Poland. In 1948, as a promising artist, he was allowed by the Communist government to go to Paris to further his art education.

On arrival in France, he immediately asked for political asylum. He lived in poverty in the very difficult conditions of post-war Paris in a room without running water at the top of a building on the Boulevard St Michel, and pursued the life of the artist in the garret. Though with very limited means, often painting on his own vests, he immersed himself avidly in the European artistic tradition - finding meaning in his daily scrutiny of great works at the major Parisian museums.

In moments of despair, including an occasion where the losses he suffered in the war turned him to thoughts of suicide, he found healing in the experience of art. In his view, being the recipient of the beauty, complexity and rich feelings evoked by a masterpiece, like Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, gave access to impressions of a freer mode of living in which higher qualities of the human mind could arise. Art became his inspiration for living, and his anchor to a hopeful and compassionate view of the world, which in spite of all its many evils, could be redeemed.

In 1958, after marrying Renee Wistreich, another survivor of the Holocaust originally born in Kraków but then resident in England, he moved to London. His negative reaction to the materialism of post-war Western Europe, no less than his rejection of totalitarian persecution (whether Nazi or Communist) enhanced the commitment to a personal spirituality – which would be fundamental for his art.

Mysticism and making

In particular, he was influenced by the teachings of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff (which he came across in Paris in the early 50’s), aspects of Sufism (through the works of French spiritual writers like René Guenon), esoteric Christianity and mystical Judaism, the Indian teacher Krishnamurti and Buddhism (most especially Japanese Zen).  From these he developed a distinctive and personal practice involving meditation that preceded his daily move either to painting or to making pottery. He saw his art as a practice of active meditation, in which he became the recipient or vessel for finer mental and bodily states that enabled the creation of forms in art. In this way, he saw his art as not personal or ego driven, but as the workings of an attunement to holistic mental states free from negativity and hatred.

Dante’s tools

Dante drew and painted on Japanese mulberry paper on which any brush stroke made by the artist was an instantaneous commitment that could not be covered up.  He saw this as a direct confrontation with his own honesty and skill as an artist, because it required total mastery over his tools: no line could be undone as the paper absorbed it immediately and completely. Ultimately, Dante rejected oil painting because he saw it as a form that allowed the painter to ‘lie’ by disguising and repainting any error or mistake. 

From the late-60s onwards, Dante began experimenting with pottery. This was a huge financial investment, as it required the purchase of a kiln, as well as the clay itself and materials to make glazes. Dante used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese method of divination, to determine whether he should embark on such an expensive enterprise.

Having begun with stoneware, Dante was decisively inspired by the Raku technique that had been developed to make the tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony. As with the spontaneity of painting in ink on absorbent paper, Raku allows the artist to fire a pot individually and to choose when to withdraw it from the kiln, thereby controlling the chemical reactions that affect the glaze.

Dante never used the same form twice and rarely the same home-made glaze. He believed that a great pot was a perfect embodiment of particularly experience in life, and in the range of his pottery he sought to evoke an infinite variety of human experiences - joy, sadness, summer, spring, winter, autumn.

In both his painting and his pottery, he prized above all the qualities of spontaneity and honesty in relation to form, line and colour.

Dante’s inspiration

Although his painting style and technique was quite unusual by the standards of French and British artists in the second half of the 20th century, he was committed to a kind of existential conceptualism that governed the themes of many of the works he made.  In pottery, he was inspired by the Japanese turn of British ceramics in the wake of Bernard Leach’s (1887-1979) friendship with Shoji Hamada (1894-1978), but he also pursued a more modernist European line – especially in his experimentation with forms – that might be more closely related to the work of such emigré potters as Lucy Rie (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981). In painting, he adopted the technique and to some extent the styles of Japanese ink and brush painting; but he used these in pursuit of his own conceptual themes –whether spiritual, social commentary or inspired by literature.

More information about the works Dante loved and studied closely when visiting art galleries and museums (from the Rose Windows of Notre Dame to the ancient Egyptian statue of Nenkhefta in the British Museum and coptic tapestries of the Middle Ages) can be found in the book, In the Spirit of Pilgrimage (2014), based on a series of conversations between Dante and his son and art historian, Jas Elsner.

To read Jas Elsner’s memoir of his father, go to: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTsA1zm8poyegwDLjem9Mgcr_B4j7BoNFnU3qsfxJQVgBdGip-a3sk67gKX99YULg/pub