Gabriel Zendel, born January 6, 1906 in Jezov (Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died September 29, 1992 in Paris 10th, is a French painter and lithographer. He is one of the representatives of the School of Paris.
Gabriel Zendel was born on January 6, 1906 in Jezov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ježovy in the Czech Republic) into a family of Polish origin. His father Joseph Zendel was a bookbinder, his mother was Ryfka Jaskerowicz. He was the eldest of three children. His two sisters were named Josée and Jenny. His vocation as a designer and painter was evident from childhood and was always encouraged by his parents: "his father was a bookbinder: thanks to him he found a climate favorable to his aesthetic tastes" confirms René Barotte. The family moved to Paris where Joseph successfully opened an art bookbinding workshop on Avenue Jean-Jaurès. Gabriel Zendel continued to draw from it the taste for craftsmanship to which he reserved a very significant part in his work: in 1920, Nadine Nieszawer specifies, he was his father's assistant while having his easel in the back room.
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From 1925 to 1929, he entered the Institute of Contemporary Aesthetics, where Paul Bornet gave him solid training in all the techniques of the trade (notably copper engraving, wood engraving and proof printing) which was interrupted by military service in Morocco in 1926-1927. Subsequently, apart from oil painting, he also practiced drawing, watercolour, gouache, engraving, lithography and even ceramics.
In 1940, arrested by the Germans, he escaped, crossed the demarcation line and settled in Cannes where he was welcomed by his friend Baron Raymond de Balazy and his wife Suzanne. He returned to Paris in 1944. From 1945, he began to spend his summers with his wife's family whose mother lent him a small house on her property in Ris-Orangis.
On December 28, 1939, he married Agathe Schneider, a milliner, at the Paris 8th City Hall. They had no children.
In 1948 and 1949, he made a decisive trip to New York where he entered into a relationship with the Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1951, he moved into a large studio in the Cité Montmartre-aux-artistes, at 189 rue Ordener, where he would reside until the end. From then on, his painting, definitively figurative, attracted a certain number of collectors to whom he would sell his paintings directly, even if they could later also find them in galleries.
Also in 1951, he began to spend long periods in a small village in Burgundy, with his wife's family. In 1959, he made a long stay in Venice, in one of the hotels on the Riva dei Schiavoni, in the company of his wife. In 1960, he acquired a beautiful country house in the village of Clamerey, in Burgundy, where he would henceforth reside in the spring and summer, devoting all his time to painting in a large studio open to nature. A homebody by nature, and enjoying above all the very warm surroundings of his homes, he gave up travelling in 1966, and then led a pleasant life surrounded by his loved ones. In particular, he had long conversations with his nephew, Doctor Claude Franceschi.
In 1988, as he approached old age, he sold his house in Clamerey and spent the summer and holidays in Burgundy, with the family of his wife's sister, Wilhelmine, wife of the film producer Henri Bérard, a great admirer of his work.
On September 29, 1992, Gabriel Zendel died suddenly in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. His wife Agathe died in 2002, his two sisters in 1995 and 2003, also without children.
