ArtistFrench
Theo Tobiasse
4 active items
Born Tobias Eidesas on April 26, 1927, in Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine, Tobiasse came from a Lithuanian Jewish family that had settled there only two years before his birth. In 1931 the family relocated to Paris, where his father found work as a typographer at a Russian press. Paris became the city that shaped him, though the years under German Occupation, marked by the yellow star and the disappearance of neighbors, would leave a permanent mark on everything he made.
He did not begin painting seriously until he was in his thirties, having spent his earlier career designing tapestries, window displays, and stage sets, including work for Hermès. His debut at a painters' fair in southwest France in 1960 was followed quickly by a prize for young Mediterranean painting and the Dorothy-Gould Prize in 1961. That year, he left commercial design entirely.
From 1964 onward, Tobiasse developed an iconography drawn directly from personal and collective memory: the wanderings of his family across borders, the Shoah, and the recurring figure of the train, no longer a vehicle of flight and terror but, in later canvases, a transport toward arrival and new beginning. Biblical texts, especially the Song of Songs, fed his imagery alongside the cities that anchored his emotional life: Paris, Jerusalem, then New York and Venice after the 1980s. The candelabra, the bride, the floating lovers, the Hebrew letter used as visual element, these became a visual vocabulary that critics frequently placed in dialogue with Marc Chagall, though Tobiasse's palette was harder and his handling of color more confrontational. He worked in oils and gouache before turning to acrylic, and developed a technique for multilayer lithographs of up to twenty colors in collaboration with the printer Pierre Chave in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he established his main studio in 1976. He also produced carborundum engravings and mixed-media works combining acrylic, oil pastel, and collage.
Major print series include Songs of Songs (1975), Let My People Go (1981), and Parfum d'Odalisque (1982). His large oil on canvas Que tes tentes sont belles, ô Jacob (1982) is among the most reproduced of his monumental works. Exhibitions were held across Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, London, New York, Los Angeles, Zurich, Lausanne, and Kyiv. He died on November 3, 2012, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
On the Nordic auction market, Tobiasse appears primarily as a printmaker. The 83 items recorded on Auctionet include prints and works on paper appearing at SAV Magasin 5, Crafoord, and Bukowskis. Prices in the Swedish market have been modest, with a top recorded sale of around 2,800 SEK, broadly consistent with the lower end of his global auction range, where small lithographs and unsigned prints trade in the few hundred to low-thousand dollar bracket. Signed, numbered originals in good condition continue to attract collectors internationally, and his work remains actively traded through major auction platforms.