Theo Tobiasse valuation
Spent two years hidden in a Paris flat as a child, and painted exile and the Old Testament ever after.
Theo Tobiasse was born in Jaffa in 1927 to Lithuanian Jewish parents, moved to Paris at four, and spent two years of the occupation hidden with his family in a single apartment while relatives were deported.
What a work by Theo Tobiasse is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Theo Tobiasse was born in Jaffa in 1927 to Lithuanian Jewish parents, moved to Paris at four, and spent two years of the occupation hidden with his family in a single apartment while relatives were deported. He worked in advertising for over a decade before painting full time, and settled in Nice. The pictures are crowded, high-coloured and deliberately unstable in perspective, built around exile, the Old Testament, women, Vilnius, and the memory of hiding — a personal iconography he repeated and reworked for fifty years. He died in 2012.
A market principally in France, with a substantial following in the United States and Japan built through gallery representation rather than the salerooms. Oils and acrylics on canvas lead. The main practical issue is the volume of editions: Tobiasse published lithographs and carborundum prints in very large numbers over decades, frequently on heavy embossed paper, and owners routinely mistake these for unique works or overestimate their scarcity. He also made mixed-media works on paper and painted objects, and signature is normally on the face.
Drouant, Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the lithographs
Tobiasse took French nationality in 1950 and moved to Nice, where he worked as an advertising designer. His first canvases were shown at the Salon des Peintres du Sud-Est in 1960, and after a prize for young Mediterranean painting in 1961 the dealer Armand Drouant gave him a contract and a show in Paris in 1962. His first solo exhibition in New York followed in 1968.
From 1976 his main studio was at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. There, with the lithographer Pierre Chave, he developed lithographs printed in eighteen to twenty colours for editions such as Song of Songs of 1975, and he also made stained glass, pottery and sculpture. The title, publisher and edition number written on a sheet are what separate a print from a unique work on paper.
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