Artist Information:
Maxwell Smart
Montreal,
Canada
Member Since: Nov 2006
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Artist Statement:
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1930
to a Czech mother and Polish
father, Maxwell Smart
immigrated to Poland as an
infant. There, his family
joined the 5,000 other Jews of
Buczacz (population 20,000)
who prospered in commerce and
in the manufacture of clothing
and hats. Art classes were the
...
Further Information
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Commissions:
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Maxwell Smart's Artist Portfolio
Welcome to Maxwell Smart's Portfolio.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1930 to a Czech mother and Polish father, Maxwell Smart immigrated to Poland as an infant. There, his family joined the 5,000 other Jews of Buczacz (population 20,000) who prospered in commerce and in the manufacture of clothing and hats. Art classes were the delight of his early years at school, cut cruelly short when the Russians and Germans jousted for control of the city during the Second World War. The Germans eventually held sway and evacuated everyone from the war zone except the Jews. Those unfortunates were loaded onto trucks and transported either to the death camps or to the forest outside town where they were systematically slaughtered and dumped in mass graves.
Maxwell saw his father taken away to be shot; he saved himself from the camp transport that swallowed his mother and sister and survived the war on the property of a sympathetic farmer who defied hostile neighbours. The sharp needles of the fir tree boughs that he used to cover his dugout hole during SS sweeps, live on in the imagery of his paintings. So do the emotions he experienced as an 11-year-old boy, looking skyward from his ... |
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