Born in Lithuania in 1927, Cécile Reims passed away in 2020 in France.
She lived and worked in La Châtre (Indre).
--
Born October 19th, 1927, under the name Tsila Remz, Cécile Reims grew up in Lithuania in a traditional Jewish family.
After arriving in Paris in 1933, she grew up primarily alone, as her family members were victims of the Vel d’Hiv roundups. A student of Joseph Hecht, she discovered engraving and burin at 17 years old, which she practiced diligently, making it a true mode of liberating expression.
The disaster of the war determined a lot for her: she was forced to find meaning in life, which had become a privilege. Living clandestinely, she joined the Jewish Combat Organization in 1943 in order to reach Palestine. A severe case of tuberculosis forced her to return to France for treatment. This also marked her return to engraving, which she practiced from then on with the same high standards as her mentor.
Her meeting with Fred Deux in 1951 opened a new horizon: transcending reality. Art became, in effect, the foundation of their togetherness. They quickly left Paris for the mountains to protect their health.
The figurative interpretations and highly realistic subjects of her early work gave way to a body of work reflecting an anthropomorphic worldview, where the human condition merges with that of animals in a mineral and melancholic natural world. The necessity of dealing with everyday life pushed Cécile Reims to temporarily abandon engraving in favor of hand weaving and writing, mainly poetry.
In 1966, she happened to meet Georges Visat, the publisher of Hans Bellmer and the surrealists. Visat was looking for a burin engraver who could engrave his drawings without losing their subtlety and fragility. Reims embarked on interpretive engraving and, between 1967 and 1975, engraved nearly 250 drawings using burin and drypoint. This was an opportunity for her to return to engraving and get to discover herself.
After the death of Hans Bellmer in 1975, Cécile Reims returned to her own engraving work, alternating between engraved interpretations of the works of her husband, Fred Deux, Léonor Fini, and other artists, then exclusively Fred Deux. Their prints are generally published in books and collections.
In 1985, Reims and Deux moved to La Châtre, in Indre, where they stayed until the passing of Fred Deux in 2015. Cécile Reims stayed there until her passing, in July of 2020.
« L'œuvre de Fred Deux, quand j'y suis entrée, et pas seulement par le regard, m'a fait aller plus loin, plus profondément dans cette réalité irréelle que je pressentais et qui, à présent, à la fois double et infirme ce que mes yeux perçoivent. »
The works of Cécile Reims are on view at the Musée de l'Hospice Saint-Roch d'Issoudun, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, at the Musée Jenisch de Vevey (Switzerland), as well as at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaïsme de Paris.