Michel Nedjar

Michel Nedjar, born near Paris in the Val-d’Oise on October 12th, 1947. He has three brothers and three sisters. His father is an Algerian Jew, settled in Paris in 1921, where he works as a tailor. His mother, also a Jew of Polish decent, fled the Pogroms and came to France with his grand-mother in 1923. In 1947, the Nedjar family are emerging from the ‘black period’ during the war - the grand-mother and her daughter were hidden on a farm in Brittany, but the majority of his father’s family members and the rest of his mother’s family were victims of the Nazi oppression.
The family is rather withdrawn and tends not to show their Jewish ascendancy. Michel will very soon have the feeling of living in an environment which distinguishes itself from the others. At school, even if he is dressed in the best overalls, a constraint of his father’s trade, he is apprehensive and poorly integrated. The only occasions he gets praised is after his drawing classes. At home, he does not get on very well with his father and brothers and finds himself turned towards the female members of his family. He had the use of a sewing-machine and at a very young age makes up clothing for his sisters’ dolls. It was around 1960 that Nedjar truly became conscious of the Holocaust, having seen a film on the television. He is deeply shocked and looks for books which speak about the camps as if to assure himself that all this is true. At the age of 14, he leaves school and vaguely dreams of becoming an artist, but he also learns the trade of tailoring. He works in several ready-made clothing workshops and seriously begins to contemplate a career as a fashion designer. But he is sent to do his military service to which he does not adapt whatsoever. He is demobilised from the army and after several months of fashion school he comes down with Tuberculosis and spends some time in a sanatorium. The confrontation with his own mortality profoundly marks him and, when he leaves the sanatorium in 1969, cured, it now seems to him that fashion is something very trivial and that he must move on to something else.
The money earned selling clothes at the flea-market in his grand-mother’s store and his sickness benefit money allow him to commence a period of wandering which includes six extensive trips which lead him, between 1970 and 1975, to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and which finally led him to India and Nepal. He finished this series of travels with a long trip to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The cultures which he is confronted with are of more interest to him than our own. Dolls there have a magical function. The personage represented losing his toy status which becomes a talisman or a fetish object. There, a greater emphasis is laid on the confrontation with death, with flamboyant funeral ceremonies. He confesses : ‘In Mexico, the mummies, it was so fascinating that it was unbearable. It was not death. They had their costumes, their dress clinging to the skin’. Back in Paris, Nedjar rents a small room. It is here that he begins to create his first dolls with all sorts of rags up until 1980, the year he diligently began to draw on papers which accidentally came his way, a passion to which he still continues to assiduously devote himself.
Translated from the French language © Geneviève Roulin 2000 for the catalogue : Collection P. Éternod et J.-D. Mermod, Lausanne - Malmö Konstmuseum and Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Sweden.