Savu Petra Dan (Romanian / Israeli, 1903-1986) - Woman and Clown, Oil on Canvas, 1964.
Signed and dated.
61x50cm.


Savu Petra Dan - a painter who survived the Holocaust in Bergen-Belsen.
The Jew Savu Petra Dan was born in 1903 in Bucharest, Romania.
From 1926 to 1933 he studied at the Art College of Bucharest. Some years later he was engaged by King Carol II of Romania as his court painter and was awarded with the prize of state of the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs of Romania. In 1961 he emigrated to Israel and in 1974 he moved to Germany where he died in 1986 (Frankfurt am Main).
Savu Petra Dan preferred oil on canvas paintings which were expressive in his early years, later they became more abstract and even surrealist. He also created portraits and compositions of landscapes but many of his works testify to deep sufferings and feelings, to the human struggle of life and death.
Due to his own very traumatic experiences during the Second World War in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen Savu Petra Dan created a series of impressionistic paintings titled - behind the barbed wire, please, don’t crucify me anymore, survivors of the concentration camp, mass grave and dictator.
These large scale oil-on-canvas paintings are his very personal witnesses of the Holocaust.
Source: www.savupetradan.com