Michel Fingesten Biography
Michel Fingesten (1884 - 1943) was born Michl Finkelstein in 1884 in the village of Buckovice (Buczkowitz), Silesia, in the Habsburg Empire, now part of the Czech Republic, to a Czech-Jewish father and an Italian-Jewish mother, and died in 1943 in Cerisano , in Calabria, after the liberation by the Allies of the camp in which he had been interned since 1941. He was one of the most original and productive graphic designers and ex libris designers of the twentieth century. He studied art in Vienna and Munich, traveled to America, China and Australia, until in 1913 he settled in Berlin where he enjoyed great popularity as an illustrator of books and magazines. Having escaped from Nazi Germany in 1936, he settled in Milan, where he created a circle of patrons who commissioned and avidly collected his works, until he was confined in the fascist internment camp of Civitella del Tronto in 1940, and then transferred in 1941 to that of Ferramonti-Tarsia near Cosenza, Calabria. He died shortly after the camp's liberation in 1943, apparently due to a wound infection after surgery in a military hospital. Fingensten was particularly popular as a creator of ex libris or ex libris (the Latin term means "From the books of..."), a genre that appealed to the tastes of elites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Fingesten's hands, the bookplate transcends its utilitarian and decorative function and claims our attention as an independent work of art. Fingesten's inspiration has shifted throughout his career between the erotic and the political. Especially in the years preceding the Second World War, his work took on a new, almost prophetic tone in denouncing the dangers of the impending catastrophe.
