François Fiedler

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François Fiedler (1921–2001) was a Czechoslovak-born French painter and printmaker. Born in Košice, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Budapest and moved to Paris in 1946 with his first wife, who died six months later. With little money and limited French, he made sanctioned reproductions for museums and small figurative paintings to survive. He later lived with his second wife, Claire, in a small house south of Paris. One day he saw sun-cracked house paint and decided to recreate that effect on canvas, which led him to abandon figurative work and develop a new, lyrical abstract technique.

Joan Miró admired his work and introduced him to Aimé Maeght, a major gallerist. Through Maeght, Fiedler befriended artists like Giacometti, Braque, Chagall and Miró, and he regularly appeared in salon shows and in the Maeght Foundation publication Derrière le miroir. To reach more buyers, he created etchings, sometimes in very limited editions, while continuing to paint in oils.

Maeght predicted he would become famous, but died in 1981 before that could happen. After Maeght’s death, photographer Daniel Kramer supported him with materials, management and publicity. Fiedler produced oils, monotype prints and etchings, and his works are held by museums and galleries including the Maeght Foundation in Paris and the Guggenheim in New York. He is considered an important figure in post-war Modernist Paris and a pioneer of lyrical abstraction. Joan Miró called him “the painter of light,” and Pollock’s influence on his method was noted in the early 1980s. The François Fiedler Foundation was established in 2006 to safeguard his work and promote study of modern and contemporary art.