Emile Kirscht
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Emile Kirscht (1913–1994) was a Luxembourgish painter who worked with acrylics and gouache on paper. In 1954, he was a co-founder of the Iconomaques group of abstract artists in Luxembourg.[1]
Born on 11 June 1913, he was the sixth of seven children in a working-class family in Rumelange, south of Luxembourg. His father died when he was only four, forcing him to earn a living in a steel mill from an early age. During the Second World War, the Germans deported him after his refusal to join the Volksdeutsche Bewegung but they later brought him back to work in the Belval steel factory where he remained for the rest of his working life. Without any formal education, he started to paint as a child using a paintbox he had found in a dustbin. He developed his own abilities in the 1940s, soon to be influenced by the lyrical abstract imagery of the Paris School after he went to the 1947 exhibition of French art in Luxembourg City.[2][3]
