Buchenwald artist dies in Paris

French Socialist Realist painter Boris Taslitzky, who risked death drawing portraits on scraps of SS stationery he stole as a prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp, has died in Paris at the age of 94.

The works of the Jewish painter, who fought oppression all his life, hang in major galleries from London to Moscow but he was largely ignored by the art establishment in France.

Taslitzky died in a Paris hospital on Friday, his family said. He was to be buried in the French capital on Wednesday.

He was celebrated for the 111 portraits he drew on writing paper stolen from the SS elite Nazi troops at the Buchenwald concentration camp after being deported from France during World War Two, and his art tackled violent as well as personal themes.

His work was often at odds with political leaders of his era and France's art world was often uneasy with his uncompromising subjects. He resisted the 20th century's great artistic shifts into abstraction, staying true to his figurative roots.

'I have always fought for peace'

"He was considered the most subtle of the last century's Social Realist painters, and unlike the others did not drift into dogma," said art historian and friend Tamara Poniatowska.

"Throughout his long life as an artist he painted the world, its tremors, its hopes, its emotions," said Communist leader Marie-George Buffet. "He devoted himself with talent to doing portraits from which the dignity of men and women shone out."

Born to Russian exiles in Paris in 1911, he was friends with artists Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti and writer Louis Aragon.

He was captured by the Nazis, escaped and joined the French Resistance, but was imprisoned by France's Vichy leadership under Nazi occupation and sent to Buchenwald in 1944. He was decorated as a war hero and received France's Legion of Honor.

His mother never returned from the Auschwitz death camp.

"I have always fought for peace and for the transformation of the world, (and today) it is more and more important," he told Reuters at a retrospective to celebrate his 90th birthday.

His art included works on the Vietnam War and the coup that took Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973.