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Alex Leon or, as he signed his pictures,Leon Alex[1] was the pseudonym ofRomanian-Hungarian graphic artist and painterSándor Löwinger (30 May 1907 – after 8 March 1944).
Alex Leon was born into a Jewish family inPetroşani, Romania, in 1907. In 1916 his family moved toOradea, where he finished the four-year middle school in 1922. In 1923 he began a men's tailor apprenticeship, which he finished in 1926 with a certificate. Being unsatisfied with that handicraft, he began working as a lithographer in 1927. In 1928 he attended the art school inBaia Mare.
In the spring of 1930 he made his first voyage toPrague. In 1932 he moved away from his family. He had his first exposition in the journalist's club of Oradea in 1933. In 1934 he visited Prague for the second time and had expositions inTimișoara,Arad,Cluj, again in Timișoara, then in Oradea. In 1934 and 1936 two albums with his lithographs were published in Timișoara.
In 1936 he went for a longer study trip to Paris, where he became a student of the paintersLajos Tihanyi andMarc Chagall. He returned to Romania in the summer of 1939 and lived in Oradea and Brasov, but mainly in Timișoara; in August 1940 he finally settled in Oradea. In July 1942 he was deported to do slave work on the Eastern military front.
In 1943 he fell ill with typhoid-relatedeczema, but received no medical treatment. In January 1944 he escaped to theSoviet Union, but had to go to a hospital because of frostbitten feet. He presumably died inOstroh, Ukraine, after 8 March 1944.
Alex Leon was anexpressionist artist; his work being regarded as a tribute to the social resonances of expressionism. His biographer,István Borghida [hu], called it "instinctive dream-painting".
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