Artworks

This book documents for the first time, Roman Halter’s artworks across a multitude of media, from stained glass, to oil, to watercolour. It includes essays by Colin Wiggins, special projects curator at the National Gallery, London and by Caroline Swash, the distinguished stained-glass historian and third-generation practitioner.

Halter was born in 1927 in Chodecz, a small village in northern Poland, and was the seventh and youngest child of a traditional Jewish family. At the outbreak of war, in 1939, when Halter was 12, the family were deported to the Lodz Ghetto. It was during the horrors of this imprisonment that his grandfather, made Halter promise to tell the story of the Holocaust ‘when’ and not ‘if’ he survived. His grandfather’s entreaty was a frequent refrain throughout Halter’s long career as an artist and narrator of the atrocities.

The book shows numerous examples of Halter’s stained glass and preparatory ‘cartoons’, revealing that he used his architectural skills and the intricacies of stained glass as the foundation and structure for his paintings and drawings. Also included are watercolours he painted later in life recollecting his childhood in occupied Poland as well as photographs of his design work for Leo Baeck College, London.