Tim (dessinateur)

Origins and early life

Louis Mitelberg, born Lejzor Mitelberg at Kałuszyn in Poland on 29 January 1919 into a Polish Jewish family, came to Paris as a student in 1938 and never went home.

Work and career

Conscripted in 1940 and taken prisoner in 1941, he escaped eastward into the Soviet Union and was one of the 218 French escapees who reached London by that route to join the Free French. He drew for L'Humanité and the communist press under his own name from 1946, broke with the party, and in 1958 joined L'Express, where he signed Tim, the syllables of Mitelberg reversed; for four decades his cartoons ran in Le Monde, The New Yorker and The New York Times, drawn with a hard pen and no captions to speak of.

He turned to sculpture in his later years, and his Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus of 1986, the officer holding his broken sword upright, stands today in Paris on the place Pierre-Lafue and in a cast at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, with a second version at the École militaire; in 1993 he made the memorial to Jewish deportees at Père-Lachaise. He received the Prix Francine et Antoine Bernheim in 1983. He died in Paris on 7 January 2002.