Samuel Ringer was born in 1918 in Tarnów, Poland, and grew up mainly in O?wi?cim, the town which, under German occupation, would come to be known by the infamous name of Auschwitz. From a very young age, he showed an exceptional talent for drawing. In 1937, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and, in 1939, was awarded first prize for drawing. He seemed destined for a career in the arts. The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany shattered those prospects.
Because he was Jewish, Sam Ringer was caught up in the Nazi machinery of persecution. His experiences during the war were harrowing. He was forced to carry out labour on the construction of the Auschwitz camp, and was subsequently sent to several camps in succession, including Annaberg, Sacrau, Mechtal, Markstädt, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Berga am Elster and, finally, Theresienstadt. He was liberated in 1945 by Soviet forces, in a state of extreme weakness. Catherine Ringer would later recount that he had suffered in particular from dysentery and lung diseases.
And it is probably at this point that his story becomes truly fascinating. Sam Ringer survived, but his work did not become a body of art focused exclusively on the horrors he had endured. On the contrary, his daughter emphasised this paradox: after such a dramatic history, her father had chosen to celebrate life and colour. “He passed on his zest for life to me,” she explained in 2023.
After a long convalescence, he resumed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He eventually left Poland and arrived in France in 1947. At that time, Paris represented a land of freedom and creativity for many European artists. Ringer enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied painting, engraving and lithography, amongst other subjects. There he met Jeannine Ettlinger, whom he married in 1957. Their daughter Catherine was born that same year.
His early days in France were difficult. Sam Ringer was a refugee with no means. Catherine would later recount that he would sometimes paint on salvaged mattress fabric because he could not afford proper canvases. He worked tirelessly, experimenting with techniques and practising painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture alike. His daughter would later describe him as ‘a workaholic’.
His artistic world is difficult to pigeonhole. He moved from almost abstract compositions to a fantastical figurative style populated by strange characters and creatures. Catherine Ringer cited Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst and Leonardo da Vinci among his influences. He was also able to sketch passengers on the Paris metro in just a few strokes, work in pen on plain paper, or transform a found object into a sculpture.
Yet he remained largely on the fringes of the art market. He exhibited his work, notably in group shows, but remained a discreet artist. Works were shown at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1950, at the Jewish Cultural Centre in Paris in 1974 and at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1981. His recognition, however, remains in no way commensurate with the sheer volume of work he leaves behind.
The story becomes even more compelling when it intersects with that of Les Rita Mitsouko.
Sam Ringer is not merely Catherine’s father. His imagination occasionally lends itself to the artistic journey of his daughter and Fred Chichin. During one of Les Rita’s first concerts at the Gibus, he projected his drawings and paintings onto the walls using a ‘magic lantern’ that he had made himself. Catherine recalled the unlikely contrast between her father’s elegant friends and the mohawked punks bouncing around the venue.
For the music video for ‘Marcia Baïla’, Catherine even asked him to make some ghosts. Ringer created large silhouettes cut out of plywood. In the end, only one appeared briefly in the video. Her father’s visual world and her own musical world thus intersected in a subtle yet very real way.
Sam Ringer died in Paris in 1986, aged 68. He left behind a considerable body of work and a daughter who would never cease in her efforts to bring it to the public’s attention. Catherine explained that she had deeply loved her father’s work since her teenage years and would show his pieces to those around her whenever she had the chance. In 2023, she took a spectacular step by exhibiting and then auctioning off around a hundred of his paintings, drawings and engravings.
In 1999, she had also donated to the Museum of Jewish Art and History a remarkable work created by her father in the late 1930s: ‘The Theatre of Kasrilevké’, a magic lantern strip comprising 65 vignettes inspired by Sholem Aleichem. An early work that had survived a journey almost as improbable as that of its creator.
But Catherine Ringer’s most moving tribute to her father is probably her musical one. On the Rita Mitsouko album *Cool Frénésie*, released in 2000, she dedicated the song ‘C’était un homme’ to him. In it, she weaves this family history—marked by deportation and survival—into her own artistic world.
Sam Ringer belongs to that generation of European artists whom history has almost swallowed up twice: first through persecution and the camps, and second through oblivion. He had survived the first. Catherine Ringer has spent part of her life fighting the second.
And when we look today at her vibrant, fantastical and at times almost joyful paintings, we perhaps gain a better understanding of some of her daughter’s unique energy. For the Ringers, having experienced the worst, creating seems to have been a way of responding to history through life.
