Bernstein-Sinaieff, Leopold

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BERNSTEIN-SINAIEFF, LEOPOLD

BERNSTEIN-SINAIEFF, LEOPOLD (1867–1944), French sculptor. He was born in Vilna to an Orthodox family. He began to study drawing before moving to Paris at the age of fourteen. In Paris he studied under Rodin and Dalou and first exhibited at the Salon des Champs Elysées in 1890. He executed statues, portraits, groups of figures, and funerary monuments, and made busts in bronze and marble of important figures such as Pope Leo xiii. He received the Order of the Legion of Honor and his sculpture Ezra Mourning was acquired by the French nation. When the Germans occupied France they destroyed the sculpture Youth and Age to which Bernstein-Sinaieff had devoted over ten years. The Nazis arrested him and sent him to the prison camp at Drancy. Two weeks later he was released, only to be reinterned and sent to an extermination camp where he was killed.