Queer Places:
152 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris, France

Estera Karp aka Esther Carp (born in Skierniewice ( Poland ), December 8, 1897 - died in Créteil, June 11, 1970) was a Polish painter. Artist Liv Schulman created a series of films: Le Goubernement, a six-episode fiction imagining the destiny and work of women, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary artists who lived in Paris from 1910 – 1980. The episodes traverses and overlay over 70 years of history and hosts the stories and fate of artists that were erased from the great twentieth century modernist narrative including Esther Carp.

Esther Carp was born near Warsaw into a family of musicians. Her father was a violinist, a painter, and a photographer. Esther was different from her six sisters and took an interest in painting at a very young age. Esther Carp studied in Vienna at an art school before going to Paris in 1925. There, she discovered Nissim de Camondo’s collection and got enthusiastic about Alfred Sisley’s and Paul Cézanne’s paintings. In 1931 art dealer Leopold Zborowski organized an exhibition of her work. Her work was constructed like a mosaic, reminiscent of the Cubist structure.

In 1931 she left France for Poland. In 1941, following her first paranoia crisis, Esther Carp was hospitalized. During the war, this incident saved her life, as she was hidden in hospitals. In 1954, as Esther Carp was just again settling into her former Parisian life, she had another paranoia crisis, accusing her hotel manager of persecution and anti-Semitism. She was subsequently hospitalized. Back in Paris, she found a small studio on boulevard Saint-Germain but she was expelled from it shortly afterwards. During this period, she produced ballpoint pen drawings. On November 23, 1963, Esther Carp was committed to Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, and later in the Vaucluse, where she suffered from persecution delirium.

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