Description: ALVA, Autograph on album and orig. lithograph, 29x22.5cm. Album "Paintings and Drawings" introduc. by Maurice Collis, ex. 265/500, London: The Bodley Head, 1942., 20pp text, 42 plated, hard cloth cover, 31x25cm., worm holes throughout the book, yellowing to edges, light damage to spine. Siegfried Solomon Allweiss Alva. 1901?1973. Born in Berlin in 1901, Alva moved to Galicia, and began to paint in Paris in 1928, producing some great lyrical abstracts. Alva also spent a 20 year period living in Britain, before returning to Paris in 1955. Bound in brown cloth.. When Alva created this work in the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was experiencing his own exodus. This symbolic painting references both the ancient biblical account of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt and the artist?s own ?forced journey? from Germany. Following Hitler?s rise to power and increasingly anti-Semitic legislation, Alva moved to Paris in 1933, afterwards settling in London.