We know that behind the happy and colorful drawings of the children of the Terezín concentration camp, 60 kilometers from Prague, was the hand of Professor Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
Her pedagogical strategy and her formula to distract the children from the oppressive reality of the ghetto, the prelude to the Nazi death camps.
What we didn't know so well was who was behind the teacher: a Jewish woman born in Vienna in 1898, a multidisciplinary artist from the Bauhaus, avant-garde painter, experimental educator, interior designer for aristocratic salons, charismatic passport forger, poster artist. committed to the anti-fascist ideology and feminism.
Until now her profound artistic biography always remained in the shadow of her personal tragedy, her murder in Auschwitz.
This year up to three exhibitions have been organized in Austria to illuminate his figure.
The Wien Museum MUSA focuses on his years linked to the Bauhaus and reconstructs the studio he shared with the architect Franz Singer in Vienna in the 1920s.
They both trained at the Bauhaus School in Weimar (Germany) and imported their sophisticated ideas and practices of design and architecture.
The museum exhibits an original bestiary of axonometric drawings, models, furniture, photographs and
collages
.
“His editing of him required almost archeological work.
The most important projects of the studio were destroyed during the Nazism, but its archive, miraculously, was preserved”, explains Andreas Nierhaus, curator of the Wien Museum.
The plans show the work of the private tennis club of Hans Heller —whose apartment had also been furnished— or of the residence of Countess Hildegard von Auersperg.
The photos reveal the functional design of spaces as disparate as the salon of the haute couture firm Lore Kriser &
Co.
or a Montessori method pedagogy kindergarten.
Both worked for an open-minded clientele, mostly Jewish intellectuals and artists looking to inhabit a modern space as opposed to traditional Viennese style.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, in a 'collage' from 1930, in an image of the exhibition on this artist in the Museum of Vienna.Wien Museum (Wien Museum)
In the 1930s, the couple separated (professionally and sentimentally, he was married, it was a stormy relationship, not very functional, very little Bauhaus) and Dicker-Brandeis came into contact with the Communist Party.
She applied creativity to activism: she was arrested for forging comrades' passports and sentenced to three months in prison, where she embroidered her prison uniform (when Franz Singer was called to testify at the trial, he wanted to exonerate her with a scathing statement that defined their relationship: "Friedl is incapable of drawing a straight line").
After his release, he continued to design propaganda posters for the Party.
The
black
and white photo collages denounced the living conditions of the working class and warned of the Nazi threat.
The crises of capitalism as a trigger for totalitarianism.
In one of the eight negatives on glass plates that have been rescued, the cut-out of Hitler stands out.
In another, she unmasks the emasculating role of women in industrial society.
They were large-format Dada photomontages that she had to destroy before going into exile.
The turmoil of Austrofascism convinced her to emigrate to Czechoslovakia, where she married her cousin Pavel Brandeis.
In Prague she alternated classes with avant-garde art.
In Vienna she had begun teaching kindergarten teachers, whom she taught to use art as therapy, and now her students included children from families who had fled Nazi Germany.
She put it into practice with her own monsters of hers: she drew a series of expressionist self-portraits set against the traumatic background of her arrest, including scenes of her interrogation.
Drawing by Hana Lustigová (1931–44), in the Terezín field.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) launched a program for country children to draw. JEWISH MUSEUM OF PRAGUE (Jewish Museum in Prague)
He painted the canvas
Fuchs learns Spanish
, a surrealist allegory about the Spanish Civil War, which could be seen at the exhibition held in the autumn at the Heiligenkreuzer Hof in Vienna.
Her curator, Cosima Rainer, editor of a canonical catalog on the artist on the University of Applied Arts imprint, says: “How is it possible that Dicker-Brandeis didn't have this recognition until now?
Her role in developing experimental forms of expression is unique in the interwar period.
She did everything.
Paradoxically, that versatility was a drag to vindicate it”.
The first exhibition dedicated to her artistic production was presented in Linz (Austria) at the beginning of the year, at the Lentos Art Museum.
Dicker-Brandeis found weightlessness in art and gravity in politics.
Over time he went the other way.
When she was deported to Terezín (Czech Republic) she threw herself into educating the creative instinct of the children.
She was her salvation.
There she watched, dumbfounded, as a Red Cross delegation inspected the ghetto in June 1944 to affirm to the world that atrocities were not being committed.
The German voice -
over
from the mockumentary filmed for the mission describes the Jewish paradise on Earth: "Who wouldn't want to live here?"
Shortly after, in October, she volunteered on the transport that led to Auschwitz to join her husband, who had been deported days before.
She was unaware of what she expected.
He sent her niece, whom she had cared for until then as if she were her daughter, rudely from the platform to prevent her from getting on the train, and left a couple of suitcases with almost five thousand drawings in a safe place. and children's
collages
.
The transport was received by Dr. Mengele who, like cattle, selected a consignment for his medical experiments.
Her husband survived the Holocaust, but she died in the gas chamber at the age of 46.
The exhibition 'Atelier Bauhaus, Vienna' will be open at the Wien Museum MUSA (Vienna, Austria) until March 26, 2023.
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