NEW YORK.- The first full-scale exhibition celebrating the art, pioneering teaching methods and spirit of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), the remarkable Bauhaus artist and art teacher who taught children in the Terezín ghetto and concentration camp, just opened at The Jewish Museum and remain on view through January 16, 2005. Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is based on an exhibition organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles.
Focusing on Dicker-Brandeis’s artistic expression, Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis will include early work made at the Bauhaus, modernist furniture and textiles designed in Berlin and Vienna, realistic oil paintings created while living in Prague and the Czech countryside, and still-life and portrait pastels made in the Terezín ghetto before she died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Over 150 works will be featured – drawings, paintings, stage and costume designs, architectural drawings, and original furniture. These works, as well as personal photographs and letters, shed light on her multifaceted life as a Jewish woman, versatile artist, designer, political activist and teacher living during a tumultuous period in 20th century history. The exhibition will also include a special section on the artwork of the children in Terezín that Dicker-Brandeis mentored and inspired.
Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is structured chronologically. Elena Makarova is the exhibition’s guest curator, and Regina Seidman Miller is the international project director. At The Jewish Museum, the exhibition is coordinated by Joanna Lindenbaum, Curatorial Assistant.
Dicker-Brandeis spent 4 years in Weimar, Germany at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school that became the single most important force in the design world between the wars. At the Bauhaus she was a pupil of modernism’s masters including Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. Her Bauhaus artwork reflects the geometric simplicity of architecture, and the influence of abstraction. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1923, Dicker-Brandeis opened an architecture and design atelier with her lover Franz Singer, in Berlin and later in Vienna. They created designs for the stage and costumes, and for retail, residential and educational facilities. Furniture, textiles, toys and accessories were also produced. Their works were presented in critically acclaimed exhibitions in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin. In response to the rise of fascism and Nazism, Dicker-Brandeis became active in the Communist Party. She created anti-fascist posters in a photomontage style similar to that of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. In 1934, Dicker-Brandeis was imprisoned for hiding illegal documents. Once released, she fled to Prague.
In Prague, Dicker-Brandeis met and married her second cousin, Pavel Brandeis. She continued working as an artist, and began to turn away from the Bauhaus aesthetics, developing a distinctive figurative style. Dicker-Brandeis was able to obtain a precious visa to Palestine in order to escape the Nazis, but her husband was not. She would not leave without him. Eventually, in 1938, the couple hid in the town of Hronov, in the Czech countryside.
In December 1942, Friedl and Pavel were deported to Terezín, the “model” concentration camp outside of Prague. Among the deportees to Terezín were artists, musicians, dramatists, intellectuals, and authors. Their talents were exploited in what the Nazis called “the ideal city of the Jews,” created to deceive the world about what was occurring in the concentration camps. In Terezín, Dicker-Brandeis painted landscapes, flowers, people, street scenes, and made sketches for theatre productions. She chose not to portray the horrors of the concentration camp. With limited art supplies, Dicker-Brandeis used whatever she could – scraps of paper and diluted watercolors.
In Terezín, Dicker-Brandeis was assigned to live in the children’s home for girls and lead art groups for children throughout the camp. Clandestinely she also worked with the traumatized and the infirm, teaching them to draw to help them express their emotions, using methods that contributed to the foundation of modern art therapy. In July of 1943, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis organized a secret exhibition of children’s drawings. In addition, she wrote a study discussing the meanings and purposes of artistic work by children, with reference to their ages and psychological development.
Dicker-Brandeis was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944, where she was murdered. In 1945, after the defeat of the Nazis, two suitcases were brought from Terezín to the Prague Jewish community. Packed by Friedl before her deportation, the suitcases contained all of the children’s artwork (approximately 5,000 drawings). Ten years passed before the drawings were rediscovered and exhibited. In 1964, the artwork and poetry of the children of Terezín was brought to a worldwide audience with the publication of the book I never saw another Butterfly.
The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is accompanied by a 240-page, full-color illustrated catalogue, with an essay on the life and work of Dicker-Brandeis, Dicker-Brandeis’s letters, as well as over 300 images. It will be available for $64.95 hardcover and $35.00 paperback in the Museum’s Cooper Shop. The exhibition has been shown internationally - including venues in Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United States (Atlanta and Los Angeles). The Jewish Museum in New York City is the final venue of the exhibition tour.
Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is made possible by a major gift from the Goldie and David Blanksteen Foundation. Generous support has also been provided by a bequest from Florence K. Jonas, Theodore and Alice Ginott Cohn, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, the William Petschek Philanthropic Fund, and The Winnick Family Foundation.
