SALZBURG.- Thousands of artists and other creative professionals fled Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933; thousands more escaped from Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938. Involuntary emigration meant loss and isolation, but it also compelled exiles to work in entirely new circumstances and, as it were, reinvent themselves. Having honed their skills in the creative professions of their choice, these four Jewish women artists were forced by emigration to rebuild their lives and careers. In exile, they devised distinctive new visual idioms, in part because their circumstances made such innovation a necessity, in part as a way to work through their experiences. All four were active in various areas of design. “After shining a spotlight on Charlotte Salomon’s oeuvre in Life? or Theatre? (2015) and forms of aesthetic and political exile in Anti:modern (2016), the new exhibition series once again focuses on women artists who experienced life in exile,” Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, explains.

The exhibition presents ca. 200 works that illustrate their diverse responses to the profound challenge of having to strike new roots or make a fresh start in unfamiliar surroundings. The selection of works on view ranges from the interwar years until the 1960s and thus also forms an illustrated history of several decades. Tracing the four women’s lives through the various stations of their emigration, the show unfolds their artistic evolution between the poles of restriction and creative expansion, of loss and inspiration. “The exhibition’s exploration of their oeuvres highlights the way exile and emigration manifest themselves in discontinuities, losses, and abrupt endings as well as new beginnings, which are sometimes shaped by factors beyond their control,” Christiane Kuhlmann, one of the curators, notes. “The art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is an exemplary case of how emigration transforms a visual language. Under the influence of the psychoanalyst Annie Reich, she also changed media: the architectural, furniture, and fabric designs of the 1920s gave way to figurative paintings that reflect her experience of life in exile,” Kuhlmann’s co-curator Beatrice von Bormann adds.

Grete Stern (1904 Elberfeld, DE–1999 Buenos Aires, AR) and Ellen Auerbach (1906 Karlsruhe, DE–2004 New York, NY, US) launched their careers as photographers in Berlin. Both studied art at traditional schools before training in photography in the Berlin studio of Walter Peterhans, later the first professor of photography at the Bauhaus. ringl+pit, the shared studio they set up in 1929, specialized in advertising photography, a field in which they quickly built a reputation despite their unconventional visual style. They left Germany in 1933: Auerbach moved to Tel Aviv, then to New York, while Stern lived in London and, from 1936 on, in Buenos Aires. Having to fend for themselves, they branched out into new lines of work to survive. The works on view, on loan from the Museum Folkwang, Essen, range from early advertising photographs and portraits to two unusual photographic series: The Sueños, photomontages Grete Stern created for an Argentinean women’s magazine between 1948 and 1952, evince the artist’s probing exploration of women’s fears and their social role. Ellen Auerbach’s Mexican Churches (1954), meanwhile, convey the distinctive atmosphere of the country’s Catholic houses of worship. Her use of carbro printing, a technically demanding color process that was already outdated, heightens the stark drama of the figures of Christ and various martyrs.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898 Vienna, AT–1944 Auschwitz, PL) received a broad-based education—she spent several years studying in the workshops at the Bauhaus—and went on to run a successful architecture and interior design studio with her sometime collaborator, the architect Franz Singer. The exhibition presents numerous designs for innovative interior solutions, adaptable furniture, and fabrics. The Phantasius toy box (ca. 1925), a set of wooden elements that could be assembled into animal figures, shows the influence of reform pedagogy on her work. Dicker-Brandeis, who had joined the Communist Party in 1931, was arrested in 1934, an experience she grappled with in the two paintings Interrogation I and Interrogation II (1934– 1938). After her release she fled to Prague, where she turned to realist painting and started giving art lessons for children. Her last works were created in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Dicker-Brandeis was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

Another native daughter of Vienna, Elly Niebuhr (1914–2013 Vienna, AT) apprenticed as a sewing pattern designer in a corsage studio and studied chemistry. In 1936, she enrolled at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and went into training in Hella Katz’s photography studio. Beginning in 1937, she created photographic series capturing the progressive achievements of Vienna’s Social Democratic government such as the KarlMarx-Hof housing complex, the family shelter, women’s health facilities, counseling centers, and maternity clinics. She left for London in 1939 and then for New York in 1940. Her long-term professional prospects as a communist in the United States were dim, and in 1947 she returned to Austria. Frustrated in her attempts to revive her work in social reportage, she became a sought-after fashion photographer. In retrospect, her artistic as well as scientific education had prepared her for this second career, in which she flourished until the 1980s.