Born: 2 December 1861, Austria
Died: 19 March 1908
Country most active: Austria
Also known as: Emilie Pelikan
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Sometimes the destruction happens on a much larger scale, and of course not all is inherently gendered. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Nazis censored both men and women’s work in their purge of so-called “degenerate” art, including works by Friedl Dicker, Ilse Twardowski-Conrat, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Teresa Feodorowna Ries, Anita Rée, Elfriede Lohse Wächtler, Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Broncia Koller-Pinell. At best, the works were confiscated and later recovered, but countless pieces were destroyed and their creators harassed, harmed, and killed, like Wächtler, who stopped painting after being forced to undergo surgical sterilisation; she was later murdered by the Nazis in 1940. Dicker was killed in Auschwitz, while Twardowski-Conrat and Rée committed suicide.
Many of Rée’s works survived because a groundskeeper at the Kunsthalle Hamburg hid them in his apartment, at great personal risk. Ries’s studio was ransacked in 1938, and after fleeing Austria in 1942, she was forced to leave all her works in Switzerland. Gabriele Münter hid her own artwork and that of other artists in her home, where, despite several searches, they were never found.