Photo: Dana Cabanová, Jewish Museum Prague
After years of negotiations, the Jewish Museum in Prague has received a substantial part of a unique art collection discovered in 2018. Nearly 380 paintings and drawings by the artist Gertrud Kauders have been donated to the institution by her relatives. Unlike her famous contemporary Franz Kafka, Kauders remained completely forgotten for nearly 80 years. I discussed the discovery with the museum’s chief curator Michaela Sidenberg:
“We knew for a number of years about Gertrude Kauders from various lists of artist associations and exhibitions. Nevertheless, we did not know about her artworks because simply there were no artworks by Gertrude Kauders in any public collection.
“Only later we discovered the reason why it was so, and that was in 2018, when some of her paintings were discovered by the workers, who worked on the demolition of a house at Prague’s Zbraslav. That house once belonged to one of Gertrude’s friends who saved her works during the war.
“Gertrude actually transferred all her studio before she embarked on her last journey to the ghetto of Theresienstadt and from there immediately to the extermination camp of Majdanek. So this is where it had been hidden for all these years.”
See the rest here.
Author: Ruth Fraňková