"Handwerkend meisje, Parijs"
Cologne 1899-1949 Paris
Paris, ca. 1930
Oil on canvas
54 x 45 cm.
Signed: upper right ‘Edith Auerbach’
Provenance: Private collection, The Netherlands.
Nowadays the German artist Edith Auerbach might be unknown; in her days in Paris, Montparnasse, she was highly appreciated by befriended artists as Tsugouharu Foujita, Moisej Kogan and Rudolf Levy, whom she all portrayed. She was influenced by the realistic and expressionist style of George Grosz and Felix Nussbaum. The portrait ‘Woman in thoughts’ is a colourful portrait, thinly applied to the canvas. Is it a self-portrait? At the beginning of World War II, Auerbach was arrested and send to a concentration camp. In 1943, she escaped from a prison hospital. After the war, Auerbach returned to Paris and changed her name in Edith Delamare. Her paintings changed: in a surrealistic style, she depicted the horrors from the concentration camps.