Rachel Stern2025-09-26T07:49:38-04:00August 12th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this virtual event, a transatlantic panel discusses the artist Samson Schames. Annika Friedman (Germany) elaborates on the artist’s beginnings in Frankfurt, Rachel Dickson, PhD (UK) gives an insight into the work he made in British exile, and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD (USA) speaks about the work he created in his new home, New York. The presentations are followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A. Image above: Samson Schames, Granite Quarry No. 1, 1958. Casein on board, 20.75 in. x 26.25 in. Leo Baeck Institute New York 2007.97 Samson Schames was a German-Jewish artist born in 1898 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, into a prominent Jewish family involved in the textile business. He initially trained [...]
Rachel Stern2025-09-26T07:54:22-04:00August 11th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In this virtual event, a distinguished panel comprising family members, friends, and their descendants from New York share memories of the German-born artist Samson Schames (1898-1967). His work, which blends modernist aesthetics with spiritual and historical depth, is recognized for its innovative technique and poignant reflections on exile, memory, and identity. Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, he fled Nazi persecution to England in 1939 and later emigrated to the United States with his future wife, Edith, in 1948 and 1947. Image above: Samson Schames, Blowing the Shofar, c. 1956. Shards of glass, polychrome, layered in relief, 25.4 x 29.7 in. (64.5 x 75.5 cm). Jewish Museum Frankfurt A short film created [...]
Rachel Stern2025-09-03T14:31:57-04:00August 4th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
This presentation explores the historical background and creative works of Hungarian-born Jewish artist Theodore Fried (1902-1980). He was educated at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Vienna in 1924 and to Paris in 1925. He met and married his first wife Anna and his son Christopher was born in 1928. That same year, the artist had his first one-man show, and was included in important shows in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Paris. Image above: Detail of Theodore Fried, Self Portrait, 1938. Oil on canvas. Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa (OK) When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fried’s work was labeled as “degenerate”. He fled with [...]
Rachel Stern2025-07-23T18:00:05-04:00July 1st, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
This image-rich talk by Georgetown University professor Ori Z Soltes considers some of the many Jewish artists destroyed by the Holocaust who had either begun or were poised to add significant threads to the tapestry of twentieth century visual art. Some are now well-known and others remain obscure—but what if artists like Charlotte Salomon and Felix Nussbaum or like Erna Dem and Fritz Taussig had survived to do more art? What additional significant contributions might they have made? Image above: Bedřich Fritta (Friedrich Taussig), Rear Entrance, Theresienstadt Ghetto, 1941–1944. India ink and wash on paper, 51 x 36.5 cm Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. Gift of the Prague Committee for Documentation, courtesy of Ze'ev and Alisa Shek, [...]
Rachel Stern2025-06-12T04:02:06-04:00May 16th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
This presentation by Irina Cărăbaș from the National University of Arts in Bucharest focusses on several key artistic and political contexts relevant to Brauner’s work and biography, as well as his reception in Romania. It is followed by a conversation with Nicola Baird, PhD. Introductory remarks by Sorina Neagu, Director of DOR – Romanian Diaspora. Image above: Victor Brauner, Composition, not dated, oil on canvas, 53,5 x 64,5 cm, National Museum of Arts of Romania, Bucharest (INV. 73973/8502) © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Born in Piatra Neamț, Romania into a Jewish family, Victor Brauner (1903-1966) took part in shaping several avant-garde groups in Bucharest since his early twenties. [...]
Rachel Stern2025-04-09T14:22:41-04:00March 24th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Curator Erik Riedel presents the work of the painter and graphic artist Léo Maillet, who changed his original name Leopold Mayer in exile, reflecting the numerous fractures in his biography. Image above: Léo Maillet, Le Graveur (Self-Portrait), 1944. Oil on cardboard. Permanent loan by the Adolf und Luisa Haeuser-Stiftung für Kunst und Kulturpflege. © estate of Léo Maillet: Daniel Maillet and Nikolaus Mayer After his dramatic escape from a deportation train bound for Auschwitz, Maillet lived in the French Cévennes under a false identity from 1942 onwards. He painted and drew with the simplest of materials. Some years later, he took up the works he had created during his flight and persecution and transformed them [...]
Rachel Stern2025-02-13T07:00:51-05:00January 26th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
This presentation starts with Bukiet reading an excerpt from a novel he is currently working on, followed by an inspiring discussion with Stern about the daily reality and nature of being a writer. They continue with a broader conversation about the arts and their relationship to reality. As they delve into his books, they explore the direct or indirect presence of the Holocaust in his works and the way it still shakes the foundation of our civilization. Melvin Jules Bukiet has published eleven books, including After, Signs and Wonders and Strange Fire. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and other magazines, his non-fiction in the American Scholar and other magazines. He [...]
Rachel Stern2024-12-05T06:58:15-05:00November 19th, 2024|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
While workmen were demolishing a house on Prague’s outskirts in July 2018 they were astonished to be deluged by works of art falling from a ceiling. Nobody knew the works had been hidden there. The art turned out to be that of Gertrud Kauders who had hidden them in the house of a friend before being deported to Theresienstadt and then to Majdanek where she was murdered on arrival in May 1942. Kauders was a serious and inventive artist, quite well known in Prague’s art world of the time. She worked in oils, pencil, crayon, watercolour and gouache. Now her work is held by museums around the world. Image above: Gertrud Kauders © Kauders Family Estate [...]
Rachel Stern2022-08-03T14:52:23-04:00May 19th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
When Ludwig and Else Meidner met in 1925, he was already an established artist well-known for his so-called Apocalyptic Landscapes. Although Else started as Ludwig’s student, she developed a distinct independent style and he always praised her art as more refined than his own “coarse” works. As Else Meidner slowly gained recognition in Berlin art circles, her career was abruptly cut short by the Nazi-regime in 1933. She moved to Cologne with her husband in 1935; and they emigrated to England in 1939 only a few weeks before the war started. In London both lived largely unnoticed by the English art scene. But while Ludwig frustratedly returned to Germany, she decided to stay in England. Their complicated relationship developed from [...]
Rachel Stern2020-11-29T20:32:16-05:00August 7th, 2020|Events, Past Events|
View a recording of the event HERE. Lecture featuring Aya Soika, Professor of Art History at Bard College Berlin, Germany Moderated by Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York The German Expressionist Emil Nolde is arguably one of most prominent victims of the Nazis' art politics: No other painter had so many works confiscated, or was presented as prominently in the show „Degenerate Art,“ which opened in Munich in July 1937. Yet, his position differs fundamentally from that of many other artists who will be presented in the Fritz Ascher Society's lecture series "From Flight to Fight": Nolde was not just a victim but also a loyal supporter of the regime whose world views were radicalized by antisemitic propaganda in [...]
Newsletter #4 December 2015
Rachel Stern2018-12-04T12:45:51-05:00December 17th, 2015|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, As the days are getting shorter and darker, and will at some point probably get colder as well, I remember fondly this past summer, when I had the chance to discover the vastness and diversity of the Grunewald, the largest city forest in Berlin, with Dr. Gudrun Rademacher, the long term director of the Forest Museum Grunewald. Within minutes Fritz Ascher was there, and he often walked for hours, usually in the early mornings or late at night. He documents in his art what he sees: heavy-trunked trees stand in open landscape, shaken by the wind, deep in leaf, or winterly bare. Dr. Rademacher discovered gouaches of the Forest Museum, the Hunting Castle with its signature orange roof, [...]
