The Better Half: Jewish Women Artists Before 1938

Female artists in Vienna had a very difficult time of it before 1938. It is therefore all the more surprising how many women managed to succeed in this métier. A large number of them came from assimilated Jewish families. Painters like Tina Blau, Broncia Koller, Marie Louise von Motesiczky, or ceramic artists Vally Wieselthier and Susi Singer have established a place for themselves in the history of art. But many others have unjustifiably sunk into oblivion—the sculptor Theresa Feodorowna Ries, the painters Grete Wolf-Krakauer and Helene Taussig, or the painter and graphic artist Lili Rethi. The exhibition presents forty artists and describes their unusual training and careers, marked by a struggle for recognition in a male-dominated art world. It also looks at promising careers that were interrupted through exile or ended forever in the Nazi extermination camps. An exhibition with lots of new discoveries.