1920 Born in Frankfurt am Main as the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants into a religious home. The father Elimelech Max Beer was a Torah scribe. Recha, the youngest daughter, was brought up orthodox like her four sisters
Apprentice in a textile company, Aryanisation of the company, then unemployed
1937 An attempt to emigrate to Palestine fails
1938 The Gestapo tries to deport the family to Poland, entry is refused
1939 Emigration to England shortly before the outbreak of war, factory worker in London
1942 Marries David Kohn, a native of Vienna, in London
1944 Birth of her daughter Vera
1946 Moves with her family to Vienna
1947 Birth of her daughter Ruth
1950 Birth of her daughter Grete
1956 to 1959 Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, art education with Prof. Matejka-Felden
1985 Humiliated and Persecuted, Exhibition Kleine Galerie
1997 "Drawings, Memories and Stories", Memoirs
2002 Exhibition at the psychosocial centre Esra, opening with Danielle Spera
2007 Nightshade, Exhibition Galerie am Park, catalogue catalogue
2011 Donation "The Burden Bearer" (1965, gouache on paper) Kohn to Yad Vashem. It is exhibited for one year in the Exhibition Pavilion as part of the exhibition „Virtues of Memory“ .
2020 On the occasion of her 100th birthday – catalogue raisonné by daughter Ruth Bachmayer and Zvi Bernstein
August 2022 Exhibition at the Chambermusic Festival Vienna
2023 Part of the collective exhibition “Wien expressiv” (Vienna expressive) at the Kunstsalon of Gallery Lang
2023 "Kunst zum Überleben" (Art to survive) - Exhibition in Kunstraum Valentinum in Braunau / Upper Austria as part of the Contempary History Days. Photos you can find here
21.3.-22.5.2024 „Über/s/leben“ – Exhibition in Theater Nestroyhof Hamakom. Photos of the opening click here.
27.06.2024 -Died in Vienna, burried in Jerusalem
On the occasion of the exhibition “Über/s/leben” Stefanie Panzenböck reported for the Falter.maily on 19.4.24. For the article please click here .
TV report in "Oberösterreich Heute", ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), 29.9.23, on the occasion of the vernissage at Kunstraum Valentinum
Stefan Daubrawa - My grandma
It was joyful news. Around 2008, when my grandma was 88 years old, I went to see her beaming with joy. I was totally proud. A good friend of mine had just told me that he wanted to buy five of her paintings. That was good news. I was sure of it.
A year or two before that, my grandmother had had her first big solo exhibition in a gallery in Vienna. And it was a complete success! Her paintings sold like hot cakes. She was a bit overwhelmed at the vernissage, but in the end she enjoyed the hype and the recognition. She was visibly happy and proud. One or two years later, the good news: five paintings! Sold in one fell swoop! There was serious interest in her art. Another step towards world fame. That's what I thought.
I was expecting a similar reaction to the one I had just had at the exhibition: happiness, pride and some praise for me, and that means something in my family. But I was wrong. Her reaction was different to what I had expected. She gave me a dirty look and asked who it was that wanted to buy the pictures. Did I know him well? I hadn't smelled the rat yet.
After a short period of pestering, it becomes clear: she doesn't want to sell, she doesn't know him. All my talking doesn't help. The fact that I put my hands in the fire for my friend doesn't change her no. After a long back and forth and a lot of persuasion from me, she finally sold him a picture, a single, rather small one. And not entirely voluntarily.
This episode is typical of my grandmother: she didn't want her paintings to fall into the wrong hands. That was more important to her than artistic recognition and fame. So who had these wrong hands? Just about everyone. There were potential enemies everywhere: real anti-Semites / anti-Semites who didn't know they were anti-Semites / anti-Semites who hid their anti-Semitism behind criticism of their Israel / Christian anti-Semites / anti-Semites who just didn't want to show it. She was surrounded by enemy territory. So I completely misjudged my grandmother. The exhibition in the gallery, which was mainly attended by acquaintances and friends of the family, was one of the few enclaves in this enemy territory, a safe haven, not an escape route. When the exhibition ended, her reality - the reality - caught up with her again.
My grandmother had a large room in her former apartment that she used as a studio. I loved being there. I've loved the smell of paint and turpentine ever since. Sketches, finished pictures, large, small, dog-eared, not so rarely painted on both sides because there was no fresh paper at the time, were piled up on a large table, on armchairs and sometimes on the floor. Small pen and ink drawings, watercolors, large oil paintings. A hopeless chaos. There was also an easel and a few sculptures. The pictures had one thing in common, regardless of the technique: they almost always depicted frightened, terrified people, often women and children, less often men, almost always with wide open eyes and small pupils. It was oppressive in a fascinating way. After they were finished, my grandmother largely didn't care about the pictures. She still signed her pictures, which she probably learned to do at the academy, but the date is missing from almost all the older ones and many of them are dog-eared or torn. If someone in the family liked one, she usually gave it away without much resistance. But it had to be family.
My grandma painted out her discomfort in Vienna, the bad memories, her fears. And that was the end of it. Until the next painting. She had to paint what she couldn't talk about, and she didn't like talking about the past, ... but we still have more than 1,200 of her paintings. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, my grandmother wrote an autobiography. In it, she writes that she tried to live like other people and to erase what happened from her memory. She didn't succeed.
After the unsuccessful attempt to sell them to my friend, we and I stopped trying to make them better known. After all, you can't force them. Until around her 100th birthday. So why now? Are we or I ignoring her wishes now that she can no longer defend herself? I don't think so. Because that's how it could have been, how she could have been. As she got older, she became more forgetful and that did her good. She became - also visually - more balanced, happier, more childlike and content in a positive way. She has simply forgotten that she is in enemy territory. You can see this quite clearly in a photo that is also on the invitation . It shows her on her 100th birthday. Suddenly she had a charisma like the nice grandma from Christine Nöstlinger's children's books. Only unfortunately without the Viennese slang. And that actually suited her much better. This brief window of opportunity has closed again - due to her age. We celebrated her 103rd birthday in June. But these few years have shown what she would have been like if... And this grandma would - I'm quite sure - have approved of the current efforts and also this exhibition.
But why here of all places - in Braunau? The radius has to be larger. It should actually say. Why in Austria of all places? There really are few places in this country that are unsullied. More than thirty years ago, my family bought a house in southern Burgenland, an old mill, beautiful, with a huge garden. Years later, the place became famous throughout Austria. Elfride Jelinek even wrote a play about it. It's called Rechnitz. There are highly unpleasant war memorials in almost every town in the country. Still do. Lueger Square in Vienna has still not been renamed. It's just Austria. It's the same here as almost everywhere else: if you scratch the surface, unpleasant things come to light. And ultimately, the same probably applies to many other countries in Europe and the world.
Braunau has it better in that - and I know this because I have long been loosely but familiarly connected to the Simböck family - it has not been able to escape the reappraisal and confrontation with the past as easily as the rest (for obvious reasons). But that is - admittedly - my view from the outside. I hope I'm right about that. Unfortunately, there is also sometimes an inappropriate way of dealing with the past, such as the - in my opinion - extremely insensitive subsequent use of Hitler's birthplace. A training center for police officers? I'm sure something more suitable, something more appropriate could have been found.
But at least there are events here, such as the Contemporary History Days. Or the memorial stone in front of the Hitler House. Not a matter of course for too long, but still. See Rechnitz, where the first film to bring the murder of Jewish forced laborers at the end of the war into the public eye was rightly called “Totschweigen” (“Wall of silence”). It was only made in 1994. I therefore believe that there are few more suitable places than this one for my grandmother's pictures. And with the Contemporary History Days, there is probably no better environment. And I am confident that there are not the “wrong people” here - in the sense of my grandmother. Unfortunately, there is no one hundred percent certainty on this point. And I'm sure of one thing: the worst thing would be for all my grandma's pictures to gather dust in some cellar or archive.
The initiative for this exhibition came from my quasi-cousin Xandra (Vierlinger), for which I am really infinitely grateful. I had doubts at first for organizational reasons, but she convinced me. And many thanks also to Peter Stollberger, who curated the exhibition and was responsible for the wonderful design of the room!
Opening speech by Stefan Daubrawa, grandson of Recha Kohn, "Kunst zum Überleben " (Art to survive)
Braunau am Inn, September 2023
Dieter Schrage - Art with a moral claim
On the gouaches by Recha Kohn
"Art can't change people but it can exert pressure on them to look at life with different eyes, to recognize their own moral problems.”
Arthur Miller -1956
Recha Kohn came late to painting and graphic art - she completed her art studies between 1956 to 1959 as a mother of three school-age children - and she is still full of creative force today as an almost 87-year-old. Especially her gouaches created in recent years are of an astonishing expressive quality for me - regardless of the artist's age. They are painted on 107 x 83 cm paper in high colour contrasts, oscillating in their depiction between nightmares about past experiences and hope for the future. This nightmarish quality is evident, for example, in strong, partly red pictures full of fire and a horrified woman giving way, or in the "Displaced Woman" . Some gouaches are vehement denunciations of Nazism, fascism, the military and the clergy. But there are also paintings with a warming fire or with fire as the light of hope. And in some paintings, there are angels. Ultimately, every well-painted picture, even if it shows the first real fall of mankind with the fratricide of Cain and Abel (not the sentimental story of Adam and Eve), is full of hope.
"Plight so that people become aware"
Recha Kohn - born in Frankfurt a. M. as the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants, escaped deportation by the Nazis to Poland, fled to England and never quite made herself at home in Vienna after 1945 - hopes, as she explains in her remarks in this catalogue, to move people with her gouaches, watercolours and pen and ink drawings "in such a way that they perceive the plight of their people and partake of it, instead of being content with their own placid carelessness". For Recha Kohn, who throughout her life has had an acute political awareness even though she has never been directly involved in party politics, art and its message are at once "obligation and life task”, and she paints and draws with a high moral standard. That is to say, her paintings are painted pleas for the observance of ethical-moral norms of action as well as vehement condemnations of their violations. The question of art and morality or ethics (as a philosophy of morality) is a much-discussed question in art theory and practice, with the most ambivalent answers. It is, for example, dealt with fundamentally in Friedrich Schiller's letters "On the Aesthetic Education of Man". But Recha Kohn's concern is not a detached aesthetic-moral discourse, but the concrete implementation of ethical claims in her art. What Wieland Schmied emphasised in 1990 in "Art - What is it?" applies to her painting: "This is not to say that art and morality can be completely separated. Their connection is only infinitely more difficult. In any case, it has nothing to do with the artist's way of life. The morality of art is expressed in the work of art, not in the person of the artist. Morality is first and foremost a question of quality. No perfect work of art can be conceived that is not supported by the morality of the artist. Or to put it another way: the humanity of a work of art - and thus its greatness - is a matter of artistic form, aesthetic form."
But we can also make things much easier and emotionally/mentally (? oder ganz weg) more rewarding for ourselves beyond Friedrich Schiller, Wieland Schmied & Co and simply take the time to look at Recha Kohn's pictures.
Dieter Schrage, Cultural Scientist, Opening Speech, Galerie am Park
Vienna, March 2007
Danielle Spera - Painting is a weapon for me
I owe my acquaintance with Recha Kohn to my dear colleague Stefan Daubrawa - the grandson of Mrs. Kohn. It was he who introduced me to her work. From the very beginning I was impressed by Recha Kohn's work and wanted to know more about her. Fortunately, Mrs. Kohn wrote down her life story and so I was able to follow an exciting, eventful life.
Recha Kohn (née Beer) was born to Polish immigrants in Frankfurt am Main, the daughter of a Torah scribe and the youngest child of five girls. She was brought up Orthodox and deported to Poland by the Nazis in 1938 together with her family. Shortly before the outbreak of the war, she managed to escape to England. In London she later married David Kohn, a native of Vienna, with whom she went to Austria in 1946. She is the mother of three daughters. From 1956 to 1959 she studied art education at the Academy of Fine Arts with Prof. Matejka-Felden.
For Recha Kohn, painting means processing experiences. Her objects are people, the vast majority of them women. Also because women had shaped her life: the close bond with her mother, four sisters, three daughters. Her guiding principle can be discovered in all her remarkable paintings: "Painting is for me a weapon with which to fight what one sees as injustice." In this sense, one can surrender to the passion found in all her paintings. I am grateful to have met Recha Kohn.
Danielle Spera, Editor, Moderator "Zeit im Bild"ORF; Director of the Jewish Museum Vienna, Foreword Catalog
Vienna, March 2007
Leopold Spira - Humiliated and persecuted
Ink drawings
Recha Kohn, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1920, came from a religious Jewish family. Religion distinguished the family from their environment, but Jews had lived in Germany for more than a millennium, often persecuted, but then integrated into public, cultural and economic life.
Many of them saw themselves as good Germans, even German nationalists. And even further east, beyond the borders of the German Reich, German culture laid the intellectual groundwork for emancipation, Jewish children attended German schools when possible. It was not an unclouded relationship, but German Jews were convinced that the age of pogroms and expulsions, forced baptisms and ritual murder charges in the German Reich was over forever. It was from the pogroms and the economic hopelessness in Tsarist Russia that many Jews fled to Germany, the realm of classical culture, scientific and economic prosperity and liberalism.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, many German Jews initially clung to the hope that things were not as bad as they looked, that the threatening situation, the scope of which hardly anyone anticipated, would subside. So many German Jews stayed put and accepted restrictions and humiliation. Recha Kohn's family also stayed in Frankfurt, where they were arrested in 1939 and deported to Poland. For most of the deportees, this was a postponed death sentence. Recha, however, managed to escape to England. She came to Vienna with her Austrian husband after the war.
Even decades later the memories of what she had seen and experienced in Germany and Poland were vivid and oppressive to Recha Kohn. With her drawing pencil she has given expression to this insurmountable affliction and hurt. It is mainly the heads of old women, their faces, that Recha Kohn uses to depict what moves her inwardly and what she wants to elucidate for others. They are starved, impoverished faces dominated by wide-open eyes looking straight ahead.
In these eyes, one not only recognises the psychological and emotional distress, the mortal fear for themselves and their family members, but also the uncomprehending horror as to why all this could happen. These are the eyes of victims who are not aware of any wrongdoing and cannot grasp the cold hatred that threatens them with death. And it is precisely this failure to comprehend on the part of the victims that is the strongest indictment.
Opening speech by Leopold Spira, Exhibition "Kleine Galerie"
Vienna, November 1985
Recha Kohn - Excerpt from memoirs
My father came from a family of Torah scribes, a profession that had been passed down from fathers to sons for many generations. My father's father had also been a Torah scribe, as had his father. Perhaps the first link in this chain went back to that distant time when the Bible was written down, which had previously been oral tradition only.
I loved to watch him sit at his desk with a parchment scroll in front of him and a goose quill in his hand, which he occasionally dipped into an inkwell so that the text of the five books of Moses, the Bible, the Torah, was recreated with wonderful precision and harmony in angular Hebrew letters. My father had a famously beautiful handwriting and Jews came from far and wide to entrust him with religious work. However, his pious handiwork brought him heavenly blessings only and no corresponding material ones. In line with the saying of the sages that only he who is content with his share is a rich man, my father never aspired to greater wealth, but bore his poverty with serenity and dignity, even if his share was a meagre one.
Recha Kohn
Baden , 1997
Recha Kohn - Art for survival
The practical study of painting gave me a handle to execute artistic ideas that corresponded with my personal conception of art based on my life experience.
The suffering human being is at the centre of my pictorial representation. The depiction of the martyr in our modern time is still based on the sufferings of some people from centuries ago. The present age, with its modern means, has multiplied a thousand times the possibilities of persecution and extermination of disagreeable fellow human beings. I consider it my duty and life's work to express the sorrow of the victims of persecution and murder in my paintings.
As much as I admired the works of other painters, especially those of the old masters, I tried to develop my own style according to the changed times and my own experiences. This should not be based on any suffering of the past, but on my own strength to cope with the circumstances of life. I have remained faithful to this style of painting ever since, hoping to move people so that they perceive the hardship of their fellow human beings and partake of it, instead of being content with their own placid carelessness.
Recha Kohn
Vienna, November 2006

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