Grete Wolf Krakauer 1890 - 1970
Merchants in the Old City, 1930

Merchants in the Old City, 1930
Pastel, 34X42 cm, Signed with the initials and dated.

About The Artist:

Artist Grete Wolf Krakauer was born in 1890 in Moravia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As an infant she moved with her family to Vienna. At a young age Grete began studying at the Art Academy and at Kunstgewerbeschule ("school of arts and crafts"). Among her teachers where Otto Friedrich, Rudolf Jettmar and Hans Tichy. After graduating Grete traveled to Munich where she worked with Albert Weisgerber and Paul Renner. In Stuttgart she worked closely with Adolf Hoelzel and Johannes Itten, later one of the central figures of the Bauhaus. At the age of 27 Grete was already an established artist in Vienna. She painted abstracts and portraits of Viennese men and women of her cultural cycle. She drew a movement of Michelangelo's Moses on the request of Sigmund Freud, which he recounted in a letter to a friend. Master artist Egon Schiele drew two portraits of her. One pondering and another depicting her as a flamboyant socialite. Grete exhibited one-woman shows and group exhibitions in Vienna, Prague and Zurich. In 1922 her work was exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1924 Grete and her husband, famous architect and painter, Leopold Krakauer with their two year old daughter Trude left Vienna and settled in Jerusalem. All along the 1920's Grete drew and painted in the old city of Jerusalem. Wolf - Krakauer eternalized on canvases and paper with oil paints and water paints the international community of Jerusalem and the Jewish pioneers of the kibbutzim and moshavim of the British mandate era. In 1926 she first introduced local crowed her new body of art work in a solo exhibition in the Tower of David, the art exhibition center of the city in those years. In 1929 she traveled to Cairo where she held one-woman show. In Jerusalem Grete became known as one of the founders of local artistic life. She was a portrait artist for the Jerusalemites of the 1920's, '30's, and 40's. She drew and painted portraits of British officers, Bedouin girls, German ladies and members of the Jewish cultural circle such as Martin Buber and Arthur Rupin. Grete also crerated the first puppet theater in the land. In 1930’s, she worked with opera singers and her marionettes on a play based on an opera by Mozart. Grete was a close friend of poet Else Lasker Schüler during Schüler's last years in Jerusalem. In 2015 The Jewish museum in Berlin acquired two drawings and a death mask of Else Lasker-Schüler which were created by Grete in 1945. The last phase of Grete's art came in the 1950's, when she began dedicating her art to the investigation of hidden images in still objects. Her works where acquired by The British Museum, Bezalel National Museum, Vienna and Prague collections, numerous private collections throughout the world and the Municipalities of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. A PhD about Grete was written by Smadar Sheffi at the Hebrew University Jerusalem.