Hella Guth

Composition, 1959

Oil on canvas Signed lower right, Customs stamp on back Dimensions: 100 x 73 cm
Provenance: Collection of Henry Galy-Carles, French poet, playwright, historian and art critic.
Reproduced on page 8 of the catalog
Price : 9000 euros

“For me, matter is the result of a painting process in which layers act on other layers. It’s a continuous organic growth that continues beyond the completion of the painting. The painting alone extends the painting” Hella GUTH

Biography

Helena Guthova, born Hella Guth in Kirchenbirk, Bohemia, during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is a painter and printmaker from West Bohemia in the Czech Republic.
She has worked in London and Paris. Early life and training Hella Guth was the second of three children born to Jewish parents who had converted to Protestantism.
She studied with Trude Sandmann while still in high school, then with Joseph Hofmann at the School of Arts and Crafts at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna from 1926 to 1929.
She moved to Prague in 1930 and became a member of the avant-garde Manès group, at which time she was classified as a Trotskyist.
1930-1932, she studied with Willi Nowak at the Academy of Arts in Prague.
She earns her living as an advertising designer for newspapers. World War II After the Nazis come to power in Germany, she takes up the cause of German artists who have fled to Prague.
Her drawings and woodcuts from the Prague period, depicting café life in Prague, are now in the collections of the Kunsthalle Kiel.
In 1932, she illustrated Brecht’s Fourpenny Opera, so impressed was she by the Viennese premiere.
In 1933, she travelled to Moscow with a theater group and worked in the anti-fascist theater group “STUDIO 34”, which Hedda Zinner had co-founded.
In 1939, she managed to reach England via Poland; almost all her artistic work remained in Prague and is considered lost.
After a brief first marriage to German-speaking Czech writer Zvi Eisner, she married art historian Frank Popper in London in 1945.
On a trip to Austria in 1947, she learned that her mother had died in Auschwitz and her sister in Lodz. Paris In 1951, she moved to a small studio at 34 boulevard de Clichy in Paris, where she lived until her death.
Then the couple separated.
In Paris, she switched from figurative to non-figurative painting.
She exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris from 1954 to 1959, then at the Galerie Colette Allendy.
After a successful phase with numerous exhibitions, appreciated by Scottish poet Edwin Muir, art critic Herbert Read and Michel Seuphor, she stopped exhibiting, falling seriously ill in the 1970s2.
A committed, outspoken woman of character, she “attracted deep enmity, particularly among gallery owners and art critics”.
Her work was only rediscovered in the 1990s, after her death in 1992.
In 2008, the Jewish Museum in Prague devoted a retrospective to her work.

Solo exhibitions

– 1953: Galerie Arnaud, Paris – 1955: Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris

Group exhibitions

-1960 : Peintres abstraits de Paris – Élie Borgrave, Georges Breuil, Hella Guth, Jean Miotte, Galerie Günar, Dusseldorf ↑ Frank, Popper, Réflexions sur l’exil, l’art et l’Europe : Entretiens avec Aline Dallier, Klincksieck, Paris, 1998, p.
65.

Bibliography

– Frank, Popper, Réflexions sur l’exil, l’art et l’Europe: Entretiens avec Aline Dallier, Klincksieck, Paris, 1998.
– Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite, Michel Seuphor, 1957.
– Hella Guth, Dissolved figures, Jewish Museum, Prague, 2008.

Museums

– Prague Jewish Museum
– Ludwig Museum, Aachen
– Kunsthalle Kiel, Kiel
Notes and references
↑ Cat. exp. Hella Guth, Jewish Museum, Prague, 2008,