Amalie Seckbach

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Woman and Sunflowers (1944)

Amalie Seckbach (born as Amalie Buch 7 May 1870 in Hungen ; died 10 August 1944 in the Theresienstadt ghetto ) was a German sculptor and painter.

Life

Amalie Buch grew up in a merchant family, her father Jakob traded in agricultural machinery. Her mother's name was Therese, geb. Katzenstein. She had three brothers and was raised a higher daughter. In 1907 she married the architect Max Seckbach (1866–1922) and moved into a spacious apartment in Frankfurt am Main . The marriage was childless.

When her husband died, she began to work as a self-taught artist. In 1926 she took an external seminar at the China Institute of the University of Frankfurt and became an expert on Chinese and Japanese woodcuts . She began to collect these and, in addition to her acquisitions, also exhibited her own small sculptures. With James Ensor she had an exhibition of sculptures and pictures in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels . In Paris took part in exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants . After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, she was only able to exhibit at the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Germany , but she also participated in exhibitions abroad, for example at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936 .

When she planned to travel to the USA via Lisbon in 1941 , it was too late for that. On September 16, 1942 she was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where she continued to paint her still lifes and imagined landscapes , some in a surrealist manner . Amalie Seckbach died of the prison conditions.

Some of Seckbach's pictures can be found in Israel today in the house of the ghetto fighters , at Yad Vashem and in the Terezin house .

literature

  • Ilka Wonschik: "It was probably a different star we lived on ...": Artists in Theresienstadt . Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2014 ISBN 978-3-95565-026-1 .
  • Gabriele Reber: "Don't let my pictures die ...": Amalie Seckbach; Fragments of a biography . Frankfurt am Main: Bergauf-Verlag, 2006 ISBN 3000193820 .
  • Hanno Müller, Dieter Bertram, Friedrich Damrath: Jewish families in Hungen and Inheiden, Utphe, Villingen, Obbornhofen, Bellersheim and Wohnbach . Fernwald: Ehgart & Albohn, 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Entry in the Central Database of the Names of Holocaust Victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial
  2. ↑ Biographical information on Amalie Seckbach in: Pnina Rosenberg: Art during the Holocaust , in: Jewish Women's Archive
personal data
SURNAME Seckbach, Amalie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Book, Amalie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor and painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Hunger
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1944
Place of death Theresienstadt ghetto