Frederick Terna

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Frederick Terna, 2013 (Photo: Daniel Terna)

Frederick Terna , originally Friedrich Arthur Taussig , (born October 8, 1923 in Vienna ) is an American painter and survivor of the Holocaust . As an artist, he is also known under the name Fred Terna .

Life

Frederick Terna, son of a Jewish family , grew up with his brother Tommi in Prague , where the family moved in 1926. Terna's father worked for a ship reinsurance company, and German and Czech were spoken at home. In 1932, when Frederick was nine years old, his mother died of pneumonia.

On March 15, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia . Frederick was initially able to hide with false papers on a farm outside of Prague. But after his father called him back to Prague out of concern, Frederick was arrested there by the Gestapo and was taken to the Linden (Lípa) labor camp near Deutsch-Brod on October 3, 1941 . In March 1943 he was sent on to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , on September 29, 1944 to Auschwitz (until the end of 1944) and from there as a forced laborer to Kaufering , to a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp . In April 1945, Frederick Terna escaped an Allied air raid while being transported in a cattle wagon. A piece of metal slipped into the car door slot enabled him to open the door and pop out when the car was shot at. On April 27, 1945, Frederick Terna, along with a second survivor, was discovered by American soldiers near Kaufering and rescued.

Frederick Terna's entire family had been murdered in concentration camps, including his brother Tommi in Treblinka in 1942 .

After a short time back in Prague, where he married his childhood sweetheart Stella Horner, also a Holocaust survivor, who had taken him in on his return, he moved to Paris in 1946 and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian . In Paris from 1947 to 1949 he also worked as an unskilled accountant for Alija Bet , the second large, unofficial wave of European Jews immigrating to Israel . After a year in Toronto , Frederick and Stella Terna moved from Paris to New York in 1952 . Here he initially worked as a coordinator in an import-export company. Stella suffered incurably from the severe consequences of her trauma. The marriage ended in divorce in 1975. Stella Terna died on March 23, 1983.

In 1982 Frederick Terna married his second wife, Rebecca Shiffman, a doctor specializing in feto-maternal medicine. In 1987, Frederick Terna was already 64 years old, they adopted their son Daniel.

Daniel Terna became a photographer and gallery owner.

art

In the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Frederick Terna began drawing on scraps of paper. In his pictures he processed the facilities and outlines of the barracks, fences, gates and paths through the camp.

Fred Terna's color-intensive paintings after the liberation, first in oil, now in acrylic paints, are strongly influenced by the Informel and Abstract Expressionism of Paris of the 1940s and 50s. They also take on representational allusions such as temples, gates or portals, sometimes nudes or landscapes. The most common motif, however, are flames. “Everything I paint has to do with Auschwitz.” Fred Terna's entire work is a processing of the “Holocaust” trauma.

Since 1966 Fred Terna has exhibited regularly and predominantly in the USA, above all in New York City , New Jersey , Long Island , but also in the house of the ghetto fighters in West Galilee, Israel, (1985). One of his paintings is in the collection of the Yad Vashem Museum of the History of the Holocaust . Hedy Lamarr bought another one in the 1960s for her private collection. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC has over twenty paintings by Fred Terna in its collection.

Fred Terna is now represented by the 321 gallery that Daniel Terna set up on the ground floor of Terna's Brooklyn home. Fred Terna's studio is upstairs. At the age of 93, Fred Terna presented his exhibition “Processing Chaos, Recurring Echoes” in 2017 at the Callahan Center at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, and a retrospective from 1970 to 2017 under the title “The Fiddle” at the Museum of Arts and Culture at New Rochelle High School. He also took part in 2017 with Daniel Terna in the exhibition "Progeny!" At the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, in which the relationships and mutual influences in artist families are examined. The exhibition “Place / Image / Object (1945–2018)” followed in 2019 , together with Anna Plesset and Daniel Terna, at Jack Barrett New York, in which Ternas presented works on paper from his Paris years from 1946 until his arrival in New York in 1952 become. They show his first room in a Paris hotel, the overcrowded apartments in the Latin Quarter , the trees of the Bois de Boulogne , the Brooklyn harbor basin and the bridges of New York City.

In 2016 Fred Terna was also represented at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair in New York.

Act

After a break in the 1990s, Frederick Terna is very active in exhibiting, and he also gives regular lectures on art history, religion and the Shoah . His memoirs are available in the archives of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York. In 1996 his story appeared in When They Came to Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust , and in 2009 he starred in Hilary Helstein's documentary, As Seen Through These Eyes . Also in William Helmreich's 1992 comprehensive volume "Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America" reference is made to Fred Terna's résumé.

Frederick Terna's portrait, photographed by BA Van Sise, was projected on the occasion of the Holocaust Rememberance Days from April to December 2017 together with around 20 other survivor portraits in an oversized format on the facade of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

In 2015, the then 91-year-old accepted an invitation from the Dachau concentration camp memorial to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Several German media reported not only about his biography, but also about the course of the visit.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "My strongest memory of Auschwitz is the constant noise, the eternal screaming and roaring." In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 . Hamburg 2015, p. 64 .
  2. ↑ Gail Wein: Fred Terna. The Defiant Requiem Foundation, accessed February 9, 2018 .
  3. ^ Daniel Terna: My childhood with a survivor of the Holocaust. In: Lillian Gewirtzman and Karla Nieraad (eds.): After the silence. Stories of descendants. 2nd Edition. Klemm + Oelschläger, Ulm 2017, ISBN 978-3-86281-105-2 , p. 68-73 .
  4. ↑ Stephen Westfall: Frederick Terna. In: BOMB Magazine. July 15, 2016, accessed February 9, 2018 .
  5. ↑ "My strongest memory of Auschwitz is the constant noise, the eternal screaming and roaring." In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 . Hamburg 2015, p. 64 .
  6. ↑ Progeny! In: efa Project Space Program. Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, accessed February 9, 2018 .
  7. ^ Place / Image / Object. Retrieved February 9, 2019 (American English).
  8. ↑ About. In: Fred Terna. Retrieved February 9, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Fred Terna. Father of Daniel J. Terna. In: The Heschel School. Holocaust Commemoration Committee. Retrieved February 9, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Mark Seliger / Leora Kahn / Rachel Hager (eds.): When They Came to Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust. Arcade Pub., New York 1996, ISBN 1-61145-502-2 .
  11. ↑ Stephen Holden: Art From the Holocaust, Behind the Barbed Wire. As Seen Through These Eyes. Directed by Hilary Helstein. In: The New York Times. October 1, 2009, accessed February 9, 2018 .
  12. ^ William B. Helmreich: Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. Simon & Schuster, New York 1992, ISBN 0-671-66956-7 .
  13. ^ Eyewitness. In: BA Van Sise. Retrieved February 9, 2018 .
  14. ↑ "My strongest memory of Auschwitz is the constant noise, the eternal screaming and roaring." In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 . Hamburg 2015, p. 64 .
  15. ↑ Emily Dische-Becker: What a survivor in Dachau wonders about. In: world. May 10, 2015, accessed February 9, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Terna, Frederick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Taussig, Friedrich Arthur (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna