Greta Saur

Greta Saur (Sauer) (born April 20, 1909 in Bregenz ; † May 6, 2000 in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), France) was a German painter who lived and worked in Paris . She is one of the representatives of abstract painting , more precisely the lyrical abstraction of the "Nouvelle Ecole de Paris".

Life

Greta Sauer (Saur) was born in Bregenz in 1909 as the daughter of a musician . After attending grammar school in Augsburg , she devoted herself from 1929 to 1934 to studying music, philosophy (with Professor Karl Jaspers ) and psychology (with Professor E. Sprenger) in Heidelberg and Berlin. It was then that her first autodidactic attempts at drawing began . From 1932/1933 she got involved in the resistance against the Nazi regime , was arrested and imprisoned in the women's prison in Barnimstrasse (Berlin). For political reasons, the artist moved to Paris with her friend François Willi Wendt in 1937 . Friendly contacts with Wassily Kandinsky , Fernand Léger , Hans Hartung , Sonia Delaunay , Alberto Giacometti and Serge Poliakoff encouraged her artistic maturation. In 1940 Saur was taken to the French internment camp Camp de Gurs as an "enemy alien" . Then she found refuge with Eva Péan-Pages in the “Villa Brise des Neiges” in La Tronche near Grenoble .

In 1945, after the end of the war, she returned to Paris, first found a studio in rue Broca, then in Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine), where she lived and worked.

Group exhibitions

• 1946 and the following years, Salon des Réalités Nouvelles
• 1950 with Georges Mathieu , Wols , Nicolas Schöffer , Galerie des Deux Iles, Paris (France)
• 1954 «Collages»: Galerie Arnaud (Paris, France)
• 1955 "The emigrated painters - Peintres allemands émigrés en France" (with Jankel Adler , Lou Albert-Lasard , Eduard Bargheer , Max Beckmann , Francis Bott , Heinrich Campendonk , Heinrich Maria Davringhausen , Max Ernst , Otto Freundlich , Johnny Friedlaender , Hans Hartung , Paul Klee , Moissey Kogan , Jeanne Kosnik-Freundlich, Rudolf Levy , Rolf Nesch , Max Pfeiffer-Watenpuhl, Hans Purrmann , Josef Scharl , Kurt Schwitters , Ferdinand Springer , Emma Stern, François Willi Wendt and Wols ), Morsbroich Castle Museum (Leverkusen )
• 1959 "Nouvelle Ecole de Paris", Kunsthalle Mannheim
• 1964 "Cinquante ans de collages": Musée d'art et d'industrie de Saint-Etienne (France)
• 1964 International exhibition with collages at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (France)
• 1981 Group exhibition with Y. Baume, Bohm, Esther Hess, F. Limerat, Louttre. B, C. Maillard, Robert Saint-Criq, R. Thévenot, Marcel Van Thienen, Galerie Le Temps de voir (Dir. G. Thévenot)
• Participation in several group exhibitions in France, Denmark, Italy, USA, Great Britain ...

Solo exhibitions

• 1948 Galerie du Montparnasse, Paris, France
• 1950 “Gouaches et pastels”, Galerie de Beaune, Paris, France
• 1951 «Gouaches» (with Stephen Gilbert), Galerie Arnaud, Paris, France
• 1952 Galerie Arnaud, Paris, France
• 1960 Galerie du Pont Royal (Dir. Irma Hoenigsberg), Paris, France
• 1961 “Peintures”, Galerie du Pont Royal, Paris, France
• 1963 «Collages», Galerie du Pont Royal, Paris, France
• 1963 “Peintures et collages” (with François Willi Wendt), Trier City Museum
• 1971 «Peintures, collages, objets d'ombre», Center Culturel Communal de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine, France
• 1986 “Collages et objets d'ombre”, Sud Gallery - Center culturel communal de Bagneux, France

literature

• "Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite" by Michel Seuphor (1957 - Editions Hazan)
• «Peintres d'origine allemande en France: Francis Bott , Leo Breuer , Heinrich Maria Davringhausen / Davring, Max Ernst , Adolf Fleischmann , Albert Flocon , Otto Freundlich , Johnny Friedlaender , Hans Hartung , Jean Leppien , Hans Reichel , Greta Sauer / Saur, Ferdinand Springer , Wols et François Willi Wendt  »by Roger Van Gindestael in Allemagne d'aujourd'hui n ° 4 et 5 (1957)
• Catalog of the exhibition "Greta Saur - François Willi Wendt  ", 1963 - Trier City Museum
• «Le collage» by Françoise Monnin (1996 - Art du vingtième siècle, Editions Fleurus-Idées)

Web links

• Literature by and about Greta Saur in the catalog of the German National Library