Margit Sielska-Reich

Margit Sielska-Reich (1939)

Margit Sielska-Reich ( Ukrainian Марія Сельська , born May 26, 1900 in Kolomyja , Austria-Hungary ; † February 3, 1980 in Lemberg ) was a Polish-Ukrainian painter who worked in Lemberg.

Live and act

Margit Sielska-Reich was the daughter of the engineer Isaak Reich and his wife Laura. In her early youth she moved to Lviv with her parents. She began her art studies at the Free Academy of Fine Arts in Lviv with Leonard Podhorodecki, Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski and Edward Pietsch. From 1920 to 1922 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow with Ignacy Pieńkowski and Władysław Jarocki . From 1925 she continued studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna , after which she came to Paris , where she studied with Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger and became Léger 's assistant. In Paris she met her future husband, the Ukrainian painter from Lemberg Roman Sielski ( Ukrainian Роман Сельський (1903-1993)) know. Margit and Roman returned to Lemberg in 1929 and married in 1931.

In Lviv they founded the artist group "artes" which soon belonged to the avant-garde of Polish art. In 1937 Roman and Margit visited Paris again. After the Soviet troops marched into Lviv on September 22, 1939, they continued to paint.

The occupation of Lviv by the German Wehrmacht on June 30, 1941 meant that Margit was in constant danger of death because of her Jewish descent. In 1942 she was arrested by the Gestapo with her father and brother and his wife and was taken to the Lviv ghetto . Roman was then active as a church painter.

Margit Sielska managed to escape from the ghetto, possibly ransomed by the Ukrainian painter Roman Turyn from Lviv, and came to Krakow with forged “Aryan” papers , then to Tarnów and finally to Warsaw , where she found refuge with the civil engineer Venčeslav Poniž. Back in Lviv in 1943, she survived hidden in the studio of the painter Sascha Wynnytzky until the Germans fled and the Soviets invaded on June 27, 1944.

Since then they have become citizens of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic again . Her husband Roman Sielski was appointed lecturer at the Lviv Art Academy, she painted at home and, like all artists in the Soviet Union, was committed to the practice of socialist realism . The Sielski couple's apartment became a meeting place for free-thinking Lviv artists.

literature

• Natalia Kosmolinska: A window to modernity: The Sielskis' studio. In: Lemberg: A trip to Europe. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86153-459-4 . Pp. 218-227.

Web links

• Margit Sielska-Reich, at Artinfo (Polish)
• Exhibition Margit Sielska-Reich, Breslau 2004
• Pictures by Margit Sielska-Reich
• Pictures by Margit Sielska-Reich
• Portrait photo of Margit Sielska-Reich (1917)