Soshana

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Soshana Afroyim in her studio in Paris (1956)

Soshana Afroyim (born September 1, 1927 in Vienna ; † December 9, 2015 there ; maiden name Susanne Schüller , artist name from 1948 Soshana ) was an Austrian painter . Your creative time falls into the classic modern . In the course of her travels, she portrayed personalities and developed her art in different directions. While Soshana's early work is characterized by classic, naturalistic representations in the form of landscapes and portraits, abstraction - inspired by Chinese calligraphy  - is important for her later work .

Life

childhood

Soshana was born in Vienna in 1927 under the name Susanne Schüller as the first of two children into a middle-class Jewish family. Her brother Maximilian Schüller followed two years later. Father Fritz Schüller owned a cufflink factory, mother Margarethe Schüller was a sculptor.

Soshana first attended the Rudolf Steiner School , then the alternative Black Forest School .

Soshana began to paint and draw as a child. The mother supported her creativity and meticulously collected all of her daughter's works.

Escape

Soshana's childhood came to an abrupt end with the annexation of Austria to Hitler's Germany in March 1938. The young family had to leave all their belongings behind and left home. Mother and children fled first to Switzerland , then to Paris and finally to England in 1939 for two years . Here Soshana attended Northwood College and in 1940 the Chelsea Polytechnic School in London , where she took painting and drawing courses and received training in fashion drawing.

Soshana, who watched the invasion of Hitler's troops from the window and witnessed the air war in London , processed her impressions as a twelve-year-old in France , for example in a drawing that she titled Hitler as Cloun and in 1940 in London, where she made a series of pictures made from aerial warfare.

Emigration to America

Soshana's father had fled from Paris to Spain via Tangier to New York. In 1941 he managed to get an affidavit for his family, and so Soshana, her mother and her brother, managed to cross over to the USA on the SS Madura , the last passenger ship to sail across the Atlantic during World War II.

In New York, Soshana attended Washington Irving High School and began to paint under the guidance of the artist Beys Afroyim (1893–1984), first in a group and later in private lessons. Meanwhile, Soshana's parents were busy reorganizing their lives and rebuilding a more or less normal everyday life. However, the father Fritz Schüller did not succeed in gaining a foothold in business, which is why the mother Margarethe kept the family afloat with a small shop in which she sold hand-knitted items.

With her teacher Afroyim, Soshana found the attention and security that she lacked at home, and a special friendship developed and subsequently a love affair.

Travel across America

Beys Afroyim and son Amos (1947)

At the age of 17, Soshana and Beys Afroyim traveled across America against her parents' wishes. In order to finance their livelihood, the couple painted portraits of writers, musicians, statesmen and scientists such as Thomas Mann , Arnold Schönberg , Lion Feuchtwanger , Franz Werfel , Otto Klemperer , Bruno Walter , Theodore Dreiser and Hanns Eisler on their travels .

When the UN was founded in San Francisco in May 1945 , the artist couple portrayed delegates such as B. Vasily Vasilyevich Kuznetsov , Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR .

In the same year Soshana married the much older Beys Afroyim in Chicago , and in 1946 a son, Amos, Soshana's only child, was born in New York from this marriage.

Stay in Cuba and the first major exhibition

Beys Afroyim was an active member of the American Communist Party. Due to the persecution of communists during the McCarthy era , the couple decided to leave the United States and spent nine months in Cuba . Soshana had her first major exhibition there in 1948 in the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Havana , where she first adopted the nickname Soshana (Hebrew for lily ), which Beys had given her, as an artist name.

Soshana and Beys returned to the USA, but it soon became too dangerous for them there, which is why they left the United States in 1949 and turned to Europe, where, after stays in Holland , Austria, England, Poland and Czechoslovakia, they ultimately moved to Israel landed.

The difficult financial situation of the family and the firm will of Soshana and Bey to devote themselves to art put a strain on the married life and finally led to an official divorce in 1950. Soshana kept her ex-husband's last name, Afroyim, throughout her life. In 1951 she returned to Vienna with her son.

Vienna - Paris

Studied art in Vienna

In order to be able to devote herself fully to art, Soshana left her five-year-old child in the care of her father Fritz, who had returned to Vienna in 1947 and was able to offer the boy a more stable life. In 1951 she began studying art at the University of Applied Arts and in 1952 switched to the Academy of Fine Arts , where she painted under the guidance of Sergius Pauser , Albert Paris Gütersloh and Herbert Boeckl . However, the academic concept of art did not meet her expectations, which is why she decided in 1952 to drop out of her studies and move to Paris.

Paris

In the 1950s, the French capital was a “Mecca of art”, the “metropolis of the avant-garde at the time, a melting pot of new influences” and “revolutionary ideas”. Soshana first moved into the former studio of the French artist André Derain , then a studio in Impasse Ronsin, right next to the sculptor Brâncuși , who loved her “like a father his daughter”. Soshana later worked in a studio in the Rue de la Grand-Chaumiere that had previously belonged to the painters Alfons Mucha and Paul Gauguin - a cold, damp hole with crumbling walls: "[...] after spending a few months there, I realized why Gauguin had fled to Tahiti. "

Soshana in her Paris studio (1953)

Despite all the poverty and hardship, it was a "bittersweet time"; Paris was Soshana's center of life for a full twenty-two years. She made the acquaintance of numerous personalities such as the Czech painter Kupka , the French artist Herbin , the painter and sculptor Ossip Zadkine , the French sculptor César , the French painters Pignon and Bazaine , the German painter, graphic artist and sculptor Max Ernst . She also met the French artist Yves Klein , the American sculptor Alexander Calder , the artists Wifredo Lam , Sam Francis, Fontana , Émile Gilioli , the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre and the well-known Indonesian painter Affandi , as well as Chagall , whom she visited in St. Paul de Vence .

Above all, however, with Alberto Giacometti , whom she met in 1956, Soshana shared a deep friendship and mutual appreciation. From 1953 onwards, one of Soshana's most convinced sponsors was the Zurich gallery owner Max G. Bollag .

In Paris, Soshana had exhibitions, including in the André Weil gallery, in various salons such as the Salon d'Automne , the Salon de Printemps, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and in the Salon de Mai , where she first met Pablo Picasso . The artist invited her to his villa in Vallauris , where he drew a portrait of the 27-year-old in 1954. “Picasso is also interested in the woman behind the artist, who determines her life as independently as he is used to as a man. He is completely fascinated by her extraordinary personality and her exotic travels, which give rise to long and intense discussions. "

Travel around the world

Pinot Gallizio and Soshana in Alba del Piemonte, Italy (1960)
Soshana, André Verdet, Picasso and Pignon at the opening of the Soshana exhibition at Château Grimaldi in Antibes, France, 1962

From 1956 Soshana undertook extensive trips to the Far East . She had managed to get an invitation from the Chinese Ministry of Culture to exhibit in Beijing, and on the way to China she visited India, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan. Soshana was very interested in Indian philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism and was deeply impressed by the calligraphic art of China and Japan. She learned techniques with ink on rice paper from Buddhist monks in Kyoto and from Chinese painters in Hangzhou. The art of calligraphy became formative for her style. In 1957 she finally reached Beijing to exhibit her works in the Imperial Palace.

In 1959 the artist traveled through Africa, where she portrayed Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné and finally returned to Paris. In the same year Soshana met the Italian artist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio . In Paris and in his studio in Alba del Piemonte , the two artists created around twenty joint works. Through Gallizio, Soshana came into contact with the CoBrA group, including Karel Appel and Asger Jorn . As a woman, however, she was denied membership in the artist group. In 1959 a collaboration with the O'Hana Gallery began in London, where she exhibited three times between 1959 and 1963.

In 1962 Soshana had a successful exhibition in the Château Grimaldi, later the Musée Picasso in Antibes , in southern France .

Soshana in Mexico

From 1964, Soshana spent long periods of time in Mexico. She traveled the country and lived for many months in Cuernavaca , the "city of eternal spring", at that time the refuge of many artists and intellectuals. She made friends with important Mexican artists such as Rufino Tamayo , David Alfaro Siqueiros , José Luis Cuevas and Mathias Goeritz , who became one of her most important companions in Mexico. It was in Mexico in 1965 that the artist first met Adolph Gottlieb , with whom she later maintained a deep friendship in New York. 1966 took place an exhibition of her works in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the most important cultural institution in Mexico.

Second world trip

Her second world tour took Soshana in 1968 to the South Seas , the Caribbean , Thailand , Bali , Australia , India , Sikkim , Nepal , Afghanistan , Iran and Israel .

In Sikkim she was commissioned by the royal family in 1969 to make portraits of the King and Queen of Sikkim. She also became a member of the Theosophical Society in the same year .

The artist moved to Jerusalem in 1972, where four planned exhibitions at the Old Jaffa Gallery were prevented by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War the following year. Two years later, in 1974, she moved to New York.

new York

From 1974 to 1985 Soshana lived and worked in New York, where she initially lived in Manhattan in the infamous Chelsea Hotel before moving into a studio in Queens. In New York, too, she made the acquaintance of well-known personalities such as Mark Rothko , Francesco Clemente and the art patron Joseph Hirshhorn, and she deepened her friendship with Adolph Gottlieb , whom she had already met in 1965.

Although she had a total of nine solo exhibitions in New York, Soshana was never really happy in the "Big Apple". In 1985 she returned to her hometown Vienna.

Vienna

With Vienna as the center of her life, Soshana pursued her passion for travel until her health no longer permitted it from 2005 onwards. She lived in a nursing home, where she still painted daily. Her son Amos took on her work in 2005 and organizes international exhibitions and other projects.

All of her life, Soshana wrote diaries, filmed her travels, interviewed artists and other personalities in the art world, and began to keep written records of her life and the development of the international art scene. Two autobiographical book projects were tackled but never completed. These collections of video tapes, tape recordings and manuscripts as well as Soshana's entire estate were transferred to the archive of the Austrian National Library in 2008 and are therefore accessible to the public.

In addition, the first monograph on the artist's life and work was published in autumn 2010, entitled Soshana. Life and work in Springer-Verlag .

In September 2011 seven Soshana works were stolen from a private collection in Vienna.

plant

Early work

Soshana's early work combines positions of American realism with youthfully carefree Fauvism .

Otto Klemperer, conductor , oil on canvas, 1945
Outside Havana , oil on canvas, 1947
Artists in Paris , oil on canvas, 1955
Kyoto , ink on paper, 1957

From the age of fourteen, Soshana attended a New York art school, where her style was strongly influenced. Until her early abstract pictures, which were created after moving to Paris in 1952, she painted an intense color, archaic realism. Soshana's striking realism of those years can be seen in the context of politically active art around 1945, a transition phase between the realisms of the 1930s and the abstract painting of the 1950s. Even in London, the experiences of the bombing had moved the budding artist to deal with her environment. Her New York art teacher and later husband Beys Afroyim, who was a committed communist, brought her even closer to social realism.

On her travels with Beys Afroyim through the USA, and later Cuba, Israel and Europe, Soshana painted street scenes (e.g. Old Street in NY City, 1943, or Street in LA, 1945), workers in the factories (e.g. . the series My Sweatshop in New York , 1944), people she met on her way (e.g. Two Black Youths , 1944, or Young Man with a Straw , 1945) and increasingly also landscapes. She also made many commissioned portraits of artists and politicians (e.g. Franz Werfel on his death bed , 1945, or Otto Klemperer, 1945). These portraits also reflect the critical-intellectual environment in which Soshana and her future husband Beys Afroyim frequented. In these frontal or three-quarter portraits, all those portrayed look emphatically melancholy. From the perspective of bold social realism, Soshana interpreted the psychology of European emigrants in Los Angeles and the European envoy of the founding congress of the United Nations in San Francisco.

Soshana's environmental studies of workers in factories show affinities in terms of content to the works of well-known regionalists and social realists such as Thomas Hart Benton , Grant Wood , the Soyer Brothers or the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera .

Until 1948 Soshana remained true to the colorful and expressive social realism. Figures in these pictures are roughly modeled with a few broad brushstrokes and without any detail, the streets and landscape scenes are always shown from a slightly elevated point of view, neither houses nor figures cast shadows, the rich application of the primary colors exudes an almost cheerful mood, which echoes of Fauvism can be interpreted. Soshana's pictures of Austrian Alpine landscapes, which were made after her return to Austria in 1951, show the first steps into Informel .

Paris, Asia and the Informel

When she moved to Paris in 1952, Soshana became part of the so-called Nouvelle École de Paris , a representative of the Paris School.

Influenced by contacts with other artists from all over the world, Soshana gradually turned from expressive realism to Art Informel. Step by step, she completely eliminated the object from her pictures and thus joined the international art jargon of the period after 1945. The painting of her time in Paris is often associated with the terms Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Informel . Their works are compared with those of Jackson Pollock , Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung .

From the second half of the 1950s, Soshana's painting increasingly showed a calligraphic style. In Paris she had many Japanese and Chinese acquaintances (e.g. Tobashi, Walasse Ting ) and made her first attempts at calligraphy . Like many other Informel artists, Soshana was fascinated by the Asian calligraphic aesthetic and the philosophy behind it.

She received the decisive impulse to deal intensively with traditional Far Eastern art during her trip to Asia in 1957. She experimented with paper and ink and soon applied the technique to her oil paintings.

Despite all the turning to abstract art from 1952 onwards, Soshana never completely detached herself from the object in the course of her life. Again and again she interwoven figures in her pictures.

Mexico and Abstract Surrealism

Surrealist tendencies can be found again and again in Soshana's works; Infinite perspectives, placeless expanses, in which enigmatic figures, masks and heads seem to float in space. The increased use of this surrealist imagery coincided with Soshana's first trip to Mexico in 1960. Due to its geographical location and its political anti-fascist position, Mexico was a great attraction for artists and intellectuals from Europe.

Alone in Mexico , oil on canvas, 1969

Soshana is also a “child of the language of painting in Mexico”, a “Pintora Filomexicana”. The painter was magically attracted to the country all of her life. The works that were created there or that have a memory of the country as their motif have a strong character of their own.

To do this, she further developed a technique that she came across by chance in her Paris studio when it rained through the roof onto a still damp picture. With turpentine, Soshana imitated the structures of the dripping water - what emerged were intoxicating, psychedelic, exotic emotional landscapes. Drip paintings with opposite signs, reminiscent of the structure of liquid crystals . She herself describes: “ Some biochemists say that my paintings resemble what you see, when you look into a microscope.

Loneliness and pain

A motif runs through the entire work of Soshana and has her reputation as a "prophetess of calamity", "painter of anxiety and loneliness, of suffering and madness, of pain and death" or "Kassandra of the canvas" (The Mainichi 1957) brought in: a lonely figure, a silhouette or a head between heavy dark beams or surrounded by wild, threatening thickets, often in a tunnel perspective.

Political works

6 million Jews , mixed media on paper, 1988

As a child, political events crossed Soshana's biography. She processed these with the eyes of a child, for example in two drawings depicting Hitler as a cloun or a landscape drawing with a Swiss flag that was created on the family's escape route through Switzerland. Cold war, nuclear threat, terrorism - all of these topics keep cropping up in Soshana's oeuvre. But especially in her later work, Soshana repeatedly referred to political events. When she returned to Vienna in 1985, she worked on the subject of Nazi rule and the Holocaust . 1987/88 was created at the time of Kurt Waldheim's election campaigna cycle of images in which Soshana incorporates Nazi propaganda texts into gouache paintings like collages. There were also series about the Yugoslav Wars, the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 or the Iraq wars.

Late work

From the late 1980s, Soshana condensed her work. Reminiscences of existing work series are clearly recognizable .

Watermelon , oil on canvas, 2010

Soshana's late work from the year 2000 stands out clearly from her other pictures. The surfaces are clearer and more calmly structured, the shapes simpler, the colors more unmixed. The motifs seem almost childishly naive, the paintings are small picture puzzles full of irony and fantasy.

Works (selection)

An overview of Soshana's creative periods can be found on her homepage.

  • 1944: Workers in a NY Sweatshop , oil on canvas, 40.5 × 48 cm
  • 1955: Artists in Paris , oil on canvas, 73 × 100 cm
  • 1957: Maroque Marrakech , oil on canvas, 60 × 55 cm
  • 1963: Chinese Tiger , oil on canvas, 96 × 162 cm
  • 1972: Terrorist in Munich , oil on canvas, 115 × 72 cm
  • 1981: Rainbow , oil on canvas, 101 × 76 cm
  • 1988: Concentration Camp , acrylic on canvas, 116 × 74 cm
  • 1990: Memories of Mexico , oil on canvas, 80 × 115 cm
  • 1992: Khorramshar - Iraq, oil on canvas, 75.5 × 115 cm
  • 2004: Movement V. , acrylic on canvas, 40 × 60 cm
  • 2007: Life , oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm

reception

Soshana within Austrian modernism

Soshana created the majority of her oeuvre in the USA, Israel, France, Mexico, South America, India, Japan, China, Africa, etc. The perception in the context of Austrian art of the 20th century has therefore largely remained denied her. Paradoxically, the foreign press saw her as an Austrian painter. Today she is often referred to as a cosmopolitan, a globetrotter, whose work has been shaped by experiences on all continents.

"Soshana's work looks like a travel diary, which page for page reflects her travels and the impressions and visual experiences gathered there, using a changing style that ranges from more or less abstract impressionism to tachistic calligraphy." ( Pierre Restany 1969, Art historian, philosopher, art critic and curator)

Soshana's position as a woman in the art world

“A woman who does art lives in an exam situation and the exam can be taken by anyone. Because everyone 'knows' what a woman is, everyone can take the right to reduce a woman's judgment of art to how she is as a woman. "

An art career was by no means a given for a woman in Soshana's time. The goal of making a living from art production seemed almost unattainable at the time, which is why many aspiring artists also completed practical vocational training, mostly in the context of the art business. Soshana chose an independent, self-determined and emancipated path in an epoch in which the legal equality with men, the same opportunity to take up any profession, was simply unimaginable.

In a letter to the co-author of her autobiography, she is aware of her role as a pioneer: “ This is why I want to write this book, to say what a struggle I went through to be a woman and an artist and be maybe like 100 years ahead of the times we actually live in. "

How difficult it was to assert oneself as a woman on the art market is shown by the fact that even a revolutionary artist group like CoBrA rejected her for sexist reasons or that the gallery owner of her fellow artist Pinot Gallizio did not want her to co-sign on the joint works. She was often rejected because of her gender. In the manuscript of her autobiography she says: "The owner of the Galerie de France told me in no uncertain terms, that they did not like to take woman artists on contract, it was considered too risky. A woman could get married, have children and abandon her career. Twenty years of publicity and a long-term financial investment in a female artist would be ruined over-night. Since this did not apply in my case, I felt the discrimination against women all the more.

According to widespread opinion at the time, the role of a woman in art was that of a muse who had to inspire the artist, not that of a painter who picked up a brush herself.

But Soshana knew how to create an independent, unmistakable image as an artist and how to successfully manage herself. Using tense stories, she tried to create a real myth around herself. She made a cult following her encounter with Picasso, especially on the day when she visited him in his villa in Vallauris to be portrayed by him and turned down Picasso's invitation to stay with him. The planned title of an unfinished novel The Girl who said No to Picasso illustrates the attempt to use a big name to attract attention.

Nevertheless, she was often torn between relief and pride at having said “No” and regret that she had not followed the safer path at the side of a man.

Awards

Exhibitions (selection)

Rainbow , oil on canvas 1981. Motif of the Soshana special stamp from the Modern Art in Austria series 2008
  • 1948: Circulo de Bellas Artes, Havana
  • 1957: Imperial Palace, Beijing
  • 1960: Museo de Arte, São Paulo
  • 1961: Soshana, Musée Picasso, Antibes
  • 1966: Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
  • 1973: Old Jaffa Gallery, Israel
  • 1976: Modern Art Center, Zurich
  • 1982: Horizon Gallery, New York
  • 1997: Soshana-Retrospective , Palais Pálffy, Vienna
  • 1998: Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria
  • 1999: Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France
  • 2006: Book presentation, Jewish Museum, Vienna
  • 2007: Siddhartha Art Gallery, Kathmandu, Nepal; Agora Gallery, New York; Givatayim Theater, Israel
  • 2008: Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah, West Bank; City Council of Lima, Pancho Fierro Art Gallery, Peru
  • 2009: Yeshiva University Museum, New York; National Bank of Serbia, Belgrade; UCLA Hillel Museum, Los Angeles
  • 2012: Lilly's Art, Vienna; Exhibition on the occasion of Soshana's 85th birthday
  • 2013: Gallery of the National Museum Bahrain
  • 2013: Galician-Jewish Museum Krakow, Poland
  • 2013: Austrian National Library, Vienna
  • 2013: Gallery Art Couture Dubai, UAE
  • 2013: Al-Babtain Library Kuwait
  • 2014: Galerie del Ponte Turin, Italy
  • 2014: Galerie Szaal, Vienna
  • 2015: Theater Nestroyhof / Hamakom, Vienna
  • 2015: Deutschvilla Strobl on Wolfgangsee, Austria
  • 2015: Gallery Lendnine, Graz

literature

  • Martina Gabriel, Amos Schueller (Ed.): Soshana . An overview of Soshana's work with texts by Peter Baum, Max Bollag, Walter Koschatzky, and many more, Vienna 2005
  • Karin Jilek: The artist Soshana “A broken childhood” . In: Fetz / Fingernagel / Leibnitz / Petschar / Pfunder (ed.): Night over Austria. The Anschluss in 1938 - escape and expulsion . Publication on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the State Hall of the Austrian National Library from March 7th to April 28th 2013, Residenz Verlag, St. Pölten 2013, ISBN 978-3-7017-3299-9
  • Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The pictorial oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde , thesis art history, University of Vienna 2011
  • Amos Schueller, Angelica Bäumer (Ed.): Soshana. Life and work . Comprehensive monograph with texts by Matthias Boeckl, Afnan Al-Jaderi, Christian Kircher, Marlene Streeruwitz, Martina Pippal , Christian Kloyber and many more, Vienna, New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-7091-0274-9
  • Amos Schueller (Ed.): Soshana. Paintings and drawings 1945–1997 , exhibition catalog for the retrospective at Palais Pallfy, Vienna 1997
  • United Artists Ltd. (Ed.): Soshana , extensive illustrated book with texts by Jean Cassou, Michel Georges-Michel, Waldemar George, Pierre Restany, Tel Aviv 1973

Movie

Alone everywhere. The painter Soshana . The 45-minute documentary was produced by Werner Müller and broadcast on 3sat in December 2013 . It is based on Soshana's life and the filming took place in Vienna, Paris, Mexico and New York.

Web links

Commons : Soshana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The painter Soshana died at the age of 89
  2. Afnan Al-Jaderi: The Story of a Life . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 25
  3. a b Afnan Al-Jaderi: The story of a life . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 26
  4. Website Soshana , soshana.net, accessed on November 3, 2012
  5. Afnan Al-Jaderi: The Story of a Life . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, pp. 26/27
  6. a b Afnan Al-Jaderi: The story of a life . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 27
  7. "This calm returned in my life: a fixed place of residence, no hotel rooms, no stations, no eternal driving away and traveling." Amos Schueller: Soshana - The daughter of my grandfather . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 254
  8. Martina Gabriel: Soshana - Leben und Werk, in: Soshana, Amos Schueller Wien 2005, p. 7
  9. ^ From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library
  10. ^ From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library
  11. Afnan Al-Jaderi: The Story of a Life . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 30
  12. Martina Gabriel: Soshana - Life and Work . Amos Schueller, Vienna 2006, p. 14
  13. "I wanted to see China and so I went to the Chinese consulate and said, I am a painter and I would like to fly to China." (From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts 1997, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  14. Amos Schueller, Biography, in: Soshana, 2005, p. 39
  15. "His hospital was pretty primitive (...) I portrayed Albert Schweitzer. He didn't want me to draw his glasses even though he had worn them "(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, undated, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  16. Amos Schueller, Biography, Soshana, 2005, p. 39
  17. Once going down Rue de Seine in the spring of 1959, I met an Italian painter in one of the galleries and we started talking and got very interested in each other. His name was Pinot Gallizio. I took him over to my studio and showed him my work. He in turn tried to explain to me, how to use Vinovil, that is a certain plastic material. I wanted to learn from him this technique. (…) ”(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  18. ^ " Pinot and myself started working on the same canvas at the same time. He showing me his technique of using Vinovil, with my technique using the palette knife. (...) Later I visited Pinot at his home in Alba de Piemonte and we worked there together using all different methods, even fire on canvas. (...) In Paris and Alba, we painted 20 or 25 paintings together, but his art dealer did not want me, therefore we signed seperately. ”(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  19. It happened that Karel Appel sat next to us and we started talking, as Pinot knew Appel and was connected with the Cobra Group, together with Asger Jorn. ”(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  20. They did not want a woman to join them. I hurt me but as a woman I slowly get used to it. ”(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  21. Several articles about Soshana's exhibitions at the O'Hana Gallery can be found in the archives of the Austrian National Library: 10/1959 The Arts Review, 1959 The Jewish Chronicle, 2/1960 Apollo, 13/2/1960 The Guardian, 19/2/1960 Evening News, 26/2/1960 The Jewish Chronicle, 4/3/1960 Yorkshire Evening News, two articles 1963 - newspaper unknown.
  22. Catherine Guglielmi, La Chronique Artistique, L'Indepentant August 31st 1962: “  Le vernissage de Soshana au Musee Picasso (Chateau Grimaldi) for an evenement artistique et mondain digne de attachante personnalite de l'artiste.  »
  23. Christian Kloyber, Mexico - Soshana inspiration. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 227.
  24. Afnan Al-Jaderi, story of a life. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, pp. 37, 38.
  25. Several articles about Soshana's exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes are in the archives of the Austrian National Library: 1966 El Heraldo, 5/6/1966 El Redondel, 5/8/1966 Excelsior, 8/8/1966 El Sol de Mexico, 10 / 8/1966 El Universal, 13/8/1966 The News, 17/8/1966 El Nacional, 17/8/1966 Cine Mundial, 18/8/1966 The News, 18/8/1966 El Sol de Mexico, 18 / 8/1966 Novedades, 22/8/1966 Excelsior, 31/8/1966 Excelsior
  26. Christian Kirchner, Soshana the world collector. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 50.
  27. Afnan Al-Jaderi, story of a life. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, pp. 39, 40.
  28. “where many artists stayed, as the owner took paintings for payment. Once I gave him a large painting for several month payment. " (From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  29. Amos Schueller, Biography, Soshana, 2005, p. 40.
  30. Amos Schueller, Biography, Soshana, 2005, p. 40.
  31. "In fact what happens now in New York has nothing to do with art anymore. You have to be in the clique of big money. Some of the big galleries that dictate the art fashion are financed by the mafia. [...] Yet when you see what happens to the artists in NY today - as NY became the Art Center of the world - only 1 of 2000 artists can make living from his work. From that only 4 or 5 women artists are known. […] Today is really like the end of art. nothing new comes out anymore. Myself and many other artists have so many paintings that they cant sell and not even exhibit and dont know what to do with their work. (...) In Paris in 1952, when I first arrived, there was a different spirit still in the Art World . The artists believed in what they did and the galleries were looking for new talents and there was a hope of success and fame. […] This period that I lived through in Paris from 1952 to 1972 is gone. [...] The American and German collectors no longer came to Paris to buy art and NY became the art center instead.”(From Soshana's unpublished manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library)
  32. 1981 the autobiographical novel The Girl who said No to Picasso in cooperation with Lucy Freeman; 1983 the autobiography with the working title Hand to Mouth - A Self Portrait in Color in cooperation with Toby Falk.
  33. October 10, 2011 - http://www.vienna.at/kunstraub-18-werke-aus-wiener-privatsammlung-gestohlen/3048745
  34. ^ Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work. Springer 2010, p. 21.
  35. Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 11.
  36. Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 12.
  37. ^ Matthias Boeckl, The Colors of Life - Prehistory and Context of Soshana's Early Work in US Modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 17.
  38. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The pictorial oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, p. 24/25
  39. Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 21.
  40. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde (PDF; 15.0 MB), diploma thesis 2011, p. 26.
  41. Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 20.
  42. ^ Matthias Boeckl: The colors of life - prehistory and context of Soshana's early work in US modernism. In: Soshana. Life and work. Springer 2010, p. 22.
  43. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The pictorial oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, pp. 29, 30.
  44. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, p. 36.
  45. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, pp. 36–39.
  46. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, pp. 52–54.
  47. ^ " My Trip to China in 1957 left a lasting influence on my work (...) I was taught the traditional Chinese painting technique on rice paper by an artist in Hangchow. When I returned to Paris I tried applying oils with a palette knife on canvas in a similar way and I continue to use this technique ”. Soshana in: Soshana, United Artists Ltd., Tel Aviv 1973, p. 146.
  48. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, p. 47.
  49. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, p. 81.
  50. Christian Kloyber: Mexico - Soshana's inspiration. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 223.
  51. Afnan Al-Jaderi: The Story of a Life. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 38.
  52. Martina Pippal: Soshana and Austrian Modernism - Attempt at Positioning. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 55.
  53. Soshana, How to make use of and control results obtained by accident, archived in the Austrian National Library, p. 6.
  54. Martina Gabriel: Soshana - Leben und Werk, in: Soshana, Amos Schueller Wien 2005, p. 24.
  55. Examples can be found on the homepage www.soshana.net under the menu item “Pictures” in the “Political” category.
  56. Ulli Sturm: Soshana - Eine Kosmopolitin, in: Soshana, Amos Schueller Vienna 2005, p. 32
  57. Examples can be found on the homepage www.soshana.net, under the menu item "Pictures", in the category "Recent Works"
  58. See the web link on Soshana's life and work
  59. Peter Baum: Existential Findings: The Viennese painter Soshana. In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 140; Ulli Sturm: Soshana - Eine Kosmopolitin, in: Soshana, Amos Schueller Vienna 2005, p. 31/32
  60. Marlene Streeruwitz: Soshana means rose. Or lily . In: Soshana. Life and work . Springer, 2010, p. 8
  61. Matthias Boeckl, The Colors of Life - Prehistory and Context of Soshana's Early Work in US Modernism, Soshana. Life and Work, Springer 2010, p. 18.
  62. Martina Gabriel: Soshana - Leben und Werk , in: Soshana, Amos Schueller Wien 2005, p. 7
  63. ^ Letter to Toby Falk, February 9, 1983, archived in the Austrian National Library
  64. From Soshana's unpublished manuscript for her autobiography, Soshana / Falk 1983
  65. Birgit Prunner: Soshana. The painterly oeuvre of the 1950s and 1960s in the light of the international avant-garde, diploma thesis 2011, pp. 75, 80.
  66. From Soshana's unpublished diaries and manuscripts, archived in the Austrian National Library.
  67. Information about the film