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    Artist

  • Spiro, Eugen, 1874-1972

    • Title

  • Portrait of Rosa Wunderlich

  • Physical Description

    1 painting : oil on canvas ; 40.24 x 30.32 in. ; 102.2 x 77 cm

  • Date

    1926

  • Notes

    The artistery is very high: the paint applied in broad brushstrokes models the forms in contrasting planes. Signed and dated, lower right.

  • Summary

    The sitter is a handsome woman of about 70, seated in a high-backed armchair, her hands in her lap, shown to the knees. She wears a dark dress with a golden brooch at the collar. She has a slight smile, eyes glassy and kind.

  • Depicted

    Wunderlich, Rosa

  • Subject

    Nineteen twenties; Women, Portraits

  • Genre

    Portraits

  • Medium

    Paintings; Oil paintings

  • Accession Number

  • URL

Biographical/Historical Information

Rosa Wunderlich was the mother of the Berlin-born economist and politician, Frieda Wunderlich (1884-65), who tought in the USA at the New School for Social Research.

Eugen Spiro was born in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland) in 1874, the son of a synagogue cantor. He studied art in Breslau (under Albrecht Bräuer), Munich (under Franz von Stuck), and in Italy. After an extended stay in Berlin from 1906 to 1914, Spiro settled in Paris, where he belonged to a group of artists that met at the Café du Dôme. He received a professorship at the Académie Moderne, was elected to the Académie Des Beaux-Arts and co-founded the Salon d'Automne. The outbreak of WW I forced him to return to Germany, where he soon became a popular portrait painter. From 1915 to 1933 Spiro was on the executive board of the Berlin Secession and a professor at the Staatliche Kunstschule. The Nazi takeover forced Spiro into emigration. The sixty-one-year old went to Paris in 1935, where he founded the Union Des Artistes Libres in 1936. During this time, he met his wife Lily Jacoby at a French internment camp in Gurs. After the German occupation of France in 1940, Spiro and his wife emigrated to America, settling in New York in 1941. Spiro worked as a teacher at the Wayman Adams School in Elizabethtown, New York and at Dartmouth College. He participated in exhibits in the United States for the rest of his life. Eugen Sporo died in New York in 1972.

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Citation

Spiro, Eugen: Portrait of Rosa Wunderlich, Leo Baeck Institute, 77.33.