Käthe Schuftan

Käthe Schuftan
Käthe Schuftan, 1945
Born	Käthe Fanny Schuftan (1899-01-12)12 January 1899 Breslau,(now Wroclaw), Lower Silesia, Poland)
Died	21 February 1958(1958-02-21) (aged 59) Manchester, England, UK
Nationality	German, from 1947 British
Movement	Expressionism, new objectivity

Käthe Schuftan (12 January 1899 – 21 February 1958) was a German Jewish artist whose paintings and drawings expressed both human suffering and the aspiration of spirit, in the mid 20th century. Josef Paul Hodin wrote that she "worked in an Expressionist style reminiscent of Käthe Kollwitz' social pathos". An artist at the time of the Weimar culture, she was tortured and imprisoned by the Nazis in the early 1930s, and her work was destroyed. She escaped in 1939, arriving in Manchester, England, not long before the outbreak of the World War II; she lived and worked there until her death in 1958.

Käthe Fanny Schuftan was born on 12 January 1899 in Breslau, now Wrocław, Poland; her father was the chemist Dr. Georg Schuftan, her mother Else née Mugdan. The chemist Paul Schuftan was her older brother. Käthe Schuftan studied at the art academy in Breslau and in Munich; one of her teachers was the graphic designer Hans Leistikow. She then worked in Breslau and became a close friend of Ernst Eckstein, one of the leading figures in the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, SAP, who apparently committed suicide after his arrest by the Nazis in May 1933. Käthe Schuftan subsequently moved to Berlin.

In Berlin, Käthe Schuftan and her younger sister Lotte were involved in underground activities of the SAP. In November 1933, she was detained and tortured by the SA at the former Volkshaus (People's House) in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and all the pictures in her flat were destroyed. In proceedings against 24 SAP members in late 1934, the Volksgerichtshof sentenced her to two years in prison (minus the time she had been on remand) for planning high treason, i.e. an overthrow of the government by violence. In 1937, Margot Riess described Käthe's works as expressing a "primarily tragic, accusing attitude towards the world, with all its stark misery, agony and hardship". In December 1933, some of her works had been included in a Breslau exhibition of what the Nazis considered "Degenerate art"; three of her watercolours and a drawing were confiscated from Breslau museums in September 1937. She left Berlin shortly before the outbreak of World War II.