Stella Kramrisch

Stella Kramrisch (1896-1993) was an American art historian, who was well known as a specialist in Indian art and Hinduism. She was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of South Asia Regional Studies, where she had been recruited by W. Norman Brown, in addition to being a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Stella Kramrisch was born on May 29, 1896 in Nikolsburg, now Mikulov, in Austria. She was trained as a ballet dancer growing up in Austria. When Kramrisch was about 10 her parents moved to Vienna. One day she came across a translation of the Bhagavadgita: "I was so impressed it took my breath away." She had found what she wanted to do in her life. She enrolled at the University of Vienna, studying Indian art, Sanskrit, anthropology and Indian philosophy, and earned her doctorate in 1919.

That year she traveled to London in 1919 with a university delegation to give three lectures at Oxford. Rabindranath Tagore heard her speak and invited her to come to India and teach at the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan in 1922. She was appointed professor of Indian art at the University of Calcutta in 1924, where she taught until 1950. She married the Hungarian economist, Laszlo Nemenyi, an adviser to the viceroy, in 1929. Since they lived in different cities (Calcutta and Delhi), they saw little of each other. After the British left India in 1947, Nemenyi opted to work for the new government of Pakistan and moved to Karachi. In 1950 he was found shot dead on a beach, dressed in evening clothes. After this, she moved permanently to the United States.

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