City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900—1938, Belvedere: 25 January-19 May 2019

The purpose of the  exhibition City of Women’s  is to introduce you to all those great female artists that too often have been overlooked,  and to celebrate their fight to establish themselves in a field mainly run by men. Even though they did not get the chance to study art officially, they  still managed to display their works; setting up self-funded exhibitions, creating associations and supporting each other.                                                                                                                      

Most of their lives and careers came to an abrupt halt with the horror of Second World War and concentration camps: Theresa Feodorovna Ries, for example, was pretty successful and was particularly appreciated by the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, but in 1938 the Nazi troops destroyed her studio, forcing her to leave her works and to flee.

Friedl Dicker, after an interrogation, was deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where  she managed nonetheless to hold art classes for Jewish children. She was murdered shortly after.

Ilse Twardowski-Conrat, close to Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, was a sculptor who took her life in 1942,  having destroying some of her biggest works, when she found out she was about to get deported.

Thanks to this exhibition you will  meet some highly talented female artists, who have often been overlooked and whose careers were cut short by a  particularly difficult and painful time in history.

Click here to book your tickets to the Lower Belvedere

Lower Belvedere

Rennweg 6A, 1030 Vienna