Nathalie Kraemer's Rising Voice

Abstract:Over seventy-five years since the Holocaust, scholarship has still not adequately studied the countless persecuted and murdered Jewish artists who worked in France before the war. Most have eluded close critical or academic attention. This article discusses one Jewish woman artist working in Paris. Her name was Nathalie Kraemer, and until now there have been few details known about her life other than that she was born in Paris in 1891, wrote poetry, and died in Auschwitz in 1943. Kraemer was "discovered" and pulled from obscurity by a private collector named Oscar Ghez, who purchased her paintings in 1973, but they have remained, for the most part, out of public view. Her story highlights how incomplete mainstream accounts of modernism are and how badly the canon of "Holocaust art" needs to be expanded. Based on new research in the archives, this richly illustrated article fleshes out her life and career.