Mini Art Therapy and The Strongest Example of Art Therapy in History: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis
The genesis of what we now consider art therapy dates back to the late 1930s and 1940s. This trend was developed simultaneously in Europe and the United States.
Until now, I knew two names of the creators of this trend, Adrian Hill and Edward Adamson.
However, recently I discovered a woman artist whose fate and work made a great impression on me, and whom I did not know.
There are many definitions of art therapy, but its essence is best explained by examples, and this one is unusual and one of a kind.
We are talking about the Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Bauhaus was a modernist art movement that focused on combining fine arts with applied crafts, and you can see some examples here:
I will jump right away in her biography to the times of World War II. Dicker-Brandeis was an Austrian Jew who lived as a refugee in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. In December 1942, she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Theresienstadt concentration camp (Ghetto Theresienstadt).
Between 1942 and 1944, 15,000 children lived in the Terezin ghetto. The 100 children survived, but not one under the age of 14.
The Terezin Ghetto was called “Hitler’s Gift to the Jews” by the Nazis and was shown to the representatives of the Red Cross as a model ghetto. This model assumed human extinction. The truth was that no one who was sent there was supposed to survive. It was intended to be a place of death.
For foreign policy, Theresienstadt was presented as a “model” ghetto, a place of a new type of Jewish settlement, or even a family camp, in an attempt to deceive Red Cross inspectors about the real conditions in the camps.
However, something extraordinary happened in this ghetto that allowed to save the memory of these children, about what they thought, what they dreamed about, what they missed and what they wanted a better world to look like, and what talents they had.
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist born in Austria, was also sent to this ghetto. Like all exiles, she was allowed to take 50 kg of luggage with her. She only brought painting supplies with the idea of conducting classes for children on-site. She already had experience with it.
She believed that art could help children cope with imprisonment and began to use her Bauhaus experience and the materials she brought to teach art classes (secretly) for about 600 children in the camp.
She conducted such classes in the ghetto until she was sent to the camp in Auschwitz, where she died.
However, she managed to pack the children’s works in the form of notes, paintings, and poetry in the same suitcases with which she came to the ghetto in Theresienstadt — about 5,000 works.
She did it at the last moment, one day before being sent to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
Most of Dicker-Brandeis’ students also died in Nazi camps, but their signed and dated artwork, discovered in their hiding place after the war, has been exhibited around the world to honor their memory. These works can now be seen at the Jewish Museum in Prague. Some became part of a book of art and poetry by Theresienstadt children called “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”.
Here is the cover of this book:
And one of poems:
The Butterfly
The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone…
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ‘way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it wished to
kiss the world goodbye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t
live in here,
In the ghetto.
(Pavel Friedmann April 6, 1942. The poem is preserved in typewritten copy on thin paper in the collection of poetry by Pavel Friedmann, which was donated to the National Jewish Museum during its documentation campaign. It is dated June 4, 1942 in the left corner. Pavel Friedmann was born January 7, 1921, in Prague and deported to Terezin on April 26, 1942. He died in Oswiecim (Auschwitz) on September 29, 1944.)
The children were greatly influenced by her. The survivors say it was the “secret of beauty” and “the secret of freedom”. Her former student Erna Furman wrote: “Teaching Friedl, the times spent drawing with her, are some of the fondest memories of my life. Terezin made it more poignant, but it would be the same anywhere in the world… Friedl was the only one who taught us and never asked for anything in return. She just gave us all of herself.” (Letter to Elena Makarova, 1989)
Friedl saw her goal in trying to rebuild the children's shattered inner world. She used a modified Bauhaus system to develop an emotional focus to compensate for the chaos of time and space.
In the summer of 1943, at a teachers' seminar in the camp, she gave a lecture entitled "Children's Drawing", emphasizing the meaning and purpose of their art, which she saw as "the greatest possible freedom for a child".
Based on her experience working with children, she also hoped to write her study on art as therapy for children.
She wrote this study her whole life and gave the children, whom fate had entrusted to her, everything she had and what she believed.
Here are the art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis:
clockwise from top left
- Portrait of a Standing Man in Black Coat and Hat, Jewish Museum in Prague
2. Portrait of a Young Woman with a Lace Collar, 1940–1944, pastel on paper, Jewish Museum in Prague
3. Begonia at the Window, c. 1934–1936, tempera on paper, Jewish Museum in Prague
4. Reader, Jewish Museum in Prague
5. Landscape around Hronov (Landscape with Agricultural Mechanism), Jewish Museum in Prague
6. Station, Jewish Museum in Prague
The Cross, The Stations of the Cross, and the Crucifixion. Suffering, dying, pain, longing, regret, experiencing cruelty.
On the other side the resurrection of humanity, the defense of humanity, the search for and finding meaning just before death, in the face of death, in hell on earth.
That’s all I see in this story about Friedl Dicker -Brandeis, about the ghetto in Theresienstadt, about adult people and children who were forced to live in hell on earth.
M.
