Eva Fischer

Eva Fischer (b.1920) is a Yugoslavian/Italian artist who works in oils, watercolours, engraving and lithography. [Recupero, J. "39 Engravings and 21 Lithographs" (Published by Cidac, Rome 1978)]

Life and Work

Eva was born in Daruvar (Ex-Yugoslavia), in 1920.

Her father, Leopold, Chief Rabbi, and noted Talmudist, was deported by the Nazis from Yugoslavia before the outbreak of World War II. Unfortunately, more than thirty members of Eva’s family were not so lucky and disappeared in the concentration camps.

Eva graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon, just before the outbreak of war. She then returned to Beograd, in 1941, just in time to witness the barbaric Nazi bombardments over her city, without a war declaration, on Sunday 6th April that year. From this moment a tormented period of her life started, a period of constant fleeing, deprivations and very hard sacrifices.

Eva was interned with her mother and her younger brother in the Vallegrande concentration camp on the island of Curzola under the Italian administration. Luckily (as she recognized) this camp was not as terrible the Nazi camps. She was allowed to assist her sick mother with her brother in the Spalato hospital, where they received permission to be transferred to Bologna. There, in 1943, Eva Fischer was hidden with her family under the false name of Venturi. She often remembers that unlucky period of her life when, however, the good Italians tried to give help and solidarity to the persecuted people, in spite of the terrible dangers they were facing. At that time Wanda Varotti, Massimo Massei and many other members of the “Partito d’Azione” gave tremendous help to Eva.

At the end of the war Eva Fischer chose Rome as her adopted city and she adores it. At once she became a member of a group of artists on Via Margutta, and she became a very close friend with many of them. It was at that time, that she started her friendship with Mafai and Guttuso, Tot, Campigli, Fazzini, Carlo Levi, Capogrossi, Corrado Alvaro and so many others of that generation of artists, who had developed unlighted ideas, within the darkness of dictatorship.

She had an intense friendship with De Chirico, Mirko, Sandro Penna e Franco Ferrara, who was already a famous conductor. At that time she took long walks at night in Rome with Jacopo Recupero, Cagli, Avenali, Giuseppe Berto and Alfonso Gatto, and also with Maurice Druon, who was not yet the French Culture Minister and who was already writing the pages of “The great families”.

It was at that time that Salvador Dali saw and fell in love with Eva’s “markets”, while the same Ehrenburg wrote about her “humble and proud bicycles”.

She met Pablo Picasso at the beautiful house of Luchino Visconti and they talked extensively about contemporary art and about the sudden urge that leads to creativity. Picasso pushed her to continue and to progress in the mysterious light of boats and Southern architectures.

Then Eva moved to Paris, where she lived for a long time in Saint Germain des Près. There she looked for Marc Chagall and later on she became one of his devout friends and a deep admirer. During this period Chagall was recounting to her his coloured dreams and the fascination of biblical tales. Zadkine gave a generous hospitality to Eva, admiring her courage for an intense and constructive research, and her fascination for a remarkable Middle European culture. At that time Eva Fischer created “Roman landscapes” with their transparencies and remoteness, as if time had somehow stopped on the ruins of the Eternal City.Then the Madrid period came. In Madrid, in Juan Mordò’s studio, Eva Fischer’s paintings – finally exhibited in museums – were at the centre of debates between the Margutta artist and the Spanish painters, who were still fighting against Franco’s politics. Eva brought them the testimony of an art reborn in a free world, an art made of new, sometimes questionable attempts, but ready to face everybody’s criticism and judgement.

In the sixties, Eva Fischer was in London, where she exhibited in the Lefevre Gallery, the most exclusive Gallery in the “city” where the Italian painter Modigliani had been allowed to show his last one man exhibition. Lefevre Gallery exhibited Eva’s paintings especially for her “Mediterranean colours and the Italian spirit” of her canvases. Eva Fischer’s world is made of short trips, wherever her talent is called for: from Israel, where she painted the wonderful canvases of Jerusalem and Hebron (her stained glass in the Jewish Museum in Rome are very famous), to the United States, where she has numerous collectors and estimators (like the actors Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda).

In 1992 the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, famed for movie sountracks, composed music for one of Eva's exhibitions. [Ennio Morricone "A Eva Fischer, Pittore" (Forum Studios, 1992)]

Now that Eva Fischer’s art is well know in the world, she talks about herself with an absolute modesty, typical of this brave and intelligent woman, who still keeps a clean and deep look in spite of men’s offences she suffered during those inhuman times. She doesn’t condemn those people with rage and revenge, but with the show of melancholic and grey paintings. She depicts the looks of astonished rather than dismayed men, and motionless children, faces frozen to the windows of trains of no return.

Notes

References

*Cambridge Scientific Abstracts "Artbibliographies Modern" (Published by Clio Press, 1996)
*"Paintings by Eva Fischer" (Published by Lefevre Gallery, 1960)
*Recupero, J. "Eva Fischer: 39 Engravings and 21 Lithographs" (Published by Cidac, Rome 1978)
*"Eva Fischer" (Sperling & Kupfer: Milan, 1957)
*Ennio Morricone "A Eva Fischer, Pittore" (Forum Studios, 1992)