Anita Rée
Anita Clara Rée was a German avant-garde painter during the Weimar Republic. She is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic artists of the 1920s, but at the same time she is relatively unknown in the art history world. She was an independent woman in an art world on the verge between tradition and Modernism, a regional artist with international aspirations, a native from Hamburg brought up as a Protestant, with South American and Jewish roots (her mother was Venezuelan). Her works reflect the sometimes radical changes in modern society at the beginning of the 20th century. In her hauntingly intense paintings, Rée depicts both people of different origins and the self as a foreign being.
Rée took her own life in 1933 when the anti-Semitic government declared her work degenerate. After her death, her work continued to be defamed by the Nazis. Her works, deemed “bastardly,” were to be removed from the collection rooms of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1937. By then, however, they were already in a safe hiding place—Wilhelm Werner, the caretaker of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, had secretly taken them to his own apartment in the summer of the same year. After 1945, he quietly reinstated the seven works.
P.S. Do you know who were Hitler's most hated artists? You will be surprised!
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