Angelika Schatz

Angelika Schatz was born in 1897 in Geneva

Angelika Schatz was born in 1897, the eldest daughter of Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel art school, and his first wife, the painter Eugenia Zhirmunsky. Her early years were spent in Sofia, Bulgaria, where her father served as court sculptor. When she was six, her mother left for Paris with the sculptor Andrey Nikolov, a student of her father, and took her along.

Schatz studied art at an academy in Germany. In 1919 she married Robert Meerson, and the couple lived in Hamburg, Paris, Berlin and then Prague. Their only child, a son, was born in Berlin.

In 1932 she won a gold medal at an art show in Paris, and she exhibited in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In Sofia she belonged to a group of women artists and wrote as an art critic. During World War II she and her son were held for a time in labor camps.

In January 1948 she moved to Israel with her son, and in 1951 she married Dan Schneider. She joined the Association of Painters and Sculptors in Tel Aviv and kept painting. She died in Tel Aviv in 1975 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery.

In 2013 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art opened an exhibition of 20 of her paintings, found in an attic. A book on her life by Doron Lurie appeared the same year.