Grete Wolf Krakauer

Grete Wolf Krakauer was born in 1890 in Vítkovice

Grete Wolf was born in 1890 in Vítkovice, Moravia, to a middle class Jewish family. In 1891 the family moved to Vienna. There she received a modern, secular education that exposed her to modern art, socialism and psychoanalysis.

She studied art in Vienna and later studied privately with artists in Germany and Austria, including Johannes Itten, Albert Weisgerber and Adolf Hölzel. Her first solo exhibition opened in Vienna in 1913.

After World War I she was active in the art circles of Red Vienna and painted portraits of its socialist leaders. She joined an avant-garde artists' group, where she met the painter and architect Leopold Krakauer, and married him in 1919. Her work was shown at the 1922 Venice Biennale.

In 1924 she followed her husband to Jerusalem with their daughter Trude. She kept exhibiting in Europe until 1932, and worked for the Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod. She ran the Marionette puppet theater from 1935 to 1939 and drew the Peel Commission hearings in 1937.

In the War of Independence she volunteered in the civil guard. She received the Jerusalem Prize for Painting and Sculpture in 1969 and died in Jerusalem in 1970. A retrospective of her work opened at the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod in 2018.