Käthe Ephraim Marcus

Käthe Ephraim Marcus was born in 1892 in Wrocław

Käthe Ephraim was born in 1892 in Breslau, Germany, today Wrocław in Poland. Her father, Emil Ephraim, was a merchant, and her mother was Fanny née Gottstein. As a youth she joined the Blau Weiss youth movement.

She studied art in Karlsruhe in 1911 and in Breslau in 1912. From 1913 she studied in Berlin with Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann. In 1925 she studied in Paris with André Lhote and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

In 1917 she married Joseph Marcus, a jurist and Zionist leader. She was influenced by Käthe Kollwitz and by German and French Expressionism. In 1928 she joined the German painters' union, and in 1930 she moved to Düsseldorf and joined the Rhine Group.

After a year in England in 1933, she settled in Jerusalem in 1934. In 1947 the British evicted her from her studio in the Old City, and most of her early works were destroyed. In 1948 she and her family were evacuated to Ramat Gan, where she also studied sculpture with Moshe Sternschuss.

Her paintings often showed mothers and children, lonely women, new immigrants and transit camps. In 1961 she published the book Out of My Life. She died in Ramat Gan in 1970 and was buried in Kfar Shmaryahu.