Lea Grundig

Lea Grundig (Dresden, 23 March 1906 – 10 October 1977, at sea) was a German painter and graphic artist.

Lea Langer was born in the old central heart of Dresden, where she grew up as part of the city's Jewish community.

Her father was a joiner/furniture maker and her mother worked in garment manufacturing.

Lea attended school locally between 1912 and 1922, while rejecting, even as a young girl, the family's religious orthodoxy.

She went on to study at the city's Decorative Arts and Crafts Academy before progressing, in 1924, to the prestigious Saxon Art Academy: here she was admitted into the Masterclass of Otto Gussmann where fellow participants included Otto Griebel, Wilhelm Lachnit and Hans Grundig.

At the Academy she also got to know Otto Dix, whom she would come to regard as one of the most influential of her mentors.

She remained at The Academy till 1926.

1926 was the year in which she joined the Communist Party (KPD).

She was also a co-founder of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists (ARBKD / Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands).

In 1928 she left the Jewish community and, in further defiance of her father's will, married Hans Grundig.

In the mid-1930s Lea Grundig's own work, reflected themes of the new Nazi age, with her cycles "Harzburger Front", "Unterm Hakenkreuz" (1936), "Der Jude ist schuld!"

In January 1933 the NSDAP (Nazi Party) took power and quickly set about creating a one party state.

Membership of any party other than the Nazi party - and particularly of the Communist Party - became illegal.

Grundig nevertheless remained an active participant in resistance to the regime, as part of a group that also included Kurt Magritz and Rudi Wetzel.

The new government also lost no time in implementing racist ideas that had been a key theme of the Nazis in opposition: government policy in Germany became actively, and as time passed ever more violently, antisemitic.

(1935–38), "Krieg droht!"(1935–37), "Im Tal des Todes" (1942/43) and "Ghetto".

In 1935 a ban was imposed on exhibits of her work and in May 1936 she was finally, albeit this time briefly, arrested.

Later in 1936 she traveled to Switzerland but she then returned to her home city and it was in Dresden that in May 1938 she was again arrested.

In March 1939 she was found guilty of "Preparing to commit High Treason" (»Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat«) as a result of her Communist activities and/or her Jewish provenance, and was sentenced to four months imprisonment.

She served her sentence, which in the event lasted till November/December 1939, in a prison in Dresden.

However, on her release she was granted an emigration permit.

She emigrated to Bratislava, then the capital of the still notionally independent Slovak Republic (Slovakia).

In 1940 she reached a refugee camp in Slovakia from where she moved as an exile to Palestine.

Here she survived in a British internment camp at Atlit till 1942.

After the end of the war in May 1945 Dresden had found itself in the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany, and by now the zone was evolving into the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

On arriving in East Germany Grundig joined the new country's recently created ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), her communist beliefs now placing her in her country's political mainstream.

On release she remained, till the end of 1948, in Palestine, living successively in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

She was again able to show her work legally: exhibitions of her work took place not just in Palestine where she was living but also in the USA, France, South Africa and Great Britain.

Her membership of the Palestinian Communist Party during this time was not legal.

She also contributed illustrations to "Volksstimme", the newspaper of the (Jewish part of the) Palestinian party.