Helene von Taussig

Around 20 paintings are nearly all that survives of Helene von Taussig's work, and they survived by chance. After she was driven from her house in Anif near Salzburg in 1940, her pictures disappeared, turned up in the basement of the Salzburg Künstlerhaus and were kept for decades in the studio of the painter Wilhelm Kaufmann. They were recognised as hers only in the late 1980s, while an exhibition of women artists was being prepared for 1991.

She was born in 1879 into a Viennese Jewish banking family, one of 12 children. With her friend, the painter Emma Schlangenhausen, she studied with the Swiss painter Cuno Amiet in 1910 and then spent several years in Paris. After nursing for the Red Cross in the First World War she settled in Anif, painting mostly portraits of women in a strong Expressionist manner. She converted to Catholicism in 1923.

In 1940 she took refuge in a Viennese convent. On 9 April 1942 she was deported to Izbica, a transit ghetto in occupied Poland, and was reported dead later that month. The Belvedere holds her Figural Expressive Study from 1925.