About the Author
Trained as a social scientist, Katherine Fennelly is an immigration policy expert whose work has taken her to many of the countries where her late grandfather lived out his adventures. She has studied and
worked in Iran, Spain, and Ecuador and done consulting work and academic residencies across Latin America and Europe. Katherine is a voracious reader and a life-long student of languages. She discovered her family’s Jewish roots as an adult, something her Hungarian-American mother preferred not to discuss. When not tracking down classified documents and delving into family history, she volunteers for refugee service organizations, serves as a Spanish-English interpreter, and enjoys biking in Prospect Park and spending time with her daughters and granddaughters who live nearby in Brooklyn.
The Lost Paintings of Budapest:
A Woman’s Art, Erasure, and the Hungarian Holocaust
By Katherine Fennelly
Resolutions regarding Nazi-looted art have multiplied in recent years. However, the bulk of attention has been paid to collections of famous museums and wealthy families, and to world-famous male artists, such as Cézanne, Picasso and Klimt. Much less is known about the disposition of works of lesser-known artists, and least of all, Jewish women artists in the mid-20th century.
Using archival research, testimonials from Holocaust survivors and published memoirs I describe the fates of many Hungarian Jewish women artists before, during and after WWII. Their experiences are illustrated with a case study of a locally renowned painter who was murdered in the Hungarian Holocaust at the end of the war. That artist was my great aunt, Boriska Noti Kálnay.
The book resurrects the life and art of a woman who had heretofore been erased from family and public history and places her work within the context of other talented and forgotten Jewish women artists.
In Budapest I visited the memorial wall at the Holocaust Memorial Center which includes a plaque commemorating Boriska.