Soshana Afroyim: A Century of Exile, Painted
She planned to call her autobiography *The Girl Who Said No to Picasso*. It was true — Picasso had met her at the Salon de Mai, invited her to his villa at Vallauris, and drawn her portrait in 1954 — and she later admitted some ambivalence about leading with it. The problem with the anecdote is not that it is false but that it is the least interesting thing about a woman who was chased out of Vienna at eleven, crossed the Atlantic on what she called the last civil ship to leave Europe, learned brushwork from Buddhist monks in Kyoto, painted the royal family of Sikkim, and paid her rent at the Chelsea Hotel in canvases.
Vienna, 1938, and the Last Ship
She was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna on 1 September 1927, into a Jewish middle-class family. Her father Fritz owned a cufflink factory; her mother Margarethe was a sculptor who encouraged the child's drawing and collected what she made. In March 1938 the eleven-year-old watched the Anschluss from the street. "I watched Hitler's triumphant entry to Vienna," she recalled. "I turned cold and was horribly frightened."
The family ran: Switzerland, then Paris, then London in 1939, where she studied at Northwood College and Chelsea Polytechnic and spent the Blitz nights in air-raid shelters. She drew what she saw, including a sheet titled *Hitler as Cloun*. In 1941 they sailed for New York aboard the S.S. Madura. She would be in motion, in one direction or another, for the next sixty-five years.
A Name from Havana
In New York she attended Washington Irving High School and studied painting with the artist Beys Afroyim. At seventeen she was travelling America with him, painting Thomas Mann, Otto Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg; in 1945 they portrayed delegates at the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations. She married Afroyim that year; their son Amos was born in 1946. In 1948, for her first major solo exhibition in Havana, Beys gave her the name she would use for the rest of her life: Soshana. The marriage ended by mutual consent in 1950, and in 1951 she took Amos back to Vienna.
Vienna did not hold her. She enrolled at the University of Applied Arts in 1950 and the Academy of Fine Arts in 1952, studying under Sergius Pauser and Albert Paris Gütersloh, found the academic regime intolerable, and left for Paris the same year.
Paris: Derain's Studio, Brâncuși Next Door
Paris was her base from 1952 to 1972, and the address list alone is extraordinary: she worked in studios previously occupied by André Derain and by Paul Gauguin, with Constantin Brâncuși as a neighbour who, she said, loved her like a daughter. She knew Kupka, Max Ernst, Yves Klein and Marc Chagall. Alberto Giacometti she counted among her closest friends.
Her painting changed accordingly. The naturalistic landscapes and portraits of the American years — Fauvist and American Realist in inflection, then Social Realist under Beys's influence, full of street scenes, factory workers and faces with a distinctly melancholic look — gave way to the École de Paris, to Informel and to Abstract Expressionism. Critics have set her work beside Jackson Pollock, Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung.
The Brush from Kyoto
The decisive shift came from Asia. In 1956–57 she travelled through China, India, Thailand, Cambodia and Japan, exhibiting in Beijing in 1957. In Kyoto, Buddhist monks taught her calligraphic technique on xuan paper. The art of calligraphy became formative for her painting style: she took up Chinese ink on paper and then carried the gesture over into oil. From that point her abstraction has a specific character — not the accumulation of Western brushmarks but the single, committed, unrepeatable stroke.
She developed a signature method using turpentine that has been described as a kind of drip painting in reverse, producing surfaces with the structure of liquid crystal. She liked to repeat what biochemists told her: that her paintings resembled what you see when you look into a microscope.
Mexico, Sikkim, the Chelsea Hotel
In 1959 she painted Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné. That same year she collaborated in Paris and Alba with the Italian artist Pinot Gallizio, producing some twenty joint paintings she considered formidable — until his dealer refused to let her name appear beside his. Through Gallizio she approached the avant-garde COBRA group, which declined to admit her as a full member because she was a woman.
Between 1964 and 1966 she lived in Cuernavaca, befriended Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and opened an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Mexico pushed her toward the surreal: infinite horizons, expanded endless spaces in which mysterious shapes, masks or heads seem to float. A second world journey in 1968 took her through the South Seas, the Caribbean, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and Israel; in 1969 the Chogyal of Sikkim commissioned her to paint the royal family. She moved to Jerusalem in 1972 and left when the Yom Kippur War broke out, arriving in New York in 1974.
The New York decade was spent at the Chelsea Hotel, where she settled her rent in paintings. She knew Mark Rothko and Francesco Clemente and stayed close to Adolph Gottlieb. She exhibited constantly and was miserable, and in 1985 she went home to Vienna.
The Woman Problem
The obstacle recurs throughout her life with depressing consistency. Gallery owners told her outright that they did not like to take women artists on contract — it was considered too risky, because a woman might marry, have children and abandon her career. COBRA rejected her on the same grounds. Gallizio's dealer erased her signature. That she nonetheless entered the collections of the Albertina, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel Museum, the Hirshhorn and modern art museums in Paris, Rome, Rio, São Paulo, Mexico City and New Delhi is a measure of how hard she had to push.
Why Soshana Is Called a Genius
The quality worth naming is absorptive rather than inventive: an extraordinary capacity to take a technique from a culture entirely outside her own and metabolise it into a personal language rather than a souvenir. Plenty of mid-century European painters flirted with East Asian calligraphy. Soshana went to Kyoto, sat with monks, learned ink on xuan paper, and then rebuilt her oil painting around what the brush had taught her. The reverse-drip turpentine method that followed is genuinely hers, and the microscopic-crystalline result was distinct enough that scientists recognised their own images in it. Her own account of the state involved — "When I paint, I forget everything around me, I become one with the canvas and I express my pain" — describes an unusually complete absorption.
The counter-case is that the word has not, on this evidence, been used by major critics. She is compared to Pollock, Mathieu and Hartung — which places her within Informel and Abstract Expressionism rather than at their origin. She founded nothing and led nothing. And she was, by her own strategic admission, willing to market herself through proximity to Picasso, which is the move of an artist who knew her work alone was not opening the doors. Some of her celebrity is the celebrity of an extraordinary life. The fair verdict is that Soshana was a serious, original and radically cosmopolitan abstractionist whose reach across cultures exceeded almost anyone in her generation, and whose reputation was systematically suppressed by a gallery system that did not sign women.
Legacy
Austria caught up late. A commemorative stamp came in 2008, the year the Austrian National Library acquired her estate of manuscripts, photographs, letters and documents; the Gold Merit Award of Vienna followed in 2009 and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art in 2010. A monograph appeared in 2010 and a documentary took the Silver Dolphin at Cannes in 2014. She kept painting in a nursing home after her health failed in 2005, and died in Vienna on 9 December 2015, aged eighty-eight — in the city that had once made her run.
Achievements
- Movement: modernism
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