Biography
Friedl Dicker was born on July 30, 1898 in Vienna. At the age of 4, her mother, Karolina Fanta, passed away, and she was raised by her father, Simon Dicker.
Friedl spent most of her time in her father's stationery shop. There, she found everything she needed to let her imagination fly, to make things with clay and paper, to draw and paint.
During the period of World War I, she managed to convince her father to enrol her in the Federal Institute for Graphic Research and Education in Austria (Höhere Graphische Bundes-, Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt), Vienna, where she studied with the master photographer Johannes Beckmann. After finishing her studies there, Dicker went to the School of Arts and Trades in Vienna (Kunstgewerbeschule Wien).
In 1915, she started studying in the textile department in the school while taking drawing lessons with Franz Cinek, a forefather of teaching art to children and youngsters who encouraged them to be creative. He told his students: "Today, you will show me your soul".
She made some extra money at the theatre, were she staged sets, made costumes, acted and wrote her own plays.
In 1916. Johannes Itten opened his own school of art in Vienna, and Friedl Dicker studied there until 1919 with her friend Anny Wottitz. They work together on some bookbinding commissions. In 1918, at Itten's school, Dicker became friends with Franz Singer, who studied architecture at the time. When Johannes Itten closed his school in 1919 to be a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dicker, Wottitz, Singer and some other "disciples" of him left with him.
To make a living, Friedl and her friends Anny Wottitz and Margit Terry-Adler made bookbindings in Otto Dorfner's private workshop. Dicker also manufactured some puppets for a state fair in Weimar that attracted and hypnotised many children. After the fair, the demand for textiles designed at the Bauhaus increased. This new production was supervised by Georg Muche, with the participation of Friedl Dicker and Gunta Stölzl. At the same time, Friedl studied the lithographic process at Lyonel Feininger's workshop.
In 1921, Dicker and Franz Singer (her future associate) became part of the drama company at the Bauhaus theatre Lothar Schreyer. That same year, she was invited by Berthold Viertel to collaborate in the play 'Erwachen' and then in 'Die Haidebraut'. She was the only student to receive a scholarship that spring.
Friedl belonged to the Bauhaus group known as "The Vienneses", who had followed Itten from Vienna to Weimar and belonged to a spiritual community called mazdaznan, with a great amount of women. Their rivals were the "kuri", Russian and Dutch constructivists.
In 1923, she left the Bauhaus because she could not become an architect there, given the fact that, at the time, there was no architecture department in Bauhaus Weimar and her chances for knowledge were limited. She left Weimar and went back to Vienna.
Dicker and Franz Singer had a close professional relationship for many years and in 1923 they founded the 'Werkstätten Bildender Kunst' (visual arts workshops) where they produced toys, jewellery, textiles and bookbindings, graphic designs and drama sets. Her association with Singer between 1926 and 1931 gave way to a great amount of architecture projects, including new buildings and interiors of homes and commercial establishments. Their studio was characterised for creating a dual architecture that was, to many, their hallmark: multiple functionality in spaces and furniture that could be adapted for different purposes.
They received many awards for their work; for instance, in the 'Kunstschau' exhibition in 1927 in Berlin and in the 'Modernes Design' exhibition in 1929 in Vienna. Their innovative and practical way of thinking brought them to invent stackable chairs, folding couches and moving lamps that could be used standing, hanging or horizontally. Soon, the furniture and decorative objects produced by their architectural studio belonged to the repertoire of middle-class Viennese homes.
It could be said that Friedl's career as an educator started in 1931, when the city of Vienna invited her to give an art course for kindergarten teachers.
It was a new chapter in her life in which she used what she had learned from Johannes Itten and Frank Cinek. The main goal was not to teach children, but to raise adults' awareness so that they would recognise artistic personalities and skills on children. Dicker promoted working with children so that they could understand their individual experiences and emotions and write them down. Her activities did not pursue any specific objective; her goal was merely to encourage children to focus on a creative process.
During that period, Dicker was an active member of the Communist Party. Just like her friend John Heartfield, she created photo collages for agitation and propaganda posters, and she did not hold back. When Hitler took power in 1931, the Communist Party went into hiding.
In Prague, she started developing her skills as a painter and went from constructivism to figurative art. Between 1934 and 1938, she worked with the children of political emigrants from Germany. She also worked in home renovations with Greta Bauer and developed textile designs with Frieda Stork. In 1936, she met an underground communist group made up of German and Austrian emigrants and became friends with them. When Hitler's Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Dicker's friends tried to persuade her to emigrate. Franz Singer had fled to London and he invited her to join him. She was also given a Palestinian visa by Anny Wottitz's husband, Hans Moller. But Dicker did not want to leave her husband behind, as he was unable to get a visa at the time.
On December 16, 1942, she and Pavel were moved to Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto. Friedl was given the number 548 and housed in the technical department; Pavel, in the carpentry workshops.
There were many intellectuals and artists among the prisoners who managed to find ways and means to establish homes for kids to help them and give them lessons. Friedl became a carer in one of the homes for girls. She taught them how to paint and kept most of their drawings to work with them after the war. Her plan was to publish her own study on art therapy for children, based on her experiences with the children at Theresienstadt.
In July, 1943, in Theresienstadt, she delivered her conference "Children's Drawings" in a workshop for teachers. In the summer of 1943, the artist organised an exhibition with the children's drawings in the basement of the home. That same year, she worked as a costume and set designer for the drama play 'Käferlein' by the actress Nava Schean with the girls in the home. Theatre became part of the lessons; the children painted the set and dressed up. Friedl helped the children in the ghetto to express their fears and help them uplift their spirits through art.
In autumn 1944, 5,000 men, Pavel Brandeis among them, where sent away on a train "to build a new camp". Again, Frield tried to stay with her husband and volunteered to be included in the list for the next train. On October 8, 1944, Friedl was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with some of her students (transport EO-167) and she was murdered in a gas chamber the day after arriving. Not long before being deported to Auschwitz, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis kept the over 4,000 drawings and poems made by the children at the ghetto in two suitcases and gave them to Willy Groag, who hid them in an attic. Now, they are preserved in the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Pavel Brandeis survived the concentration camp. Out of the 150,000 estimated people that went through Terezin, only 25,000 survived. Out of the 15,000 children, 100 survived. Some of the surviving children became artists and said that Friedl was "the mystery of beauty" or "the mystery of freedom".
