Jolan Gross-Bettelheim

From the late 1920 through the 1940s, Jolan Gross-Bettelheim was known for her semi-abstract print images of industrial scenes, machinery and technology, and anonymous masses of factory workers and armies, often inflected by leftist political sentiment. Gross-Bettelheim was born in Hungary (in an area now part of Slovakia). Around 1919, she began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest; she also attended Vienna's Kunstgewerbeschule, followed by a year at Berlin's Akademie für bildende Kunst. From 1922 to 1924, she was in Paris studying at the conservative École des Beaux-Arts and at the Grande Chaumière, a private academy school. Following her 1925 marriage to fellow Hungarian Frigyes Bettelheim, a psychiatrist, she emmigrated with her husband to Cleveland, Ohio, where she continued her art studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Gross-Bettelheim made her first print in 1928 and during the next decade regularly exhibited her prints in annual contemporary art exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1935-36, she produced twelve prints for the Cleveland-based Graphics Division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project, a depression-era government relief program. During this period, she joined the Communist Party, whose advocacy of workers' rights attracted many of her artistic contemporaries.

In 1938, Gross-Bettelheim and her husband moved to New York City, settling in the borough of Queens. Her only solo exhibition took place in 1945 at Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. From 1943 to 1950, her work was regularly included in the Library of Congress's print exhibitions. By 1955, she had made about forty prints, primarily in drypoint or lithography, featuring industrial structures, workers, and urban scenes in a modernist style in which familiar forms are abstracted and distorted with an emphasis on smoothly modeled volumes and sharp angles evocative of machines and the speed of modern life. These qualities suggest a connection between her work and the dynamic images of the Italian artists of the early 1910s known as futurists; her flattened and distorted forms also hint at her awareness of the less well-known art of Czech practitioners of the modernist mode of cubism, in which objects are abstracted in terms of their component planes and angles.

In 1956, her husband's death and the anti-communist political climate then prevalent in the United States impelled Gross-Bettelheim to return permanently to Hungary, taking her unsold artworks with her. She arrived one month before the Hungarian Revolution, an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Soviet Union's dominance of Hungarian political life. The artist's pro-Communist views made her an outsider in her native country; she is said to have lived the remainder of her life in semi-seclusion and she apparently made no more prints. Gross-Bettelheim died in Budapest at the age of seventy-two.