Tina pezellen: joyful greeting cards and naturalist portraits of the poor

Tina Pezellen (1897-1979) or, as she was later called, Tina Bauer-Pezellen, was an Austrian-German painter and graphic artist. She was born in Cattaro, which used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now belongs to Montenegro.

Tina Pezellen was influenced by Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Käte Kollwitz. Accordingly, much of her art is dedicated to naturalist portraits of poorer people, especially children, which is not the most cheerful of subjects or styles. However, as a young woman in her mid 20s, possibly while she was still studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, she created a series of greeting postcards that were anything but gloomy and not reminiscent of any other artist of the period. Instead, those cards were joyful and utterly original.

When the Nazis gained power in 1933, Tina Pezellen’s more serious work was ostracised as “entartet” (degenerate) and she withdrew from public life until after the war. She found late recognition in Eastern Germany where she lived until her death in 1979. She is buried in Weimar. No public record of her life and work mentions her postcards.

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