Eva Deutsch Costabel: Catalog of Works

Eva Deutsch Costabel was born in Yugoslavia to a middle class Viennese family. She fled her native town of Zagreb in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, then began the odyssey and the flight from the Nazis until the end of the war. She spent eighteen months as a prisoner in two Italian concentration camps. After the Italian capitulation in 1943, she joined the Yugoslav resistance first as an army nurse and later as a staff artist for the resistance publications. In 1945 she was able to reach Bari, Italy and then to Rome, Italy where she was accepted in the Academy of Fine Arts to study painting, through the compassion and the generosity of the director of the Academy. As a refugee she had no money to pay for the tuition nor had she graduated from eight years of high school necessary to be accepted at the Academy. This human gesture changed the artist's life, when after nearly five years of persecution and suffering she was again able to live a fairly normal life. On June 10, 1949 she received her visa and she sailed into the New York harbor. After arriving in New York she studied in Pratt Institute, Brooklyn under Franz Kline the famous New York abstract expressionist painter. He had a strong influence on her artistic development, introducing her to abstract art. And for the next thirty years she would paint in the abstract style.