Eva Deutsch Costabel: Catalog of works

From the age of 6, in her native Zagreb, Eva Deutsch Costabel knew she would be an artist. The many-hued traditional costumes, The play of light and color in the lush countryside, the Yugoslavian peasant art itself, were all seeds which she would come to cultivate years later, far away, in a new and different world. But first the Nazi occupation, in 1941, meant the beginning of an odyssey of flight and displacement, and then imprisonment with her family in an Italian concentration camp in Croatia. Following the Italian capitulation in '43, she would join the Yugoslav resistance, first as an army nurse and then as a staff artist for the resistance publication, where her first sketches were realistic attempts to convey the humanity and pathos of the partisans and the sickness of war itself. With the close of the war and her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, she began what she considers "the long and painful healing process after witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust." Her odyssey would now take her to America in '49, and to study with Franz Kline, with her efforts in these "years of introspection," culminating in a series of abstract works, seemingly objective, even "decorative," but paradoxically deeply personal. Here she seeks the reality of her emotions rather than a naturalistic representation of the dislocation and loss of the wartime experience, the enormity of which she continues to feel could never adequately be expressed in direct terms.