Few people knew about Gertrud Kauders until 2018, when workers in the process of demolishing an old house in Prague made a remarkable discovery.
It seemed to be a routine construction job, until one of the workers began tearing down a wall and nearly 30 paintings tumbled out. A collection of Impressionist portraits, landscapes, still lifes. Someone had removed the canvases from their frames and stashed them in the wall of this house.
As the demolition continued, more hidden canvases emerged from the walls and from underneath the floorboards. Eventually, the workers unearthed close to 700 paintings, all in perfect condition after many years.
And all of these canvases bore the signature of an artist from Prague named Gertrud Kauders.
The Life of Gertrud Kauders
Gertrud Kauders was born in Prague in 1883, into a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family. A talented artist, Gertrud studied under the well-known Czech artist Otakar Nejedlý at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. As a student, Gertrud had the opportunity to spend her summers in France and Italy. There she spent hours painting the iconic cities and landscapes she saw. She developed her own distinctive style, which bore resemblances to Impressionism, with softly defined forms and vibrant, yet muted tones.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany and turned their attention on Czechoslovakia, most of Gertrud’s family managed to escape the country. Although they begged her to come with them, she didn’t believe the Nazis would target her, as a native German speaker. And so she stayed behind.
But the Nazis quickly began to persecute the country’s Jews, and Gertrud realized that she didn’t have much time left. And so she and her close friend Natalie Jahudkova, who’d studied with her at the Academy of Fine Arts, devised a plan to save her artwork from the Nazis.
Gertrud removed all her canvases from their frames and smuggled them to Natalie’s house in the Prague suburb of Zbraslav. The two women then managed to hide the canvases in the walls and floorboards of the home, without anyone else knowing about it. And there they remained for nearly 80 years.
Sadly, Gertrud was arrested by the Nazis in May 1942 and sent to Terezin soon after hiding away her paintings. If she had been able to stay in Terezin, she would have undoubtedly found a way to continue her art despite the terrible conditions there. But tragically, Gertrud never had the chance.
She was only in Terezin a couple of weeks before she was transported to a death camp in Poland called Majdanek. There she was murdered shortly after arrival, sometime around May 17, 1942.
The Rediscovery of Gertrud Kauders’ Paintings
Natalie Jahudkova kept the paintings hidden in her home and kept this secret for the rest of her life. She died in 1977, and left the house to a woman she’d unofficially adopted in the 1920s. In 2018, this woman’s grandson, Jakub Sedlacek, decided to tear down the abandoned and broken-down house. It was during this demolition that Gertrud’s paintings resurfaced.
After seeing reports of the find in the media, Gertrud’s niece Miriam Kauders managed to locate the paintings. While they don’t have a permanent home yet, both Jakub and Miriam intend to donate most of the collection to a museum in Prague. And some of the portraits will be returned to Miriam and the surviving members of the Kauders family. They will serve as a memorial to Gertrud, the talented artist whose name is just now being rediscovered.
To view photos of some of Gertrud’s remarkable paintings, you can find them here. Hopefully the day will come soon when her paintings are displayed to the world once again.