222 A Summary
addressed to Hirszel, a manager of the Bernhard Hallmann workshop, imploring himto provide her with a “life ticket” witch world make her stay in the ghetto “legal” to some extent.
Gela’s artistic output has been divided in two major groups: works produced
before September 1939, and the war pieces, created September 1939 through 1942. The former includes portraits, sketches, nudes, still life pieces, and landscapes, whereas the latter set is confined to portraits and figures.
Gela Seksztajn belonged to a large group of artists in whom the colourful
scene of Jewish culture in Warsaw abounded, along with writers, theatre artists, and musicians. Hardly a celebrity, since she matured as an artist not earlier than in 1938, she specialized in watercolours and drawings, but did a few oils as well. Portrait was her favourite genre, although she tried her hand at landscape and still life. Her art fits in the so–called “Warsaw School”, inspired by the Ecole de Paris and classicizing trends.
Gela was born in Warsaw in 1907, into a worker’s family. Her father was
a cobbler, while her mother came from the Landaus, a family of higher status.
She died in 1918. In 1924 Gela graduated from the school at 68 Nowolipki Street,
organized under the auspices of CISZO (Central Yiddish School Organization). The languages of instruction there were Polish and Yiddish, both of which she used in adult life, although she seemed to have preferred Polish in writing, judging by her signatures “Gela Seksztejn/Seksztajn”, by the sole extant full letter to her husband’s sister–in–law Noemi Lichtensztejn–Fridman, and by a fragment of an application written on the back of the Passers–by drawing. Gela attended a sewing course organized by the ORT (The Organization for Rehabilitation through Training). It was the writer Jehoszua Singer who discovered her talent. Through him, she met actor and director Jonas Turkow, who introduced her in turn to the known sculptor Henryk Kuna. Thanks to Kuna’s intercession Gela received a two–month scholarship from the Ministry of Religion and Public Education to study at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow. Gela spent about thirteen years in Krakow; according to her own testimony, she studied at the Academy for two years, but her name was not recorded on any of the enrolment lists in the school’s archives. To earn her living, she got a job in a photo atelier, retouching photographs. Hence perhaps her passion for portrait art. Her artistic career began about 1930 and was almost exclusively Warsaw based, even though she did not come to stay there until 1937. She must have visited, the capital on the occasion of group exhibitions of Jewish artists, starting in 1931. She was a member of the Association of Jewish Artists and the Jewish Society for the Propagation of the Fine Arts, both Warsaw based, too. Yet she does not seem to have identified herself with the painters’ milieu. Both her own words, as recorded in the testament, and the selection of works she chose for hiding with the first part of the ARG, indicate the bond to and her affection for Jewish writers with whom she struck up friendships at the beginning of her career. Included in the selection were
