Beginnings
Edith Kramer was born in Vienna in 1916 during the world-shattering years of WWI, when the Hapsburg empire collapsed and much of Europe lay in ruins. The war years for the Austrian Axis, were especially brutal. Kramer recalled that years after the war’s end, the family huddled in a cold water 4-story walk-up, where she was sent out to the street to scrounge for coal as a seven-year-old, backpacking the fuel up the stairs innumerable times. The above depiction already shows her affinity for the outdoors, comfortable in the magical forests with a confident, even defiant demeanor.
These attributes were perhaps forged from an unconventional upbringing. Her extended family was ‘Bohemian’ in the truest Viennese sense of the word with actors, psychoanalysts, artists, lovers, an uncle who was a highly regarded poet, and her father who was a Communist revolutionary—contrasting all this tumult, was a sensitive, patient mother who nurtured her artistic talents. As there was little scrap paper available to children, Kramer drew with chalks on slate, and in sand, anything to produce an image—these were ephemeral works, but laid the groundwork for almost a century’s work to come.
When Kramer was eight or so, she was sent to a boarding school in Berlin, where her free-spirited ways and unruliness were not aligned with German mores, and after being punished by the headmaster, she simply left—making her way by train the young iconoclast returned home to Vienna alone, surprising her family.
She somehow remained complaint enough to complete her studies but never relinquished her commitment to her art, which was inviolate. As a schoolgirl she was already seen as gifted and reclusive, an avid reader, and obviously an accomplished painter. Her moodiness and self-absorption is already evident in this earliest of self-portraits.
The Artist and her Mentor: Art of the Proletariat
Also at age 13, Kramer was introduced to Friedl Dicker, a Bauhaus trained artist who was part of the family inner circle and eventually accepted her as an apprentice. After graduating from high school, Kramer moved to Prague, where she studied under her mentor, pursued art, and gained experience working with the children of Czech political refugees. By 1938, it was evident that Nazism was a mortal threat, prompting Kramer to emigrate on one of the last ships sailing from Europe eventually reaching New York City.
She had parted ways with Dicker, who decided not to emigrate as she could not accept, could not comprehend, that such evil existed in mankind. In 1942, Dicker, branded a communist and identified as a Jew, was apprehended by the Gestapo and sent to the infamous Nazi propaganda camp named Terezin. On the surface, Terezin was a sham for the Red Cross to inspect, as the Germans arranged for the Jewish intellectuals to create a veritable university within the camp confines. This was a dastardly deception—in reality, it was a transit center that led directly to the gas chambers. At Terezin, Dicker was deemed the ‘art teacher’ of the camp, helping the children survive the fear, hunger, and deprivations of camp life until such time she was forced to board the train to Auschwitz, where she perished. Dicker’s communist affiliations and her Bauhaus teachings left an indelible mark on Kramer and her art, whose subject matter embraced the unheralded power to the ‘worker’ sensibility.
New York City
When she began making art in the States, Kramer stated she was most moved by the unruly yet vibrant bustle of the City. Still influenced by Dicker, her aesthetic was centered upon the “realistic made poetic”. Her depictions of city streets, factories, and in particular workers which included machinists, whom she assisted in many of the shops along Lower Manhattan’s Grand Street. Countless sketchbooks recorded studies of the men machining and tooling—which she recalled held the pervasive scent of oil. Pencil and ink sketches such as the below illustration documented her years of service to the war effort.
Her work also brought her to the City’s tenement stoops, where she would fill her sketchbooks with depictions of families and friends kibitzing during sweltering summer nights. After preliminary drawings, she would transcribe the scenes into a range of mediums, such as this complex ceramic study that captured the vibrancy of the 1940s and 50s—when lively groups of all ages gathered to exchange neighborhood gossip and family chatter.
Kramer expanded her scale to almost monumental size when painting industrial city scenes that included waste treatment plants, water pumping stations and in this next work, the gargantuan hangers where subway cars would be taken for repair. There she would don a hard hat, set up her easel all to the amusement and appreciation of these unsung workers that kept the city’s transit system running.
Again, Kramer never drew or painted from photographs which she dismissed as cheating the subject matter. Each scene was painted plein air. As the workers toiled, she too dressed for the frigid cold—she was one with the workmen, as they hoisted whole subway cars off their trucks.
Kramer was also an early street artist. She roamed gritty neighborhoods where the dispossessed, the homeless, or those passed out in a stupor became subjects that seemed not to faze her. At all hours and in all kinds of weather she recorded the pulse of the city, sketching rapidly, even urgently. Returning to the studio she would take these preliminary drawings and transpose them into lithographs. This transposition gave the work a formal sensibility that contrasted with these downtrodden characters.
Not content with traditional printmaking or sculpture, Kramer would take her work to the next level. Cityscape works were also applied to the most complex art processes, in this case a 5’ collage. Utilizing thousands of scraps of paper, she would again use her drawings as studies to construct enormous collages in almost unimaginable detail— using the humblest of scrap material. Her task she said was to bring to life the most ordinary park scenes—those who were simply passing by, or chatting, amongst the tree-lined streets. She captured moments that evoked not just the urban with the City's buildings as a backdrop, but that nature could also coexist, at its most vibrant.
Contrasting urban life, nature was a constant theme dear to her. During her entire lifetime, she painted the natural world, particularly rugged, inhospitable landscapes. She worked indefatigably, with enormous hardiness and stamina despite her advancing years. She painted nature all over the world, most often in the Viennese Alpine meadows of her homeland.
Kramer was not content to paint mountain scenes nearby her chalet in the alpine village of Grundlsee, Austria. Every summer, she ascended even further to the ‘high country’, where the verdant pastures offered rich forage for the herds of Swiss-cows. To reach a communal ‘milking cabin’, Kramer would hike almost 5 hours, assisted by the village men, and set up camp to paint for weeks on end, while they lugged firewood, roofing material and other necessities. Here she is posed outside her primitive cabin, unfinished painting by her side, aged well into her seventies.
She was sometimes accompanied by trusted colleague, the late Lani Gerity, who aside from partaking in artmaking, would tend to the stove and cook Kramer’s favored fiddle-head fern soup, which she foraged for in the cold mountain dawns. Gerity went on to write of Kramer’s ‘Legacy’, the definitive book of reminiscences by her friends and life-long colleagues including this writer.
Architectural projects in the mountains were also monumental in scale. Outside her neighbor’s carpentry shop, she painted an outdoor mural of their building in the style of ‘trompe l’oeil’. The effect was to trick the viewer’s perspective that despite it being depicted on the outer walls, the scene was inside the shop, with the windows aiding in ‘fooling the eye’. The project took an entire summer, mounting an 8’ scaffold each day—such was the ambition of this aging lady who’s fondness for the carpenters were dear to her Bauhaus beginnings.
She especially prized visiting the Nordic countries such as Iceland and Sweden as their being ideally picturesque. There she would sometimes paint through the long Arctic nights, which allowed her to capture dramatic forest scenes with their shadowy forms and colors only seen in the dark forests.
The Maine coast brought her to the sea, where she worked with the movements of currents, tides, and crashing waves, favoring the earliest part of the day when the water shone almost firey red. Time itself meant nothing, only as potential for unique contrasts, moods, and tonal values.
Kramer was not one to leave a subject superficially examined. Again, she was the master of transposing a painted scene into a different medium, regardless of its complexity. Woodcuts are among the most challenging of mediums, but to capture the sheer magnitude and even violence of swirling waves crashing on the rocks was yet another challenge to test her eye and hand.
The Artist as Therapist
Morphing from artist to the professional was a natural inclination for Kramer. She made use of Dicker’s experiences with Czech refugee children and immediately applied them when arriving in New York City. Without a job or prospects, Kramer’s contacts with other displaced Jews in the refugee community led her to teach at the Little Red Schoolhouse, a progressive school still operating in Greenwich Village. There she taught shop and later art, camping out in the school’s unheated attic, unpaid except save for the collections from sympathetic teachers and their heralded principal. Now in her early thirties, her work evokes rare moments when Kramer disclosed emotion. Images from this period show a sense of intense self-reflection and intense angst, which she once confided, was characterized by her own ‘survivor-guilt’, with an intensity that bespoke of the pain and suffering of those left behind as well as her new professional life in an unforgiving foreign city.
In the 1950s, Kramer began working with disadvantaged youth at the Wiltwyck School for Boys, which the resident psychologist deemed her the designated ‘art therapist’— a term not generally known. She now employed the Euro-teachings of not just her mentor Dicker, but of Josef Itten, Viktor Lowenfeld, and other ‘child-centered’ teachers. She was encouraged to document her cases at the Little Red Schoolhouse and Wiltwyck, which led to her first book, ‘Art Therapy in a Children’s Community,’ in 1958. Working with marginalized children became her calling, as she applied psychoanalytic concepts to the creative work of children, terming it ‘Art as Therapy.’
After several years of continued art therapy practice, she mounted one of the first exhibitions of artworks by ‘troubled children’, where most of the child’s art now resides in the archives at New York University. It gained such recognition that Elinor Roosevelt opened the exhibit, shown here addressing the crowd in a candid photograph taken by Kramer’s long-time friend, the late Canadian art therapist Herschel Stroyman.
By then, Kramer’s experience and her published book had brought her enough renown to begin teaching art therapy theory and practice to adult students. She was invited to many programs both in Europe and in the States, teaching at George Washington University, the New School for Social Research, Turtle Bay Music School and eventually settling at New York University where in 1973, she and Professor Laurie Wilson begin a world-renowned graduate program.
Her courses and workshops drew upon her mentor’s method of using the whole of the body and its five senses to enliven expression. Classes often started with awakening her graduate students out of the day’s exhaustion. She needed us energized, which she announced we’d be taking turns massaging each other’s shoulders! One can only imagine that in this day’n age there’d be fuss over ‘personal space’. Forget that—we were to rub, stretch, bend and take deep breaths, going outside to take the fresh air. Her lectures were deep and thought provoking. Case material from her books were lucid and illustrative of her methods. Kramer’s insistence on clear simple language when writing on complex Neo-Freudian psychodynamics was to this student, an entirely new paradigm of learning. It is interesting to note that Kramer never worked clinically or as a professor full-time, as she was married to her studio art time. When not painting, she prepared lecture notes, organized her slide presentation and tended to student papers, but there was always afternoon ‘tea’. This is when Kramer would rest in repose, often reading her beloved New Yorker, or her favorite German poets such as Schiller and Goethe.
For 50 years Kramer became the backbone of NYU’s graduate program—teaching exhaustively, attending conferences, leading workshops and all the while traveling abroad to teach in Austria, Scandinavia and Europe. She was closely affiliated with programs in Berlin, where she lectured for her friend Professor Karin Dannecker. The bibliography attests to Kramer’s vast academic accomplishments with authored papers, books, and presentations. It is almost astounding how someone so absorbed in her studio could reset to an academic life of writing and teaching the grueling 3-hour classes, three days a week for decades. Up until age 80 she trained down from New York to George Washington University to teach intensive courses on her weekends. Such a regimen would defeat the strongest individual. Only when she became deaf, was she forced to retire. After much reflection, she decided it was time to retire to the old country, living out her life among the caregiving villagers—an age-old ethos that has now become rarer in this contemporary life.
Epilogue—Back to the Art
Kramer never ceased expanding as an artist and iconoclastic academician—never stagnating, never resting on her laurels as the one of the so-called ‘mothers of art therapy’. This moniker Kramer detested, as she was the first to point out many had come before her. As she approached her elder years, Kramer never slowed, whether it be writing, lecturing, teaching, traveling, or making art.
Commissions came from diverse communities. One seminal project came from the Transit Authority of New York in 1993. She was commissioned to create a 3’X5’ mosaic based upon her studies of subway sketches. No small task, her painting studio became a lapidary shop, where she sourced and collated thousands of mosaic pieces, from stone, ceramic, glass, even bits from antiquity. I recall being sent down her kindly antiques dealer to collect some authentic but broken Roman glass that he saved for his favorite patron of ‘junk’. Working late into the night, clouds of stone dust and the sound of relentless grinding, and then, with concentrated silence, each bit was applied with the patience of a surgeon.
The finished work, still installed in the subway stairwell in SoHo, is a remarkable piece. Although created in the early 90’s it stands the test of time. Although she continued to work day-in, and day-out almost for the next 2 decades— this was a culminating commission. It is a gift to people of New York that encompasses the core of her aesthetics. As she often preached, the work evokes feeling, is true to on itself, and communicates to others, the “poetry in the everyday”.
When she returned to Austria in 2007, she remained physically and artistically active until her 90’s. When inquiring whether she had gone to the shepherd’s cabin she quipped; “of course, though I left my pack to the others”. This is how she would want to be remembered, fiercely independent, constantly creative, and at peace where the milkmaids once sang their songs in time with the cow-bells off in the mountain mist.
