Bedrich Fritta Sold at Auction Prices

FRITTA, BEDRICH.

Theresienstadt - Kleine Festung. Pen-and-ink on paper. Partially signed (“B. Fritt.”) upper right. 6 x 9 inches / 15 x 22 cm. • Drawing likely by Bedrich Fritta of a grave in Theresientadt, alongside multiple symbols. Featuring a Star-of-David against a cross joined together by barbed wire and surrounded by Jewish sur-names and German expletives used to describe Jews during the Holocaust. In the background, the scene is watched over by a hill as a female breast, the sun as a Star-of-David, and the moon as a menorah. “Bedrich Fritta (1906-44) received his artistic training in Paris around 1930, then moved to Prague. There he worked as a technical draughtsman, graphic designer, and cartoonist, for clients including the exile edition of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus. On December 4th, 1941, Fritta was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the second “construction commando,” made up of engineers, craftsmen, and physicians. He supervised the drawing studio in the Jewish self-administration’s technical department. Up to twenty imprisoned artists worked in the studio, producing construction plans and illustrated supplements for the reports that were to be sent to the SS commandant’s office. These officially commissioned works underpinned the ghetto’s public image as a smoothly functioning, self-governed model settlement - but the artists secretly used the studio materials to also record the misery of everyday ghetto life. The SS discovered these unofficial drawings in the Summer of 1944. They convicted Bedrich Fritta and his colleagues Leo Haas, Otto Ungar, and Ferdinand Bloch of “atrocity propaganda.” On July 17th, the artists were sent to the Small Fortress with their families where Fritta’s wife Johanna died. Thereafter, Bedrich Fritta and Leo Haas were deported to Auschwitz. Fritta died of exhaustion there in November, 1944. Leo Haas survived, and adopted Fritta’s son Tomas” (www.jmberlin.de/fritta/de/index.php). See Jewish Museum-Berlin exhibition, Bedrich Fritta: Drawings from the Theresienstadt Ghetto, (May-Sept. 2013). Provenance: Jüdisches Diaspora Museum, Bad Vilbel, Germany. Theresientadt, April 4th, 1943.