Watercolour sketch of a tray on a bed

Gertrud Kauders was born on 26 April 1883 in Prague, then under the Austro-Hungarian empire. She grew up in a well-established, German-speaking, secular Jewish family. Her parents, Sigmund and Emmy Kauders, came from affluent and culturally active Prague Jewish families. From a young age, she was encouraged to pursue artistic and intellectual endeavours.

Kauders received formal artistic education at several important institutions: she first studied in Munich at the Damenakademie under Max Feldbauer (founder of the Munich Secession), then in Paris, and later in Prague, including in the landscape painting class of Otakar Nejedlý at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her work included watercolours, drawings, oils, gouache; she was particularly noted for landscapes and portraits. Some of her early exhibitions were with German-speaking artists’ groups in Prague, the Society of German Female Painters, and she showed work in Prague Secession exhibitions in the 1920s-30s.

Following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and the subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia, Kauders remained in Prague even as persecution of Jewish people grew. In 1941, she entrusted her friend and fellow artist Natalie Jahůdková with hiding her life’s work. Jahůdková’s house, still under construction at the time, served as a secret repository: paintings, sketches, and drawings were concealed in the walls, ceilings and floors.

On the 12th of May 1942, Kauders was transported first on Transport Au 671 from Prague to Terezin and then on the 17th of May she was put on transport Ay 859 to Lublin. At Lublin a selection took place and those fit to work were separated from those not. The latter were sent to the extermination camp Sobibor where they were murdered on or soon after arrival. While Sobibor’s records are no longer existent, Kauders’ family and researchers believe she was murdered there.

Rediscovery and legacy

Kauders’ hidden collection remained secret for decades. The house in which her works were stashed was demolished in 2018, and about 700 works - paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks - were found.

The collection was eventually returned to her heirs, who donated large portions of it to several museums internationally. The Jewish Museum in Prague now holds about 380 works; others are dispersed in collections including in New York and Washington, D.C. This is one of 18 works on paper that were gifted to Te Papa by Kauders' family.

Kauders’ nephew, Cornelius, immigrated to New Zealand during the war. The rediscovery of her work, and its place in a New Zealand collection, creates a connection for Jewish Europeans who sought refuge in New Zealand during the 1930s and 40s. Kauders’ watercolour paintings and sketches of family, city scenes, friends and interiors give us a glimpse into the lives that these people lost for their safety.

Gertrud Kauders’ story is testament to both the fragility and resilience of artistic legacies under extremity. Her work reveals an individual voice in early 20th-century European art: shaped by an education across Munich, Paris and Prague; by engagement with the artistic currents of her time; and by the tragic interruption of her life and career under Nazi persecution. The fact that such a record of her practice (hidden, preserved, then rediscovered) has come to light offers scholars, curators and audiences a rare and moving window into an artist whose name was nearly lost.

At Te Papa, her works don’t just add to the visual richness of our collection - they carry stories of survival, loss, and remembrance.

- Brooklyn Grace Folesi, Te Papa intern, 2025