Dekk (née Dorothea Karoline Fuhrmann) was born into a Jewish family in Brno, Moravia Austria-Hungary (subsequently Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) in 1917 and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna (1936–38). Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, she fled to London studying at the relocated Reimann School, specialising in graphic design. After the war she adopted the professional name 'Dekk' for design and advertising work for many notable clients, also working as 'Dorrit Dekk' as a painter and printmaker from 1982 onwards.
Graphic designer and printmaker Dekk (née Dorothy Karoline Fuhrmann) was born into a non-observant Jewish family in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (subsequently Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) on 18 May 1917 and was known as 'Dorrit' after her mother's love of Dickens. Although born Jewish, then subsequently baptised, Dorrit described herself as an atheist and, as Jana Buresova, author of 'The Dynamics of Forced Female Migration from Czechoslovakia to Britain, 1938-1950', has observed, ‘Religion therefore played no evident part in her artwork, though it did affect her life’ (Buresova, 2019). Dorrit's mother, Valerie, was a third cousin of Greta Tugendhat, wife of the Jewish industrialist Fritz Tugendhat, for whom the German architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed the modernist Villa Tugendhat in Brno, and Dorrit recalled taking tea there on visits as a young child. At the age of four she left Czechoslovakia with her mother and brother and settled in Vienna, Austria (her father, a textile manufacturer, who remained in Brno, later perished in Auschwitz); after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, Dorrit spent four years in a Swiss sanatorium.
Between 1936 and 1938 she studied theatre design at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where she was taught by stage designer Otto Neidermoser, until the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) in 1938, caused her to flee to England with her mother in 1939, aided by the Quaker Mackinnon family which acted as guarantor (Buresova, op. cit). Neidermoser facilitated Dorrit's scholarship at the Reimann School, which had relocated from Berlin to London the previous year, and she switched to studying display and commercial design. Among her circle were the future émigrée gallerist Annely Juda, painters Leonard Rosoman and James Holland, and designers Milner Gray, Eileen Evans, and brother and sister Natasha and Alex Kroll, who all became lifelong friends. In 1940 Dorrit married Leonard Klatzow, a South African physicist, who was instrumental in the invention of the cathode-ray tube and infrared night vision for the navy. Following his death two years later, she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) as a radio intelligence officer intercepting coded messages sent to German naval forces; her mother, Valerie, worked as a German translator at Bletchley Park (‘Station X’).
After the war Dorrit adopted the professional name, 'Dekk' and joined the design studio of what was to become the Central Office of Information, producing numerous posters for the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Works between 1947 and 1949 with messages such as 'Coughs and sneezes spread diseases' and 'Bones are still needed to make glue'. She left in 1948 to spend a year in Cape Town, South Africa, where she worked as a stage designer and illustrator, before returning to London and establishing her own design practice. Influenced by the photomontagist John Heartfield, she frequently used collage in her colourful, playful designs for clients including London Transport, British Rail, the Post Office Savings Bank, Penguin Books and Tatler magazine, while her Air France poster designs and a long professional relationship with the P&O shipping line, earned her the nickname the 'travel queen'. She created the mural British Sports and Games for The Festival of Britain's Land Travelling Exhibition in 1951 (subsequently displayed in cities across the Midlands and the north of England) and throughout the decade designed covers for the Workers Educational Association monthly magazine 'The Highway'. In 1956 she became a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists and in 1959 was listed as a member of the Contemporary Art Society. In 1968 she married Kurt Epstein. After retiring from her design practice in 1982, she concentrated on painting, printmaking and collage under the name ‘Dorrit Dekk’, embracing both figuration and abstraction in her experimental compositions. She held four solo exhibitions including at the Clarendon Gallery, London (1984, 1986) and, aged 90, held a studio sale at Duncan Campbell Fine Art, London (2007). She also participated in several mixed exhibitions including the Whitechapel Open (1988).
Dorrit Dekk died on 29 December 2014 in London, England. Her work is held in UK public collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, the Imperial War Museum, the Jewish Museum London, the Science Museum, the London Transport Museum and the V&A. Her work has been included posthumously in exhibitions including 'Designs on Britain' at the Jewish Museum London (2017) and 'Poster Girls' at the London Transport Museum (2017). In 2019 she featured in the exhibition 'Czech Routes to Britain' at Ben Uri Gallery, which focused on Czechoslovak refugee and immigrant artists to Britain, where she was also the subject of a lecture by Dr. Jana Buresova, author of 'The Dynamics of Forced Female Migration from Czechoslovakia to Britain, 1938-1950' (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019).