Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Edith Kiss artist

Edith Kiss (née Róth) was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1905 and studied art in Budapest and Düsseldorf, establishing a successful prewar career as a sculptor. In 1944 she was deported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp and later to the Daimler Benz factory, where, as a forced labourer, she was among 1,000 women employed in aircraft engine manufacture for the Nazis. After her escape, Edith Kiss married and eventually continued her art in Morocco, Paris and London, where she also worked at Anna Freud's Child Therapy Clinic in Hampstead from 1962.

Born: 1905 Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary)

Died: 1966 Paris, France

Year of Migration to the UK: 1962

Other name/s: Edith Bán Kiss, Edit Kiss, Edit Bán Kiss, Edit Rott, Edit Róth


Biography

Sculptor Edith Kiss (née Edit Rott) was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary on 21 November 1905. She studied sculpture in Düsseldorf, and painting with István Réti in an artists’ colony in Nagybánya (Siebenbürgen), Romania. Afterwards, prior to the Second World War, she established a successful career as a sculptor in Budapest, where she also met and married her first husband, Tivadar Bán. In the 1930s she joined the Association of Socialist Artists, probably meeting there the modernist painter Bela Kadar, with whom she exhibited in 1943 at the Tamas Galeria, Budapest. She was also commissioned by the city’s Hitelbank (Credit Bank) to create a life-sized sculpture, Woman (which went missing after the bank’s seizure by the communist government, after the end of the Second World War).


In 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, Kiss was deported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp and later to the Daimler Benz factory 60 km from Berlin, where, as a forced labourer, she was among 1,000 women employed in aircraft engine manufacture for the Nazis. While in Ravensbrück, she made a series of twelve drawings, ‘Life in the Camp’, which was discovered and destroyed by the guards. In 1945 the factory was evacuated as the Red Army advanced, and Kiss and her friend Agnes Bartha escaped a forced march, going into hiding and eventually making their way back to Budapest, suffering further violence at the hands of Russian soldiers en route. After her return Kiss executed a series of 30 figurative gouache sketches based on the women's experiences in the camps, which were exhibited in late 1945. In 1948 she had a solo exhibition at the Muvesz Galeria, Budapest, showing 20 sculptures and was commissioned to create four large stone reliefs, known as the Deportation series, commemorating Jewish suffering, which were set in the outer wall of the city’s Újpest Synagogue.


In 1949, having divorced from her first husband, she left Budapest with her second husband, Dr. Sándor Kiss, moving first to Paris, France, then Casablanca, Morocco. They returned to Paris in 1956, taking French citizenship, and she exhibited regularly at the Galerie Raymond Duncan, Paris. In 1962, following her husband’s death, Kiss moved to London, where she worked for four years in Anna Freud’s Child Therapy Clinic in Hampstead. She committed suicide in a hotel in Paris, France on 27 October 1966. In 1996 a posthumous exhibition In 1996 a commemorative exhibition entitled Ki ismeri ezt az asszonyt? (Who knows this woman?) was held at the Hungarian Jewish Museum in Budapest (where she is known as Bán Kiss Edit), which featured the Deportation series rediscovered by Helmut Bauer in London in 1992. In 2014 a street in Berlin, Germany, 'Edith Kiss Strasse', was renamed in her honour and a commemorative exhibition of her work was held at the Daimler Benz building in the city. Her work is represented in public collections in Hungary and in the Ben Uri Collection in the UK. Her work was included in Ben Uri's remounted centenary exhibition, entitled ‘100 for 100: Ben Uri - Past, Present, Future’, at Christie's South Kensington in London in 2016, and at a reconfigured Ben Uri centenary Out of Chaos exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, also in 2016.

Related books

  • Helmuth Bauer, Innere Bilder wird man nicht los: Die Frauen im KZ-Außenlager Daimler-Benz Genshagen (Metropol Verlag, 2010)
  • reproduction of a detail of Kiss's drawing, Jewish Chronicle, 16 July 1993, p. 26

Public collections

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • 100 for 100, Ben Uri: Past, Present & Future, Christie's London (2016)
  • Edith Kiss, Daimler Benz building, Berlin (2012)
  • Ki ismeri ezt az asszonyt? (Who knows this woman?), Hungarian Jewish Museum, Budapest (1996)
  Edith Kiss
   
Ben Uri collection

Edith Kiss in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edith Kiss]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Edith Kiss] in the Ben Uri Library