Käthe Strenitz was born into a Jewish family in Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou), Bohemia, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1923 and studied at the Officina Pragensis school in Prague. In 1939 she travelled on a Quaker-sponsored Kindertransport to England. She later completed her art education at the Regent Street Polytechnic and made the industrial landscapes of London, in particular the King's Cross area, the subject of much of her work.
Artist Käthe Strenitz was born into a Jewish family in Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou) in the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) on 12 April 1923. After her family moved to Prague in 1938, she attended the Officina Pragensis, a school for printmaking, book illustration and poster design, under the instruction of painter and printmaker Hugo Steiner. Aged 16, in 1939, Strenitz travelled as a refugee to England on a Quaker-sponsored Kindertransport organised by the humanitarian Nicholas Winton, as one of the 669 ‘Winton children’, leaving her family behind in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.
Once in England, Strenitz had difficult experiences on a farm in Hampshire, with insufficient food and suffering bouts of illness. She then worked briefly at the David Eder Farm in Kent which trained young people to work on 'kibbutzim' in Palestine, before being sent to an Orthodox Jewish girls’ hostel in Stamford Hill, Hackney, north east London. She later found work washing milk bottles on a farm. Meanwhile, unbeknown to Strenitz, some of her drawings were sent via a friend to Austrian émigré artist Oskar Kokoschka, and on Kokoschka’s recommendation Strenitz was awarded a British Council scholarship at Regent Street Polytechnic in 1942. Finding herself dissatisfied with the teaching, however, she decided to leave the Polytechnic and commit to war work making air force goggles. She moved into Canterbury Hall, a hostel maintained by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, where she met Otto Fischel, a Czechoslovak Jewish journalist-turned-entrepreneur. They married in 1943 and their daughter was born in 1950. Strenitz later returned to Regent Street Polytechnic where she shared a studio with painter and engraver David Smith and studied wood engraving; for decades she used a huge press to make woodcuts of her drawings. When her husband opened a plastics factory, Otaco Ltd, on Market Road, north of King's Cross Station, it became a base for Strenitz, who made the interior of the factory and the surrounding industrial landscape the main subjects of her drawings, woodcuts and engravings. Documenting King's Cross, St Pancras and the surrounding cityscape along Regent's Canal - railways, bridges, tunnels, streets, warehouses, docks and waterways - her work provides an important artistic record of the area. Strenitz traced her interest in the industrial landscape to the visual impression made on her when first arriving in east London as a refugee at Liverpool Street Station.
Strenitz favoured pencil, ink and wash, or charcoal for her drawings, but also painted in oils and watercolour, and found most success commercially with her woodcuts. In 1972 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and received the Lord Mayor's Award for woodcuts in 1973. She exhibited at numerous London venues, including Bankside Gallery and Boundary Gallery. She also continued to align with her Jewish heritage, showing with Ben Uri regularly from the late 1940s into the 1970s in its annual open exhibitions and presenting a solo show with the gallery in 1961. In 1998 her work featured in Ben Uri's exhibition Czech Artists from the Collection.
Käthe Strenitz died in London, England, on 29 August 2017. Her work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Guildhall Art Gallery and the London Metropolitan Archives. Posthumously her work featured in Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection presented at the Museum of Gloucester in conjunction with GARAS (Gloucestershire Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers).
Käthe Strenitz in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Käthe Strenitz]
Publications related to [Käthe Strenitz] in the Ben Uri Library