Marie Paneth was born Marie Julia Fürth into a prosperous Jewish family in Sukdull, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1895. She visited London for the first time in 1935, moving there permanently four years later. She is best known for her ground-breaking work as an art therapist for young people, a technique she pioneered and used from 1945 at Calgarth in Windermere in the Lake District, working with traumatised children who survived German concentration camps.
Painter and art therapist Marie Paneth was born Marie Julia Fürth into a prosperous Jewish family in Sukdull (near Würzing), Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1895. Her father, Alfred Fürth, died an untimely death, aged only 40, when Marie was four years old, and she was brought up with her three brothers by her mother, Marie Fürth. Paneth studied in Vienna under Franz Cižek, an Austrian genre and portrait painter who helped to build the Child Art Movement that came to prominence in the 1920s. Cižek played an important role in Paneth’s future path as a children’s educator. In 1918 she married a Jewish doctor, Otto Paneth. Probably because of the scarcity of jobs in Austria, after the end of the First World War the couple appeared to have moved around: in 1921 they were in Amsterdam and later relocated to Sumatra, Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). However, the marriage broke down in the second half of the 1930s and they were later divorced.
Paneth returned to Europe and appears to have been in London in 1935, when she exhibited her drawings and watercolours at the Twenty One Gallery, 59 Conduit Street. The Times (9 December 1935) noted Paneth's 'technical virtuosity', praising the richness of colour of her monochrome The Ram (location unknown) and adding that her watercolours 'by a combination of diffused tones and sharp accents, have a seductive quality'. After spending a period in Paris in 1938, she left for New York, where she exhibited in 1939 with the Society of Independent Artists (SIA), founded in 1916 to provide progressive artists with an opportunity to show their work through an annual exhibition. Paneth remained in New York for seven months, sailing for Southampton, England at the beginning of July 1939.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, she was listed as a 'female enemy alien' but following an appeal, she was exempted from internment and classed as a non-refugee. Her occupation was listed as 'Artist Painter', but she first found work as a matron in Scotland at the renowned Gordonstoun School, Elgin, which was now home to the German refugee educator Kurt Hahn. After several months, she returned to London, living first in Chelsea and then in Hampstead. Paneth spent much of the war working with orphaned and troubled children alongside fellow Austrian émigré Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud. In 1944 Paneth published a book about her experience of youth work, Branch Street, focusing on a play centre that began in what had been a surface bomb shelter and was eventually moved to a condemned house loaned by the borough council. The book received positive reviews, with George Orwell describing it in the Observer as 'a valuable piece of sociological work' and adding that 'it would be difficult to read the book without conceiving an admiration for its author, who has carried out a useful piece of civilising work with great courage and infinite good-temper' (Orwell 1944, p. 3). During these years, Paneth began using the ground-breaking idea of art as therapy for young people, a technique she pioneered and used from 1945 at the Calgarth Estate in Windermere in the Lake District, where traumatised children who survived German concentration camps were rehabilitated. Paneth recalled how the youngsters were still 'suffering from the effects of either extreme starvation or typhus, often both', and had 'the experience of hell ever-present in their minds’ and ‘guilt at being alive (quoted in Smallman, 2021). After her time at Windermere, Paneth continued her work with children and adolescents who suffered traumatic experiences.
Marie Paneth died in the Hazlewell nursing home in Putney, London in 1986. Paneth's papers, covering the period 1938–68 and including correspondence, a diary, reports, writings, and children’s artwork, are held by the Library of Congress, Washington. Paneth’s time at Calgarth was depicted in the BBC drama The Windermere Children by Michael Samuels (2020) which was broadcast in January 2021 to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Paneth's journal, in which she recorded on a daily basis how her lessons helped rebuild the lives of 300 children, was published under the title Rock the Cradle by 2nd Generation in 2020. Paneth's work in Windemere and her writing, was explored by Trevor Avery, director of the Lake District Holocaust Project, in a zoom talk under the auspices of the Insiders/Outsiders cultural festival in early 2021.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marie Paneth]
Publications related to [Marie Paneth] in the Ben Uri Library