Ottilie Tolansky (née Pincasovitch) was born to a religious Jewish family in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) in 1912. She grew up in Vienna and later in Berlin, where she studied at the Reimann Schule before immigrating to England in 1933 due to increasing anti-Semitic legislation in Germany. In exile she exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, Women's International Art Club, New English Art Club (NEAC), Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) and with Ben Uri.
Ottilie Tolansky was born Ethel Pincasovitch to a religiously observant Jewish family in Czernowitz, then in the Northern Bukovinan sector of Austro-Hungary (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on 30 May 1912. The family moved to Vienna shortly after her birth due to riots directed at the town’s Jewish population, and she always considered herself Austrian. She then moved to Berlin, where in 1928 her father, Salomo (Shlomo) Pinkasovitch, became head cantor of the Alte Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Germany. She began studying at the progressive, Jewish-owned Reimann School of Art in Berlin after her family noted her precocious artistic talent, then continued her studies at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.
Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933 and the subsequent introduction of anti-Semitic legislation, the family immigrated to England, after her father accepted a post at a synagogue in Cheetham Hill, then the predominantly Jewish area of Manchester. In 1935, Ottilie married physicist and Nobel Prize nominee Samuel Tolansky, with whom she had become acquainted in 1931 when he spent a year working at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin. She later produced diagrams and illustrations for a number of her husband’s academic texts and was duly acknowledged for her work, her name first appearing in his monograph on fine structure in line spectra and nuclear spin. After continuing her studies at the Manchester Municipal School, Tolansky and her husband settled in London, where she attended the Hammersmith School of Art after the end of the Second World War. She subsequently exhibited regularly in group exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, and with societies including the Women's International Art Club, the New English Art Club (NEAC), and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI). She also held solo exhibitions at the Q Theatre Gallery, Richmond Hill Gallery, and Walker’s Gallery on Bond Street (all dates unknown). In 1967 she presented Paintings and Drawings by Ottilie Tolansky at Gallery 273, Queen Mary College (now QMUL, part of the University of London).
Her portraits, still lifes, and figure drawings, mainly in oils and gouache, are characterised by the predominant use of blues and violets and the modelling of forms through strongly defined planes of colour. In the early 1960s, she produced two portraits of her grandfather, Rabbi Joseph Trostmann, based on childhood recollections and family photographs, one was purchased by the Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery, and the other was retained in the family; upon the artist’s death, her son Jonathan Tolansky inherited the second portrait, which he donated to the Ben Uri Collection in 2018. A 1966 review of her exhibition at the RBA Galleries, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts , characterised her as a painter ‘steadfastly, regardless of current fashion and dogma, pursuing her own way’ (Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 1966, p. 1028). Tolansky also contributed many art reviews across a wide range of topics to the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, including reviewing the BBC’s lecture series on modernist art in 1971, the biography of fellow émigrée artist Anna Mahler in 1976, and David Hockney's autobiography in 1977.
Ottilie Tolansky died in London, England on 13 February 1977. In 1979, the Mall Galleries in London presented a posthumous retrospective, and in 1989, her son, together with Haim Lazarov, mounted a major exhibition at the Hurlingham Gallery. Her work has also featured posthumously in Ben Uri exhibitions including Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain, 1933-45 (2018). Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Guildhall Art Gallery, Royal Holloway (University of London) and The Potteries Museum and Art Galleries, Stoke-on-Trent. In 2020, five of her works were given by her son to the city of Klagenfurt in Austria. The papers of Samuel Tolansky are held in the archive of Senate House Library, University of London.
Ottilie Tolansky in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ottilie Tolansky]
Publications related to [Ottilie Tolansky] in the Ben Uri Library