Käthe Schuftan: Prophetess of Spirit

Video of an online talk for the Insiders Outsiders Festival. The story of this forgotten artist, who was a friend of Eugene Halliday in the 1940s and 1950s, has now been rediscovered. “She believed in creative energy . . . She has lived, and always with her art and her great energy tried to provoke everybody else to live, in the light of freedom, in the light of spirit; and if, therefore, we could have a way of remembering her, let us always remember her as a prophetess of spirit and of freedom. That is all that she would want from us.” (From the eulogy given by Eugene Halliday at Käthe Schuftan’s funeral.) This is the story of the German Jewish refugee artist Käthe Schuftan (born Breslau 1899) who arrived in Manchester in June 1939 after suffering greatly at the hands of the Nazis and having had much of her work destroyed. She became an important figure in the artistic community of Manchester, teaching and inspiring young artists and exhibiting her work, but following a retrospective organised by a close friend after her death, her work disappeared and she was forgotten. But not by an eight year old child who, over fifty years later, discovered documents which led her to retrace Käthe’s steps, meeting people who had bought her paintings which had eventually resurfaced decades after her death, thus leading to the rediscovery of the life of this remarkable woman. The speaker is Hephzibah Yohannan, artist and writer, who was once the child who was eight years old when Käthe Schuftan died, too soon, in 1958. She is currently working on the biographies of Käthe and of her friend the artist, writer and psychotherapist Eugene Halliday; and is the editor of the Halliday Review and the Melchisedec Press. (Image: Portrait of Käthe Schuftan by Eugene Halliday.)