Despair

Immigrated to Czechoslovakia 1933, Great Britain 1939, returned to East Germany 1960. A former life model for Otto Dix, poverty and ill-health confirmed Klopfleisch’s Communist convictions; she became a party member in 1931, carrying out agitprop. Fleeing to Prague in 1933, she co-founded the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, escaping to England with AIA assistance in 1939 and marrying her German fiancé. Working as a domestic for Roland Penrose, she studied sculpture at Reading University, exhibiting with the FGLC. While interned in Rushen Internment Camp, she modelled a clay figurine, Woman in Despair, on which this German Expressionist carving is based. She returned to Dresden, Eastern Germany in 1960, suffering further persecution from the Stasi.