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.
1941
Wood
Images and text © Ben Uri collection, 2017
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Refugees – The Lives of Others
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3:28
Despair
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0:58