From Happenstance and Determination,
an International Exhibition

By JULIE SALAMON

New York Times, Arts,

10 September 2004

How did this retrospective come to exist? Remember, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis had not been heralded as an artist after World War II, but as a teacher. Exhibitions of her work had been scant in her lifetime - a few paintings in a group show of Bauhaus artists, a solo exhibition in a London gallery in 1940, which she couldn't attend because of the war. Her work was scattered.

A bat mitzvah gift opened the door. When Regina Seidman Miller, now 40, turned 13, her mother, a Polish refugee who had settled in New York, gave her a copy of "I Never Saw Another Butterfly." Until then, her mother had declined to discuss her past; she used the poems and drawings of the Theresienstadt children in the book as a way to do it. In a telephone interview, Ms. Miller, who now lives in Los Angeles, said, "That was a beautiful entrance into my family's history."

Young Regina choreographed a dance based on the book and Dicker-Brandeis, which eventually helped her win a full scholarship to college. She danced professionally for a few years and then decided to become a teacher, eager to incorporate dance into an early childhood curriculum. Again, Dicker-Brandeis turned up in a book a friend had given her to help with her career change. "To Friedl" was the dedication of a textbook called "Art as Therapy With Children" by Edith Kramer. Ms. Kramer had worked with refugee children in Prague on the eve of World War II, in the classes organized by Dicker-Brandeis.

To Ms. Miller that coincidence felt like destiny. With no endgame in mind, she said, she began trying to find out everything she could about Dicker-Brandeis, tracking down survivors who might have known her. She built files within files.

She was living in New York but left for Los Angeles to work on a television show for children. In 1995 she visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center there, created to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. In it she discovered a collection of 142 Dicker-Brandeis works, acquired from Peter Brandeis, son of Pavel, Friedl's husband. He had survived the war, remarried and had three children with whom he never discussed his first wife or the trunk full of her art he kept in the attic. After he died in 1971, the sons moved to Los Angeles, with the trunk, and put the art up for sale.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, though not an art museum, bought the work in 1989, preserved it and put it in storage. There it remained until Ms. Miller showed up in 1995.

In another twist, a librarian at the Wiesenthal Center told Ms. Miller that another woman, an art historian, had become obsessed with Dicker-Brandeis. She knew her name - Elena Makarova - but not how to reach her. Ms. Miller tracked Ms. Makarova down at an exhibition she had been curating in Stockholm. A week later the two women met in Prague.

On their first night together Ms. Miller was mugged in the subway and her passport and money were stolen. Things improved after that. For two years the women met in Eastern Europe, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks, finding pieces of Dicker-Brandeis art and people who knew her. They raised about $400,000 from the Austrian government to support the project. By then Ms. Miller had a goal: "I didn't want this to be in community houses. I wanted an exhibition of Dicker-Brandeis work in the top museums in the world."

With the backing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, she raised $1.2 million to acquire art and arrange loans. The exhibition has toured Europe and Japan, at the top museums Ms. Miller had wanted, including the Bauhaus in Berlin and the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. The Jewish Museum is the exhibition's last stop but may be only the beginning for Dicker-Brandeis. Ms. Miller said she had had calls from Ph.D. candidates, playwrights, film producers and publishers.