Jolán Gross-Bettelheim

b. 1900 — d. 1972

Jolán Gross-Bettelheim, a Hungarian artist, lived in the United States between 1925 and 1956. Although details about her life remain sketchy, she is best known for her social and political prints of industrial urban life. Born in 1900 in Nitra, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire but now in the Slovak Republic, she began her art studies in 1919 at the Budapest School of Fine Art, where she studied painting with Róbert Berény. In 1920 she studied with Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna and within a year went to Berlin and enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künst. Between 1922 and 1924 she lived in Paris and studied at the Académie de Grande Chaumière. By 1925 she was living in Cleveland, married to Frigyes Bettelheim, a Hungarian-born radiologist. She exhibited in annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1927–37) and had her first solo exhibition at the Kokoon Klub (1932). In 1936, while on the Works Progress Administration graphic arts project in Cleveland, she made her first lithographs. In 1938 she moved to Jackson Heights, New York, with her husband, who opened a practice in Manhattan. A committed communist, Gross-Bettelheim was a contributor to the New Masses and the Daily Worker as well as a member of the John Reed Club and the American Artists’ Congress. During the 1930s and 1940s her works were exhibited extensively in Ohio, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. She was included in the exhibitions America Today, shown simultaneously in 30 cities (1936), Artists for Victory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1942), and America in the War, shown simultaneously in 26 locations (1943). Following the death of her husband, she returned to Hungary after 1956. Gross-Bettelheim died in Budapest. Transformations in Cleveland Art. (CMA, 1996), p. 230