Paula Maly

Austrian painter Paula Maly studied in Graz, where she grew up, at the Styrian Landeskunstschule and at the Arts School in Wien (Vienna) starting in 1914. Her sister Ida Sofia (1894-1941) studied there with her. Ida was murdered by the Nazis in 1941 at Schloss Hartheim in Upper Austria in the gas chamber. She had been ill from schizophrenia since 1928, and interned in the “Landes Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Am Feldhof” (sanatorium and mental home) in Graz, and the Nazis eliminated her as an undesirable.

From 1925-45 Maly taught at the Women’s Vocational School in Graz, first producing conventional paintings based on Impressionism. During her life there was never a catalog published of her artistic work. Only a thinner, four-page brochure, published in 1961 by the Neue Galerie in Graz, is reminiscent of the artist, although the Gallery Leonhard dedicated an exhibition of paintings from the 1950s and 1960s. In these two decades Paula Maly created paintings as a Cubist, with rounded shapes or simple, two-dimensional cubes. Her motifs later changed to an easier, informal style of painting.