Diana Kurz

Diana Kurz (born 1936, Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born feminist painter who is known for her Remembrance (Holocaust) series, which explores the "loss and preservation" of the artist’s family members during the Holocaust.

Early life and education In 1938, Diana Kurz's family fled Austria, first to England and then to the United States. Kurz spent her childhood in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. where Jean Hélion became a mentor. After returning from France, Kurz turned to figural compositions, which had interested her since 1963. She was influenced by Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse,

Since the late 1960s, Kurz has identified as a feminist. She participated in the Women’s March for Peace (Jeannette Rankin Brigade) in Washington, D.C., in 1968 and joined the Women's Caucus for Art in 1972. She was one of thirteen contributors to The Sister Chapel, a collaborative feminist installation that celebrated female role models. Kurz painted Durga (1977), for which she painstakingly studied numerous Indian examples and an actual devotee of the Hindu goddess, but retained her own distinctive painting technique. Instead of merely enlarging the black-and-white photographs, Kurz used her imagination to embellish them and incorporated text, letters, and other media. She used bright colors because, as she explained, “I was often struck by the irony of the fact that terrible, unspeakable things occurred while the sky was blue, the weather beautiful, birds singing, etc.” In Self-Portrait (1999), Kurz appears to stand in front of Vienna, another painting from the series. She leans with her elbows resting on a table, as if physically in the same space—for the first time—as those of her diseased relatives. As observed by Evelyn Torton Beck, Kurz’s “philosophy of painting closely parallels feminist theories of relationship and process: color is relational. Painting is very much about relationships.” In 1998, Kurz exhibited a number of paintings from her Remembrance (Holocaust) series at the Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt in her birthplace, Vienna.