Gerda Matejka-Felden

Gerda Matejka-Felden (29 April 1901 – 27 December 1984) was an Austrian painter and art teacher.

Life and works Provenance and early years Gerda Felden was born at Dehlingen, a small village on the northern edge of Alsace, which between 1871 and 1919 was a semi-detached province of Germany. Emil Felden (1874-1959), her father, was a Protestant pastor-theologian who had been at school with Albert Schweitzer. Commentators suspect that it may have been on account of Schweitzer's friendship and influence that after his daughter grew to adulthood, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, Emil Felden entered mainstream politics committed to social democracy and pacifism. Gerda Felden's mother, also called Gerda, was a product of the Prussian landed aristocracy. Gerda was the eldest of her parents’ four recorded children. When she was 7 Gerda's family relocated to Bremen in connection with her father's church work. She was enrolled at an all-girls secondary school in Bremen and two years later, aged 11, began to receive supplementary drawing lessons privately, with the support and encouragement of her mother. A couple of years later, aged 13, she was enrolled at the “Kunstgewerbeschule” (loosely, “College of Applied Arts”) in Bremen in 1914. In 1917, having apparently completed her courses, and still aged just 16, she stayed on for another year as a teaching assistant in the drawing classes. She then studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Leipzig, on the other side of the country, between 1919 and 1924.

Vienna In 1924 Gerda Felden moved to Vienna, marrying the author Karl Ludwig Kossak. In Vienna she worked as a graphic artist-designer, producing drawing for Das Kleine Blatt and other newspapers and magazines along with book covers, notably for Ullstein Verlag, and posters. There are also portraits and water colours that she produced dating from this period. Following her husband's arrest, Matejka-Felden was served with a ”Berufsverbot” (government ban on professional work), which in terms of her qualifications and professional experience rendered her unemployable. She lived on cash remittances from her father and devoted her energies to trying to secure her husband's release. During 1939 undertook several visits to Berlin in pursuit of this objective. She failed to secure her husband's release, but did eventually acquire from the authorities a permit to visit him at the camp which was, under the circumstances, a significant achievement.

Aftermath of war In 1943, still able to visit her husband at Camp Dachau, Matejka told her of the increasingly dire shortages affecting inmates, and she was able to arrange for supplies of food and medicines to be sent in. On 7 July 1944 Viktor Matejka was released from the concentration camp. It is possible that this was a reaction to the desperate shortage of manpower that the state was by this time facing on account of the slaughter of war. Matejka managed to get himself admitted to hospital as a patient in order to avoid immediate conscription, and during the next ten months he managed to stay out of the army using a succession of medical certificates, some of them issued by doctors and others of them simple forgeries. While her husband embarked on a successful political career at the interface between the arts and city politics, Gerda Matejka-Felden accepted a teaching post with the “masters school for arts education” at the Academy of Fine Arts on the Schillerplatz. Two years later, having taken over leadership of the “masters school”, a measure of acceptance was marked by the conferring on her of an extraordinary professorship. Closer to home, however, resentment continued to simmer undimmed among the arts elite at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her applications to take leave in order to accept education-related engagements at other institutions were regularly rejected by the rector with the justification that her invitations came not from her work for the Fine Arts Academy but on account of her “community college activities”.

Later years In 1962 Matejka-Felden staged an exhibition of her own paintings in Bremen, The next year the ”Wiener Kunstschule” (as the “Verein Künstlerische Volkshochschule” had been renamed in 1954) finally relocated to a new site in Vienna-Alsergrund, leaving the basement rooms at the Academy of Fine Arts, unencumbered by her class rooms, and freed up for a return to their former uses.

Recognition and celebration On the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday two exhibitions were staged at the Vienna Künstlerhaus exhibition space. One featured paintings by Gerda Matejka-Felden: the other featured paintings by students and former students of her ”Wiener Kunstschule“ (‘’”Vienna College of Arts”’’).

In 1967 she received the Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria in gold.

In 1972 she receiver the Great Decoration of Honour from the city and state of Vienna.