Robert Guttmann

Robert Guttmann (born 20 April 1880 in Sušice, Southern Bohemia; died 14 March 1942 in the Łódź Ghetto), was a Czech painter.

Life Robert Guttmann attended primary school in Planá nad Lužnicí and secondary school in České Budějovice, leaving after two years. In 1895 his family moved to Prague, where he attended the two-year Bergmann private business school and then the private art school of the landscape painter Alois Kirnig.

He wandered through Slovakia and Carpathian Ukraine visiting Jewish communities in those areas.

On 16 October 1941 Guttmann was deported on the first transport that left Prague for the Lodz ghetto. Life in the harsh confines of the ghetto seems to have been unendurable for the free-spirited artist who had roamed eastern Europe on foot. He became apathetic and silent, staring vacantly into space, still clutching the folder he used to carry around Prague. He died on 12 March 1942.

Guttmann's painting style does not fit into classical art methods: it can perhaps be viewed as an original form of primitivism. As an artist he defended his right to freedom of self-expression: "I am completely independent and happy that I have escaped the pedantry of the academic world and that I am free to live and rage!". During his lifetime, he was known more as a Prague character than as an artist. It was only after World War 2 that his works came to be admired as the creations of an original naive artist. Some of his surviving works from 1939 to 1941 appear in the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague, one of whose branches opened in 2001 as the Robert Guttmann Gallery with an exhibition of his pictures.

right|frame|Chanukka mit Theodor Herzl (1941)