Suzanne Perlman

Suzanne Perlman (18 October 1922 – 2 August 2020) was a Hungarian-Dutch visual artist known for her expressionist portraits and landscape paintings. Her bold use of colour has its origins in her early paintings of the tropical island of Curaçao, where she moved with her husband in 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. Her expressionist style developed under the tutelage of Austrian master Oskar Kokoschka in the late 1950s,

Perlman studied at Columbia University School of the Arts, Instituto Allende and at Saint Martin's School of Art. was born in Budapest in October 1922 into a Jewish family. She lived with her brother, Sigmund, and her two parents, Abraham and Elisabeth Sternberg. The family owned an art and antiques gallery and Abraham had an avid interest in the works of young Hungarian artists, discovering and promoting many of them, including Pál Fried. While still at school, Suzanne would help her parents to sort and catalogue a collection of museum postcards by celebrated artists – an experience that Perlman saw as her early training and inspiration. She left school at 13 after her father died. Soon after arriving, tensions in Europe were rising. After coming in with the lowest tender to supply grain to French troops behind the Maginot Line, Heinz was summoned by telegram to Paris to urgently negotiate the deal and was told to bring his wife. Suzanne described this call as the one that saved their lives. For some years, with her husband, she ran an antiques business; her studio being in the attic above.

While living in Curaçao in the 1960s, Perlman was selected to attend a workshop run by Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. Suzanne is quoted saying of Kokoschka: "He had an amazing dynamic and said to me 'Technique you can learn, but the moment of vision cannot be taught'".

New York From the early 1950s, and until her husband died, the couple lived in New York City where Suzanne studied at the Art Students League of New York, first in 1955.

Likely immersed in the burgeoning abstract expressionist movement, Perlman painted her first known abstract expressionist work, Untitled, in 1950. Later in New York she was a pupil of Sidney Gross, a painter, from whom she drew inspiration and produced abstract works still brimming with the Caribbean palette of the Dutch Antilles.

London Perlman moved to London in the 1980s to be closer to her family after the death of her husband in 1983.

In 2014, David Glasser curated the exhibition Suzanne Perlman, Painting London, at the Ben Uri Gallery in London, (30 April – 17 May 2014). Glasser described her London work as "part Arcadia, part metropolis, part fantasy and part documentary. Her subjects include summer revels and autumn blooms in London’s parks; traffic-laden busy thoroughfares; Covent Garden nightlife; booksellers on a glowing Southbank, and architectural vistas of the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and St. Paul’s." It was awarded the Critic's Choice by Jackie Wullschlager of the Financial Times who described Perlman's work as "expressive, visionary [and] deeply engaged with the modernist tradition".

Collections Works by Perlman are present in major museum collections, including: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Curaçao Museum Parliamentary Art Collection (House of Lords) Ben Uri Gallery, London Museum of London Dohány Street Synagogue (Jewish Museum of Budapest) Jewish Museum London Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam Museum Gouda, Holland Ruth Borchard Collection Queen Beatrix, the Queen Mother, Netherlands Royal Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York