Object numberM2010/096:008
Creator Mark Tedeschi (photographer)
DescriptionBlack and white photograph of artist Judy Cassab AO CBE, taken by Mark Tedeschi AM QC in 1992 for the Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition Courage and Survival. She is depicted holding a palette and paintbrush, the tools of her trade, in front of a landscape painting.
A two-time winner of the Archibald Prize, Judy Cassab was a portraitist of immense insight and imagination, seemingly able to capture not only a sitter’s likeness but the spirit of their times. As well as painting social luminaries, royals, fellow artists, family and friends, she was also a prolific draughtswoman and an acclaimed landscape artist.
Born Judit Kaszab in Vienna in 1920 to Jewish Hungarian parents, Cassab started painting at the age of 12. She began her formal studies at the Academy of Art in Prague in 1938 but these were cut short by the oncoming Second World War and she was forced to flee the German occupation in 1939. She resumed her studies in Budapest in 1941 with Aurel Bernath and Lipot Hermann – the same year her husband Jancsi Kampfner was conscripted to work in labour camps (she had married him in 1939 on the condition that she be allowed to pursue a career as an artist). After the war Cassab and her husband learnt that their immediate families had died in Nazi concentration camps; Cassab herself evaded persecution during the war by posing as her family’s Catholic maid.
The couple moved to Sydney with their two sons in 1951, settling in Woollahra. In the following years Cassab established herself as a portrait painter of considerable renown, rendering her subjects with an expressionist style influenced by European modernists.
She died in Sydney in 2015.
Reference: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
A two-time winner of the Archibald Prize, Judy Cassab was a portraitist of immense insight and imagination, seemingly able to capture not only a sitter’s likeness but the spirit of their times. As well as painting social luminaries, royals, fellow artists, family and friends, she was also a prolific draughtswoman and an acclaimed landscape artist.
Born Judit Kaszab in Vienna in 1920 to Jewish Hungarian parents, Cassab started painting at the age of 12. She began her formal studies at the Academy of Art in Prague in 1938 but these were cut short by the oncoming Second World War and she was forced to flee the German occupation in 1939. She resumed her studies in Budapest in 1941 with Aurel Bernath and Lipot Hermann – the same year her husband Jancsi Kampfner was conscripted to work in labour camps (she had married him in 1939 on the condition that she be allowed to pursue a career as an artist). After the war Cassab and her husband learnt that their immediate families had died in Nazi concentration camps; Cassab herself evaded persecution during the war by posing as her family’s Catholic maid.
The couple moved to Sydney with their two sons in 1951, settling in Woollahra. In the following years Cassab established herself as a portrait painter of considerable renown, rendering her subjects with an expressionist style influenced by European modernists.
She died in Sydney in 2015.
Reference: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
Production placeSydney, New South Wales, Australia
Object namephotographs
Dimensions
- height: 240.00 mm
width: 305.00 mm
Credit lineSydney Jewish Museum Collection, Donated by Mark Tedeschi