Edith Kramer

Edith Kramer is internationally known as a painter and art therapist. The artist was born in a Jewish middle-class family in 1916. Her uncle was the poet Theodor Kramer and her maternal aunt the actress Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel. In her youth, Edith became acquainted with artists, intellectuals, scientists and psychoanalysts, who represented the avant-garde, youthful, left-wing Freudian milieu of the interwar period in Vienna. She started her artistic training with Trude Hammerschlag, Friedl Dicker and Fritz Wotruba in Vienna. Edith Kramer came into contact with psychoanalysis through her Uncle Siegfried Bernfeld, Anna Freud and Annie Reich. She first applied it to herself and later studied psychoanalysis in order to establish it in her exile in New York as an independent form of treatment in art therapy. The book "Art as Therapy with Children", which she wrote from clinical experience, has been translated into seven languages ​​and is considered to be the core literature in the training for art therapists. The artist commuted between two worlds: she spent the summer at Grundlsee, where she devoted entire days to painting in her studio on the alp with great discipline. The rest of the year, she worked in New York. The internationally known artist died on February 21, 2014 in her adopted home in Austria.