Lisa Rodewald Collection

Lisa Rodewald (née Thon) was born on December 1st, 1895 in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland) as an only child to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. After working as a teacher for two years, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art in Breslau in 1914 where she worked together with Otto Mueller (a member of the movement “Die Bruecke”, one of the big groups within Expressionism). She married the architect Ernest Rodewald in 1921, and they had a son, Claude (December 25th, 1921- July 1st, 1953). Ernest passed away in 1925.

In 1936, Lisa and Claude fled Germany and went to England. She later managed to get her mother out of Germany and sent Claude to the U.S. while staying in England. During the war, Lisa worked in munitions plants. After the war, she designed embroideries for haute couture houses. Lisa followed her son to the U.S. in 1947 or 1949 where she received a scholarship to study at the Penland School of Handicrafts in North Carolina. She taught handicrafts at the New York Guild for the Blind in White Plains for seven and a half years until she retired in 1962. She lived in New York City until she moved to Cooperstown, New York, in 1973, where she died on November 13th, 1979.

Lisa started painting in oil and watercolor but later switched to embroidery and needle paintings. She exhibited her work in Germany and England as well as in the U.S. (Cooper Union and The Contemporary Craft Museum). After she started to suffer from severe psoriatic arthritis, she worked on watercolors on tissue paper.