Eva (1920) Fischer

Eva Fischer (19 November 1920, Daruvar – 7 July 2015, Rome) was a Croatia-born Italian artist who worked in oils, watercolours, engraving and lithography.

Eva was born in Daruvar (present-day Croatia) in 1920. Her father, Leopold, Chief Rabbi, and noted Talmudist, was deported by the Nazis from Yugoslavia before the outbreak of World War II. Unfortunately, more than thirty members of her family were not so lucky and disappeared in the concentration camps. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon, just before the outbreak of war. In Belgrade in 1941, she witnessed the city's bombardments by the Nazis.

Eva was interned with her mother and her younger brother in the Vallegrande concentration camp on the Croatian island of Korcula under the administration of Italy. This camp was not as terrible the Nazi camps. She was allowed to assist her sick mother with her brother in the Split hospital, where they received permission to be transferred to Bologna. There, in 1943, Fischer was hidden with her family under the surname Venturi. She remembered that period of her life when good Italians tried to help them. At that time Wanda Varotti, Massimo Massei and many other members of the “Partito d’Azione” gave tremendous help to her.

At the end of the war Fischer chose Rome as her adopted city. She became a member of a group of artists on Via Margutta, and became close friends with most of them. She met Pablo Picasso at the home of Luchino Visconti and they talked extensively. He pushed her to continue and to progress in the mysterious light of boats and Southern architectures. She moved to Paris, where she lived for a long time in Saint Germain des Près. In Madrid, Fischer’s paintings – finally exhibited in museums – were at the centre of debates between the Margutta artist and the Spanish painters, who were still fighting against Franco’s politics.

In the 1960s, Fischer was in London, where she exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery, where the Italian painter Modigliani had been allowed to show his last one man exhibition. In 1992 Italian composer Ennio Morricone composed music for one of her exhibitions.