Robert Guttmann

Robert Guttmann (born 20 April 1800 in Schüttenhofen, Austria-Hungary; died 14 March 1942 in the Łódź Ghetto), was a Czech painter.

Life

Robert Guttmann attended primary school in Planá nad Lužnicí and secondary school in České Budějovice, leaving after two years. In 1895 his family moved to Prague, where he attended the two-year Bergmann private business school and then the private art school of the landscape painter Alois Kirnig. From 1893, Guttmann was involved in a forerunner of the Maccabi Hatzair Jewish youth organization, and in 1897 he set off for the first Zionist congress in Basel. He hiked to Basel on foot, financing the trip by selling hand-painted postcard views and caricatures. This was to remain his main source of income in later years. In 1899 he was a co-founder of a Zionist organization in Prague. He attended most of the Zionist congresses until 1925, but his eccentric appearance set him apart from other delegates.

Guttmann was a Prague café and street painter. He wandered through Slovakia and Carpathian Ukraine visiting Jewish communities in those areas. In the year of the 10th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, he held an exhibition of 40 paintings in Prague's Karlsplatz square.

After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, Guttmann was persecuted as a Jew. On October 16, 1941, he was deported on the first transport of Jews from Prague to the Łódź Ghetto, where he died of the harsh conditions.

Guttmann's painting style does not fit into classical art methods: it can perhaps be viewed as an original form of primitivism. During his lifetime, he was known more as a Prague character than as an artist. Some of his pictures from 1939 to 1941 and appear in collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague, one of whose branches opened in 2001 as the Robert Guttmann Gallery with an exhibition of his pictures.

Bibligraphy

• (in German) Manfred Knedlik: Guttmann, Robert. In: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (AKL). Band 66, de Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-598-23033-2, S. 308
• Guttmann, Robert, in: Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main : S. Fischer, 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5, S. 207
• Guttmann, Robert, in: Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971, Band 7, Sp. 995
• Arthur Heller: Guttmann. Eine psychologische Studie über den Maler Robert Guttmann. Prague: "Litevna“ – Literarischer und wissenschaftlicher Verlag Vojtech Tilkovsky, 1932

"Robert Guttmann: painter, globetrotting Zionist, and "most caricatured man" of 20th century Prague". Radio Prague International. April 12, 2019. Retrieved January 9, 2022.