A contemporary of Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Hartigan, Martha Szabo has the unfortunate distinction of having had to survive the war in Europe. She was 16 - a critical age for a young artist - when her family was taken by the Nazis and imprisoned at the Strasshof concentration/labor camp in Austria. 

Her career and life shed valuable light on underknown women artists and postwar artists who survived the war. This illumination is academically important, with the added benefit of being visually delightful and emotionally moving. Well aware of Szabo's challenging journey, Dr. Chantal Desmoulins, founder of the Catharsis Application Program, describes the impact of wartime trauma on the young artist: 

To prevent a young artist from expressing herself and practicing her art, is to cut off the essence of her soul. To create, for an adolescent, is an urgent calling of self-discovery, of self-creation and self-revelation: the most sublime part of her being. It is a calling from the very essence she seeks to manifest through her work.

This work, once cut off, is like the annunciation of a life aborted. It is a birth that could not reach its full term, a heavy weight whose burden the young artist carries for her entire existence. At the moment when she is prevented from creating, it is her very existence that is tied off like a tight knot. The present is only there to tell her that the work she might have done, does not exist. Thus, she cannot live the stages of her growth until their natural end.

Something is broken. And this break spoils, hinders the passage to adult life. Her innermost, deepest spirit, her imaginative power, her secrets, her feelings, all are inhibited. Carrying this burden of potential unfulfilled, of the unresolved tension from opposing facets of her being, she could not reconcile, through artistic creation, the parts of herself that she tried to discover, to reveal, to bring to light. She could only become a rebel, conflicted, in revolt against a world that tried to mask her, rendering her invisible to her own eyes.

Martha never actively sought the attention her work justly deserved; her wartime experience, followed by having to escape Hungary after the Revolution of 1956, caused her to avoid attracting any attention at all. 

My mission is to bring attention to my mother's work. Her hundreds of paintings date back to the early 1960s. I predict that exhibitions of even a fraction of Martha's output would be of great interest to international art scholars and curators; for contemporary connoisseurs and collectors, viewing these works is a rigorous yet uplifting experience that will be discussed for decades to come, and given its proper due. 

Julia Szabo
New York City, 2021