Greta Saur

Greta Saur (Sauer) (born 20 April 1909 in Bregenz, Austria; died 6 May 2000 in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), France) was a German painter who lived and worked in Paris. She was an abstract painter, specifically in the style of lyrical abstraction of the "Nouvelle Ecole de Paris".
Life.
Greta Sauer (Saur) was born in Bregenz in 1909, daughter of a musician. After attending grammar school in Augsburg, she devoted herself to the study of music, philosophy (with Professor Karl Jaspers) and psychology (with Professor E. Sprenger) in Heidelberg and Berlin from 1929 to 1934. It was then that she made her first autodidactic attempts at drawing.
In 1932–1933 she became involved in the resistance against the Nazi regime, and she was arrested and imprisoned in the in Berlin. For political reasons, she moved to Paris in 1937 with her friend François Willi Wendt. Friendly contacts with Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Hans Hartung, Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti and Serge Poliakoff encouraged her artistic maturation. In 1940 Saur was taken to the Gurs internment camp in France as a "feindlicher Ausländer" (lit. "enemy alien"). She found refuge with Eva Péan-Pages in the Villa Brise des Neiges in La Tronche near Grenoble.
In 1945, after the end of the war, Saur returned to Paris, first finding a studio in Rue Broca, then in Bangeux (Hauts-de-Seine), where she lived and worked.