Magda Watts (Israeli, b.1928)
Handmade Folk Art Sculpture
Tourists.
Hand signed to underside,
Dimensions: 12"h x 14.5" l x 7.5"d.
Magda Watts, Holocaust survivor, dollmaker
She grew up in the Hungarian town of Nyiregyhaza, which the war reached in 1944. Jews were herded into a ghetto, where they remained for several weeks. Magda began making dolls while being held in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland in 1944. Her creativity and imagination helped her to survive the horrors of the holocaust and led to an inspirational career in art and visual storytelling.
A resident of Eilat, Israel, she is an internationally known artist. Her intricate soft fabric and textile dolls and panoramas bring the people of the shtetl back to life. She has recreated part of the Jewish community of her native Hungary in order that it might never be forgotten.
A documentary was made on her life, “Liberation of the Spirit: The Journey of Magda Watts”. The film opens with a close-up of Watts' hands. She is shaping a doll head, pressing creases with a wooden tool into pliable sculpting resin that later will be hardened by baking. With a few nicks and strokes, human features begin to emerge from the shapeless lump.
"I don't know why I am making old people," she says. "It is coming out from me. I can't order my hand what to do."
She calls her dolls "small human beings. When you see them in half-dark, you see them dancing, speaking, like they are in life."
She makes the dolls in batches of body parts, and also makes most of the props that go with them: miniature furniture, musical instruments, tiny leather shoes with wax soles, even treadle sewing machines.
Watts survived the Auschwitz death factory, then the labor camp at Nuremberg. It was there that she created the ancestors of the folk-art masterpieces she now crafts, such artful and appealing rag dolls that Nazi guards would swap extra bread for them. That, she says, "was life" for her and her sister Shari, enough to keep them alive.
The doll scene is typical of her work: lifelike yet cartoonish figures set in evocative tableaux. She makes them in her workshop in Israel.
Starting at $1,500, Watts' soft dolls are sold only in Israel, but collected worldwide. She once made a panorama of the Jewish people's 5,000-year history for an Israel museum, and a violinist doll for concert great Isaac Stern. The dolls are tailors, jewelers, klezmer musicians, seamstresses, musicians, students, rabbis, a cast of characters from the shtetl of a bygone Europe and from small corners of the modern Jewish world. Like Frank Meisler but in fabric and cloth. They laugh and brood, gossip and smoke, fiddle and play cards. Infused, as if by some spiritual alchemy, with the full range of human emotion, they furrow their aging brows in worry and concentration. Soulful eyes gaze both outward and inward. Here and there, figures from her life emerge. "When I make the seamstress, I am thinking of my aunt. She had a little bit of a hunchback. She had a Singer machine and many drawers, with every one something beautiful inside." A careful observer can spot visual jokes in her work.
"I'm making the Bible, and (a museum panorama character) is sitting on the camel with a cigarette in his hand. Nobody sees it, but I know it. I made it for myself. I have to make something that makes me laugh."
From oven-baked clay and Styrofoam, she’s re-creating her past: rabbis, gossipy ladies, peddlers, jewelers, tailors, old couples and fish vendors from her small village in central Hungary. Nearly all perished during the Holocaust. Most were sent to the gas chambers in 1944 when Nazis overran her country, including some in Watts’ family.
Her lifelike creations have been displayed – and sold – around the world. Her creations emerge from the back of her memory. She remembers a gentler Hungary, where Jewish communities thrived before the Nazis came. On one doll’s baked clay face, she paints the knotted frown of a rabbi concentrating on a Torah passage. Another doll grows into a man hawking fish. Women play cards. A stern schoolmaster presides over a class. “They love to love,” she says. She has exhibited with Malcah Zeldis. Her naive, whimsical images contain a number of storytelling devices and attempt to convey a narrative. She is also fond of Mea Shearim...
Category
20th Century Folk Art Fabric Sculptures
MaterialsFabric, Wood, Mixed Media
