Lisel Salzer

Lisel Salzer was born in Austria. Her father was a German-speaking citizen of the Austria-Hungarian Empire and her mother was born in Turkey. Both of her parents and Lisel were Jewish.^[1] Lisel was the only-child of a well-to-do family. Her artistic talents were noticed early and she attended the Vienna Art Academy. Graduating in 1929 at the age of 23, her parents sent her to Paris for three months to continue her studies before she opened her own studio in Vienna not far from her parents' house.^[2] Her works were accepted into top-rated exhibitions and were shown at the Vienna Secession Her paintings were also exhibited and sold at the Würthle Gallery, alongside contemporary stars Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

The Salzer family spent summers near Salzburg, by the Wolfgangsee and there Salzer would meet and join the artist community in Zinkenbach artist colony which included many famous Austrian artists of the time period including Georg Ehrlich, Alfred Gerstenbrand, Ernst Huber, Ferdinand Kitt and others. In 1939, Salzer and other Jewish artists fled Austria under the threat of Nazi persecution. Lisel Salzer arrived in New York. Her parents died at the Theresiendstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.^[3]

In New York, Lisel Salzer continued her artistic career in the luxury shops at Bonwit Teller, painting oil and pastel portraits of the children of high-society women who frequented the store. She also painted watercolor landscapes, including many of Central Park.

When she arrived in New York she joined her boyfriend, Dr. Frederick Grossman, an Austrian physician and cellist who had fled before her and was waiting for her. They moved in to an apartment together in Manhattan and married in 1942.^[4]

In 1945, Salzer visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw an exhibit of Limoges enamel, especially finding inspiration in the Grisaille technique. The technique was several hundred years old but had experienced a revival in the 1930s.^[5] Unable to find a practicing artist in the style, she and her husband researched the techniques with the aid of some manuels they found, and eventually bought a kiln. The grisaille technique required a white enamel that was not commercially available, and so Salzer and Grossman returned to the manuels to find recipeies that helped them make their own white glass which was ground into powder for use in painting. Enamel became her medium of choice and in 1946 two portraits she has painted using the technique wer accepted into the Syracuse Ceramic National exhibition. She went on to participate in the exhibit nine more times, in 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958 and 1960. Her work was also regularly featured at the Wichita Art Museum and in 1959 two portraits were exhitbited at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts.

In 1950 Salzer and Grossman moved to Seattle, where she continued her work. Grossman died in 1957.