Soshana Afroyim (born Susanne Schüller; September 1, 1927 – December 9, 2015) was an Austrian painter of the Modernism period. Soshana was a full-time artist and traveled frequently, exhibiting her work internationally. During her journeys, she portrayed many well known personalities and her art developed in different directions. Her early period artwork was largely naturalistic in nature, showing landscapes and portraits. Later her style developed towards abstract art, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.
Soshana Afroyim was born in 1927 as Susanne Schüller in Vienna, Austria, into a Jewish middle-class family. Her younger brother Maximilian was born two years later. Her father, Fritz Schüller, owned a cufflink factory and her mother, Margarethe Schüller, was a sculptor. Soshana first went to the Rudolf Steiner School, but soon changed to the alternative Schwarzwald School. She started to paint and draw at a very young age. Her mother supported Soshana's creativity and collected her works.
At the age of eleven, Soshana witnessed the annexation of Austria. "I watched Hitler's triumphant entry to Vienna. I remember well how I looked out of the window (...) and saw how he was welcomed by the cheering crowd as he drove in his open car (...). I turned cold and was horribly frightened."
The family decided to leave Austria. Fritz Schüller, who had been born in Brno, had a Czech passport and left the country first. Margarethe, Soshana and Maximilian fled to Switzerland, then Paris, where Fritz had waited for them and finally in 1939 they reached London, where they would stay two years. Soshana attended the Northwood College and in 1940 the Chelsea Polytechnic School, where she had painting and drawing lessons and learned about fashion design. Due to the Blitz, the Schueller family had to take refuge in air-raid shelters almost every night. The experience was very stressful for Soshana, which she later expressed through drawings.
Soshana's father fled to Spain and via Tangier, followed by New York. In 1941 he managed to get an affidavit for his family and booked three tickets for the S.S. Madura, the last civil ship that would leave Europe. In 1941, Soshana, her mother, and her brother arrived at Ellis Island, in New York City. She enrolled at Washington Irving High School and attended painting classes under the guidance of artist Beys Afroyim, future plaintiff-appellant in Afroyim v. Rusk.
At the age of 17, she travelled against her parents' will with Beys Afroyim through America. To earn their living during these travels, they painted writers, musicians, statesmen and scientists like Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodore Dreiser and Hanns Eisler.
When the United Nations Conference on International Organization opened in May 1945 in San Francisco, the couple portrayed well-known delegates, such as the deputy chairman of the UdSSR national planning commission Vasilij Vasilevič Kuznecov.
Cuba and the first large exhibition
Because of Beys' activities within the Communist Party, the couple left the US and spent nine months in Cuba, where Soshana had her first exhibition in 1948 at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Havana. From that time on she used the name "Soshana", the pen name Afroyims gave her, meaning "Lily" in Hebrew (the more common spelling is Soshana - שושנה). After a short stay in the US, they moved to Europe and eventually to Israel.
Soshana returned to Vienna with her son and eventually gave Beys full custody. In 1950, she enrolled at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and in 1952 to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she painted under the guidance of Prof. Sergius Pauser, Albert Paris Gütersloh and Prof. Herbert Boeckl. Unhappy with academic art practice, she relocated in Paris, France in 1952.
Upon relocation to Paris, Soshana lived and worked in the former studio of André Derain. She eventually moved into another studio at Impasse Ronsin next to Brâncuși. She became very close with the artist, whom she described as loving her "like a daughter." Later, she lived in another studio that was previously owned by Gauguin.
Soshana struggled financially as a full-time artist in Paris. She described it as a "bittersweet time." She became acquainted with the artists Kupka, Auguste Herbin, Ossip Zadkine, César, Pignon, Bazaine, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Alexander Calder, Wifredo Lam, Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Affandi, Lain Bangdel, and Marc Chagall. She considered Alberto Giacometti one of her best friends. In 1953, Soshana met the Zurich gallery owner Max G. Bollag, who became a major promoter of her work.
In Paris, Soshana had multiple exhibitions in the André Weil Gallery and Salon d'Automne, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Salon de Mai, where she met Pablo Picasso for the first time. He invited her to visit him at his Villa in Vallauris and drew a portrait of her in 1954.
In 1956, Soshana traveled through Asia. She had organised herself an invitation for a Chinese Ministry of Culture to exhibit in Beijing. On her way to China, she visited India, Thailand, Cambodia and Japan, where she became inspired by Indian philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism.
She was impressed by the art of calligraphy and learned art techniques on xuan paper from Buddhist monks in Kyoto and Chinese painters in Hangzhou. The art of calligraphy became formative for her painting style. In 1957 she arrived in Beijing, where her exhibition took place in the Emperor's palace.
In 1959 Soshana travelled through Africa, where she portrayed Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné, eventually returning to Paris.
In the same year, she became acquainted with the Italian artist Pinot Gallizio. They worked together in Paris and Alba del Piemonte, Italy. In a letter written by Gallizio, to his gallerist Otto and Heicke Van de Loo in Munich, he announced that "20 paintings were made in September 1959 in Paris, together with Soshana", adding "results formidable".
Through Gallizio, Soshana got in contact with the COBRA group, among others to Karel Appel and Asger Jorn. But because she was a woman, they did not accept her as a full member of the art group.