Sculptor, painter and graphic artist Terry Haass was born on 17. 11. 1923 in Czech Cieszyn. Part of his childhood spent in Mohelnice, studied girls vocational school Pöttingeum in Olomouc, then because of Jewish descent in 1939, escaped from Czechoslovakia to France. Here she studied art history.
In 1941 she moved to New York. Five years later he entered the studio of Stanley William Hayter, who in 1940 moved to New York from Paris his famous "Atelier 17". There he met and worked alongside for example, Joan Miró, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. In 1951 she went to Paris. In the printing company Roger Lacourièr met with Pablo Picasso, for example. At the same time, she studied Mesopotamian archeology and received a diploma at the Ecole du Louvre. She participated in major excavations in the Middle East - Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran.
Her art work is represented in collections in museums and galleries around the world (eg. England, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, the United States, but also Cameroon). A large collection of her works owns Olomouc Museum of Art too. Museum organized in 2006 an extensive retrospective by Terry Haass titled Light - space - time. The exhibition offered a profile of her work since the 40s of the 20th century to the present. She introduced her graphic works, paintings, sculptures and costume designs. The exhibition was a documentary Terry from Montmartre director Olga Špátová, broadcast by Czech Television. The exhibition supplemented documentary "Terry from Montmartre" by director Olga Špátová.
"Terry Haass lived an incredibly rich, creative and meaningful life. She had no time for fatigue, did not allow her age, she still had creative plans. It is an honor for me that I could meet and work with so active, decent and characterful woman," said Gina Renotiére, art historian and curator of the Olomouc exhibition.
Terry Haass is one of the most outstanding modern printmakers, whose mastery of colour etching has been widely admired. Terry Haass trained under S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17, and understudied him as chef d'école. In The Artist and the Book in France, W. J. Strachan writes of the etchings of Terry Haass, "her designs - abstract but always possessing some link with reality - are controlled but full of verve; the colour, subdued when necessary, is often rich and glowing… the sheer technical accomplishment is overwhelming and one is not surprised at the success of her exhibitions of these works and separate prints.” Terry Haass was born Tereza Haass, into a Jewish family in Cesky Tesín, Moravia, in what was then Czechoslovakia. By 1939, having fled the Nazis, Terry Haass was studying art in Paris, and by 1941 was in New York, a scholarship student of the Art Students' League. From 1947 Terry Haass worked with Hayter at Atelier 17, taking over the direction in 1950. In the 1950s Terry Haass also studied archaeology, and took part in digs across Mesopotamia; this informed her great work, Inanna. Her exhibition "Homage to Albert Einstein" travelled Europe in the late 1970s. Her closest personal and artistic allies were Hans Hartung and his wife Anna-Eva Bergman. Although largely abstract in style, the art of Terry Haass is infused with spirituality, and a sense of the building blocks of the cosmos and space-time. See: Peter Spielmann, Terry Haass: The Graphic Work, 1997 (catalogue of a huge retrospective at the Bochum Museum).
http://adventuresintheprinttrade.blogspot.nl/2009/10/building-blocks-of-space-and-time.html
