Drypoint etching by Lea Grundig of a Jewish family under attack

"I wanted to portray the thousand fears, the perception of the horrible, the subjection of those who are shadowed and persecuted. I wanted to show the dehumanizing process and the struggle of the best against it. And I wanted to warn the world against the war that threatened." Lea Grundig (1958)

Lea Langer was born on March 23, 1906, in Dresden, Germany, into a middle class Orthodox Jewish family. Despite parental objections, she studied at the School of Academy of Arts and Crafts and then the Fine Arts Academy in Dresden from 1922 to 1926. While in school, she met Hans Grundig, another art student. Hans was born in 1901 to working class parents, also in Dresden. Lea and Hans joined the Communist Party in 1926. Her father did not approve of her politics or of Grundig, and sent Lea to sanatoriums in Heidelberg and Vienna, but Hans joined her in both cities. In 1928, she and Hans married. They lived in the poor, working class area of Dresden. Lea and Hans were founding members of the Dresden chapter of the Revolutionary German Artists' Association (ASSO) and worked with the Linkskurve theater group. Lea and Hans produced drawings and posters for the Communist Party, but neither could find steady work during the Depression. Lea did linocuts of mother and child images which were widely distributed. She was influenced by the humanistic work of Kathe Kollwitz and the anti-war work of Otto Dix. Her expressionistic style blended elements of her Orthodox Jewish background, social realism, and her deep political involvement in works inspired by the passionate belief that art that would change the world around her.

Hitler assumed power in Germany on January 30, 1933. By summer, the dictatorship was firmly in control. Opposing parties were outlawed and civil rights were abolished. Resistance art was deemed dangerous and Lea and Hans were prohibited from working as artists. The government established a Reich Culture Chamber to control all aspects of German culture. In the Third Reich, the only purpose of art was to glorify Nazi-determined German virtues. Grundig defied the prohibition and between 1933 and 1939, she created three powerful series of protest art: Der Jude ist schuld [The Jew is Guilty], Unterm Hakenkruz [Under the Swastika], and Krieg Droht [War Threatens!] Her work opposed Nazi propaganda by depicting humane scenes of daily Jewish life and the inhumane effects of raids and mass emigration. She wished to show conditions as they really were and to warn people of the bleak future threatening everyone. She worked primarily in intaglio techniques, such as etching and drypoint. Lea was arrested in 1936, but soon released. She was arrested again in 1938, this time for high treason, and sentenced to two years in Dresden's Gestapo prison. After her release from prison, Lea emigrated to Palestine in December 1939 and produced a series of prints depicting the horrors of the ghettos, prisons, and camps in Nazi-dominated Europe. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. Of the nearly 150 prints she created in Germany, 114 survived the war.

In 1949, Lea returned to Dresden in the communist ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR / East Germany). She reunited with her husband. Hans, a painter and graphic artist, also had created works that protested the Nazi regime and its brutish rule, based on terror. He had been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1940-1945. Lea continued to create political works about the Holocaust, including some based on Hans's ordeal, as well as on contemporary concerns, such as atomic warfare. In 1951, Lea became a professor at the Fine Arts Technical University in Dresden in the communist ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR / East Germany). She was elected to membership in the Academy of Art and served as president of the Association of GDR Artists. She remained politically active and was a member of the Central Committee of the SED, a major political party. Hans, 57, died in 1958, the same year his autobiography was published. Lea, 71, died in October 1977.