Irma Toledo

Irma Rafaela Toledo (Laufen, DE, 1910–Salzburg, AT, 2002), née Irma Friedman, adopts the artist’s name Toledo in a nod to a nickname from her youth. Her dream of forging a career as a painter does not come true until after the end of the Second World War. The daughter of a Jewish merchant family, she survives the war in hiding in the mountains near Salzburg. Working with limited resources, she produces her first paintings from 1945 onwards. Among the formative influences in Toledo’s work are the circle around the former Bauhaus student Max Peiffer-Watenphul and the painters Herbert Breiter and Slavi Soucek. She is invited to join the “Salzburg Group,” an artists’ association founded in Salzburg in 1952; its membership includes the abovementioned artists as well as Agnes Muthspiel, Trude Engelsberger-Drioli, and others. When she attends Oskar Kokoschka’s “School of Seeing” at Hohensalzburg Fortress, an altercation escalates, and she stages a demonstrative “exodus” from his class.

Toledo’s oeuvre comprises views of the city of Salzburg, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits as well as works that are inspired by her searching meditations on faith and religion. The early paintings in particular reveal how the artist, while under the influence of the “Salzburg Group,” strives to devise her own style. Highlights include the painting Nächtlicher Garten (Nocturnal Garden) from 1967, in which an arbor bathed in moonlight becomes a dense theatrical backdrop, and Ur-Anfang (Primordial Beginning) from 1972, a fruit of her study of the book of Genesis.

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s collections include around twenty paintings, drawings, and prints by the artist. A selection, complemented by works of loan, will now be on view in the first exhibition dedicated to the artist at the museum, which will retrace the evolution of Toledo’s art from the early 1950s through the 1970s.