Terry Haass

Biography of Terry Haass

Terry (Tereza) HAASS was born in 1923 in Cesky Tesin, Czechoslovakia. Of Jewish origin, the young girl fled her country in 1939, during the arrival of the Nazis.

Her exile, begun in the United States, allowed her to discover painting, and it is quite naturally in Paris, which she joined in the 1940s, that she found the true home of her second life.

There, in those triumphant 1950s, she crossed paths with the greatest (from Picasso to Léger, passing through the abstract artists whom she joined in her artistic journey) and perfected her technique by exploring various modes of artistic expression.

From painting to engraving (with aquatint or carborundum), from metal sculpture to works in crystal, from opera costumes to collages inspired by archaeology, she wandered, she discovered, she learned, always trying in the end to bring together her main aspirations, which are gesture and the union of the three elements: Light, Earth, and Space.

It was in the 1990s, once communism fell, that she returned for the first time to Czechoslovakia. And after European and American recognition, as many national museums have acquired her works since the 1960s, she finally sees her native country pay tribute to her talent. And in this year 2006, it is a retrospective exhibition that crowns her career in Olomouc, near the city where she was born.

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES