1 work, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Judy Cassab's The Pink Dressing Gown, with Footnotes. #148

Judy Cassab, (1920 - 2015)

The Pink Dressing Gown, c. 1998

Oil on canvas

76.5 x 95 cm

Private collection

Judy Cassab AO CBE (15 August 1920 – 3 November 2015), was a portraitist of immense insight and imagination. As well as painting social luminaries, royals, fellow artists, family and friends, she was also a prolific draughtswoman and an acclaimed landscape artist.

Born Judit Kaszab in Vienna in 1920, Cassab started painting at the age of 12. She began her formal studies at the Academy of Art in Prague in 1938 but these were cut short by the oncoming Second World War and she was forced to flee the German occupation in 1939. She resumed her studies in Budapest in 1941. 

Judit Kaszab and her hsband moved to Sydney with their two sons in 1951, settling in Woollahra. In the following years Cassab established herself as a portrait painter of considerable renown, rendering her subjects with an expressionist style influenced by European modernists.

In 1953 she held the first of what would be more than 70 career solo exhibitions, but it was in 1960 that she came to public prominence when she became only the second woman to win the Archibald Prize. In 1967 she was the first woman to win the prize for a second time. Overall, Cassab exhibited 41 works in the competition between 1952 and 1998. (She also won several watercolour awards for landscape works in the Wynne Prize competition between 1973 and 2003.)

Cassab was made a commander of the British Empire in 1969, then an officer of the Order of Australia in 1988. In 1980 she became only the second female trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2011 she was awarded Hungary’s Gold Cross of Merit and in the same year she generously donated 400 of her works to small Australian galleries. She died in Sydney in 2015, aged 95.  More on Judy Cassab

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints and 365 Days, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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