Elsbeth Juda
BORN DARMSTADT, GERMANY, MAY 2 , 1911. DIED LONDON, JULY 5, 2014, AGED 103
THE ARTIST and photographer Elsbeth Juda died surrounded by candles, flowers, beloved friends and Bach. The previous week she was sunbathing on her balcony, enjoying a steak dinner and a glass of Merlot.
Elsbeth Ruth Goldstein was the daughter of Julius Goldstein, a professor of philosophy and colleague of Sigmund Freud. Visiting her father after Elsbeth’s birth, Freud heard her crying, demanded to examine her and pronounced her starving. When her mother’s milk was tested it was found to be virtually water. A wet nurse was summoned and, as Elsbeth told me, “Ninety eight years later, I am still alive because of Sigmund Freud.”
The story later inspired one of her collages: a psychiatrist, his couch and his patient, in tribute to Freud.
Julius considered Elsbeth the cleverest of his four children, but thought her lacking in visual sense, and insisted she learn languages instead of art. Every day she had to master a new piece of literature or piano music. In the long school holidays she was dispatched, unaccompanied, to the homes of her father’s former pupils, to acquire perfect English.
Returning once to a rapturous reception from her siblings, she was summoned to the professor’s room. “I want you to know I am just as pleased to see you as your brothers and sister”, he informed her. She ran from the room, choking back tears: it was the kindest thing he’d ever said to her.
But his discipline framed her life. She swam daily until her tenth year and was still doing Pilates a week before she died. She drove a Renault Clio into her 90s to the National Gallery or Royal Academy, where she studied one work of art for the whole morning. At seven, Elsbeth threw a snowball at the second alpha male in her life, Hans Juda, and when he chased and caught her she knew she’d marry him, which she did in 1931. In the early 1930s, the couple were tipped off that Hans would be interrogated by the SS as a “dangerous” intellectual.
They had an hour to pack and board a ship. At the first sight of the Dover cliffs, Hans fell in love with England. After the war the couple established the Ambassador Magazine on a shoestring but with considerable chutzpah and charm.
Elsbeth’s photographic career started when a photographer failed to show up, and she had to do the shoot. Her teacher, former Bauhaus lecturer Lucia Moholy, recognized the good eye that her father had denied, and she honed her skills as a “back room boy” in a Soho studio. Lugging a large Gandolfi camera and printing all her stills in the bathroom at home, she created some of the most arresting fashion images of the era.
She photographed the model Barbara Goalen on a high shelf in a Bradford Mill draped in tweed that cascaded in a helix 30 feet down to the upturned faces of five tweed-clad managers on the factory floor. The magazine’s avant-garde status was boosted by the couple’s lively editorials and Elsbeth’s stylish, provocative photographs. She and Hans men-