#46 Hilda Goldwag 1912 – 2008
PAINTER, DRAUGHTSWOMAN, and designer Hilda Goldwag was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria Hungary (now Austria) on April 28, 1912. Goldwag, whose artist father, Moses, died when his daughter was nine, attended Anna Schantruch’s art classes for gifted artistic children and, aged 14, helped paint murals for the new St Leitner Kindergarten. She graduated from the Graphische Staatsämter und Versuchs Anmalt in her home city with special commendation in 1938.
Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, Goldwag secured a travel permit to Scotland in March 1939 to work as a domestic helper for a minister of the Church of Scotland in the southern village of West Linton; tragically, the rest of her family perished in the Holocaust. In 1939, while in Edinburgh, she met fellow refugee and lifelong friend Cecile Schwarzschild, from Germany, whom she painted on numerous occasions. Following the outbreak of war in September 1939, they relocated to Glasgow, settling in Hill Street near Garnethill Synagogue, and undertook war work as turners at McGlashan’s engineering works.
Postwar, Goldwag was appointed head designer at silk manufacturer Friedlander’s, in Hillington, designing scarves for Marks & Spencer. Afterwards, she worked as a freelance illustrator for Collins Publishers, producing illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses and a number of distance language-learning publications. From 1962 to 1975 she worked as a part-time occupational therapist at Glasgow’s Foresthall Hospital.
Goldwag resumed painting and exhibiting in the 1950s, working principally with oils and a palette knife on board, and mostly working outside. Her subjects included the nearby Forth & Clyde Canal, the tenements and warehouses of Cowcaddens and, from the 1980s, exuberant flower pieces, panoramic farm landscapes, waterscapes, and “imagined” figure paintings.
She exhibited in the towns of Gourock and Greenock, and at Glasgow’s Lillie Art Gallery, receiving awards from the Glasgow Society of Women Artists. She was also a member of the Scottish Society of Women Artists, Paisley Art Club and Milngavie Art Club. In 2005, the exhibition Hilda Goldwag’s Glasgow was organised at the Collins Gallery, Strathclyde University. In 2007 she donated her 1976 oil, The Wheel, referencing machine parts (above), to the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum’s permanent collection.
Goldwag died in Glasgow on January 28, 2008. Her work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Strathclyde University and the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, the last of which also houses archival materials relating to the artist’s life. Her work was exhibited posthumously at the Hidden Lane Gallery in Glasgow in 2010, 2012 and 2017; the 2012 display included sketches and drawings recovered from a dustbin outside Goldwag’s house by a waste collector after the artist’s death. In 2018 her work was included in Ben Uri’s survey exhibition Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain 1933-45.