Hanny Fries. Eigentum ohne Besitz

The Zurich painter, graphic artist and illustrator, Johanna Katharina ‘Hanny’ Fries (1918–2009) was from a family of artists: Her father was the well-known painter of Zurich society Willy Fries, her mother the writer Catharina Fries-Righini. Already during her student years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, Fries was often drawing. After returning from Geneva in 1948, where she was briefly married to the writer Ludwig Hohl, Fries made a name for herself in Zurich as a theater illustrator for the Weltwoche, the NZZ, the Tages-Anzeiger and Die Tat (documented in’1000 Theaterzeichnungen’ (1000 theatrical drawings, 1978). She also made portraits of famous personalities, such as Josephine Baker, Marguerite Duras, Elias Canetti and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Hanny Fries left behind an enormous graphic oeuvre. As a chronicler of the fleeting and unagitated she recorded them in particular railway stations, streets, squares, kiosks and bars, and the waiting room of the Stadelhofen Station in Zürich became her second atelier. Since Hanny Fries never abandoned figurative drawing, even in the 1940s, her art was seen as unfashionable. So that she was not honoured until late in life: In 1981 she was awarded the Art Prize of the City of Zurich, being only the second woman to do so, after Helen Dahm. At that time an exhibition in the Kunsthaus was also devoted to her, where her painting, which oscillated between Realism and Expressionism, was acknowledged for the first time. In 1999 at last, the Kunsthaus granted her a retrospective. With this exhibition, the Kunsthaus performed pioneering work. The creator of the retrospective, Vice-Director Guido Magnaguagno, placed Hanny Fries’s paintings in the center. One could see that even in her paintings, fleeting locations were in the foreground: cityscapes, bathing beaches, construction sites, backyards, parks, places empty of people are favourite motifs, but they are also to be understood as inward-looking pictures. In addition, she was also interested in banal objects such as an egg rack, which in her case mutated into a seductive object. While the early drawings were still dark, in the later work her palette became lighter. But the colouring remained brittle. The retrospective was well received. Thomas Ribi found that the exhibition made one thing visible more than any other: ‘The motifs are important for her.’ The determination and consequence with which she persisted through almost six decades of wide-ranging work speak for themselves.’ At the time of the exhibition the first monograph on Hanny Fries appeared: Eigentum ohne Besitz. Hanny Fries, Malerin (Property without Ownership. Hanny Fries, painter), by Ludmila Vachtova (NZZ-Verlag, Zurich, 1999).