Dora Holzhandler, artist - obituary

Dora Holzhandler, who has died aged 87, was a Polish-Jewish artist who escaped Nazi persecution in Europe to forge a successful career in Britain, painting colourful naïve works in the vein of Chagall and Matisse.

Stylistically, she drew on folk art and children’s illustrations to tackle subjects from religious iconography and family history (including her grandfather’s fate in Auschwitz), to everyday pleasures such as buying bagels or visiting an ice cream parlour. Her compositions incorporated patchworks and chequered patterns which gave them a quilt-like quality.

Folk art (considered by some to be “outsider art”) has a long association with the Jewish community in Britain. Although she studied art in Paris and London, Dora Holzhandler was part of that tradition.

She was an intuitive painter, often working from memory, who eschewed all perspective in her views of Holland Park and Notting Hill and portraits of rabbis, lovers and mothers. “Before Leonardo nobody used perspective,” she liked to point out. “I think it’s a sort of a trick really.”

Art, she claimed, was a kind of religion: “Here in my paintings are the rules I’ve found,” she noted. “There mustn’t be a feedback to ego. You must give, whatever. And sort of without thinking, I’m giving anything.” She took her lead from the guilelessness of children although she herself had endured a peripatetic and difficult childhood. Nevertheless, optimism remained as much a part of her palette as her vibrant turquoise, mauve and poppy-red oils.

A petite woman with a great capacity for friendship, she attracted several well-known fans (Charlie Chaplin and Maureen Lipman collected her works). Sister Wendy Beckett, another admirer, observed: “She sees us clearly, for her all is sacred, all is aflame with divine power, even sorrow, even death. She offers to life here a total yes.”

Dora Holzhandler was born on March 22 1928 in Paris in to a family of Polish-Jewish refugees. She was, perhaps, destined for a life in exile. In the late-1920s her father Sehia Holzhandler, a handbag maker, and mother Ruchla (née Rocheman) had both fled the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Warsaw for London where they met and married. The couple joined Ruchla’s brother in Paris shortly before Dora’s birth.

In the early-1930s, struggling to make ends meet, her parents placed Dora with a foster family in a farming community in Normandy, where she lived for five “idyllic” years. On her return to Paris her mother supported them with seamstress work while her father was in London seeking medical treatment. It was in Paris that Dora’s maternal grandfather, a rabbi, fuelled her interest in Jewish traditions.

In 1934 Dora and her mother joined Sehia in London where the family settled in the Jewish community in Dalston. During the war Dora was evacuated to Norfolk. Several family members, including her grandfather, perished in the Holocaust.

After the war she studied at the L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Anglo-French Art Centre in London, where the artist Victor Pasmore recognised her potential. She also caught the eye of George Swinford, an aspiring jewellery designer, whom she married in 1950.

During the 1960s the family lived a bohemian lifestyle with little money – “in furnished rooms” – and for a period in the early-1970s relocated to a house in Dumfries, Scotland. During this time Dora Holzhandler developed a dual faith, combining her Jewish roots with an interest in Buddhism. She described herself as a “Jew-Bu”.

There was a melancholic reverie, or nostalgia, to much of her work which the novelist Edna O’Brien described as “an ineffable tenderness”. The irony was that Dora Holzhandler credited that touching element to her ability to detach herself from her subjects, even those which were painfully personal.

In later life, she and her husband lived in a flat in Holland Park crammed full of ceramics, textiles, pot plants, canvasses and easels. The telephone was splattered with paint.

Her works sit in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow and the Jewish Museum in London; her last solo show was held at the Goldmark Gallery in Rutland in 2013.

One of her final portraits was of the violinist Nigel Kennedy, who subsequently became a friend . “I fell in love with the innocence of her work,” Kennedy explained. “She’s the archetypal hippie.”

Dora Holzhandler is survived by her husband and their three daughters.

Dora Holzhandler, born March 22 1928, died October 8 2015