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Lette Valeska
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Lette Valeska (1885-1985)
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Forty years after her death at the age of ninety-nine, the work of Jewish painter and photographer Lette Valeska is enjoying a long-overdue resurgence. In 2023, the Braunschweig Museum in Germany mounted a major retrospective of her Hollywood photography and published the first comprehensive monograph on her life and art. The following year, her paintings and photographs were featured in Galka Scheyer and The Blue Four, exhibited alongside masterpieces by Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky. The show also inspired a German television feature film chronicling Valeska’s friendship and collaboration with the pioneering art dealer Galka Scheyer (1889–1945). In 2023, her hometown of Braunschweig honored her with a memorial plaque at the site of her childhood home.
As an artist, she worked simply under the name “Valeska.” Professionally trained in photography at the Lette-Verein in Berlin and at the École des Beaux Arts in Brussels, she was nevertheless a self-taught painter. Beginning in 1939, encouraged by Scheyer, she developed a distinctive style that merged folk art aesthetics with elements of expressionism and social realism. Her early paintings recalled memories of her childhood in Braunschweig which were rendered in rich colors. She also painted visions of Jewish tradition, faith, and persecution, which she described as arising from a “collective Jewish unconscious.” In a spirit comparable to her near-contemporary Marc Chagall, Valeska fused nostalgia and spirituality in works depicting village life, synagogues, and rabbinical study. She favored imagination over formal technique, working in somber, harmonized palettes with closely clustered figures to convey deep emotional resonance.
To understand Valeska’s work it is essential to know her personal story. Born Valeska Heinemann in Braunschweig in 1885 to an assimilated Jewish middle class family, she was the daughter of businessman Berthold Heinemann and his wife Fanny. She grew up with three brothers—Ludwig, Walter, and Fritz. Ludwig died in the 1918 influenza pandemic and her mother and Ludwig died in a bombing in Holland after fleeing the Nazis. Walter immigrated to America. After a conventional education, she studied photography at the Berliner Lette-Verein, carrying a camera throughout her life; it was this formative training that inspired her later professional name, Lette Valeska. In 1915–16, she studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Brussels with her friend Galka Scheyer.
In 1920, she married Frankfurt businessman Ernst Heymann, owner of a pharmaceutical chemical company, and gave birth to their daughter, Hella, in 1921. The family relocated to Paris in 1932, but Nazi persecution upended their lives: their Frankfurt factory was confiscated by the Nazi regime in 1937. Sensing the danger, the Heymanns emigrated to the United States in 1937. Soon after, Valeska separated from her husband and, following Scheyer’s advice, settled in Los Angeles with her daughter. Scheyer, who had already emigrated to California some years before, came to America to represent a stable of modernist European artists that she had developed. She named them the “The Blue Four” (Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Jawelensky).
In Hollywood, Valeska quickly established herself as a portrait photographer. Producer David O. Selznick recognized her talent, commissioning her to photograph major stars including Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, and James Stewart. In December 1941, however, her career was temporarily interrupted when the U.S. government confiscated her cameras because she was not yet a citizen.
Turning to painting in 1939 under Scheyer’s encouragement, she treated it as both therapy and passion. Though her family had not been particularly observant, her work soon revealed powerful visions of Jewish life, ritual, and trauma, often anticipating or responding to the unfolding Holocaust. National newspapers began covering her paintings by the late 1940s, and in the 1970s and early 1980s she exhibited in several solo shows.
In 1945 Galka Sheyer died and Valeka became the official archivist for The Blue Four Galka Sheyer Collection of over four hundred pieces which are now on display and in the permanent collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
After Valeska’s death in 1985, her work fell into relative obscurity, rarely shown for decades. Today, however, her contributions to both photography and painting are being rediscovered and celebrated. Lost Art Salon extends gratitude to her granddaughter, Julia Hammid, for preserving this remarkable collection and allowing us to further Valeska’s richly-deserved artistic legacy.
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