Judy Cassab

Notre Dame 1990

Oil on Canvas

110 x 120cm

$ 60,000

This painting is the major work of Judy’s Paris series of 1989-1990, during this period many preparation drawings were created and those are held in Art Gallery of NSW.

A two-time winner of the Archibald Prize, Judy Cassab was a portraitist of immense insight and imagination, seemingly able to capture not only a sitter’s likeness but the spirit of their times. As well as painting social luminaries, royals, fellow artists, family and friends, she was also a prolific draughtswoman and an acclaimed landscape artist.

Born Judit Kaszab in Vienna in 1920 to Jewish Hungarian parents, Cassab started painting at the age of 12. She began her formal studies at the Academy of Art in Prague in 1938 but these were cut short by the oncoming Second World War and she was forced to flee the German occupation in 1939. She resumed her studies in Budapest in 1941 with Aurel Bernath and Lipot Hermann – the same year her husband JancsiKampfner was conscripted to work in labour camps (she had married him in 1939 on the condition that she be allowed to pursue a career as an artist). After the war Cassab and her husband learnt that their immediate families had died in Nazi concentration camps; Cassab herself evaded persecution during the war by posing as her family’s Catholic maid. The couple moved to Sydney with their two sons in 1951, settling in Woollahra. In the following years Cassab established herself as a portrait painter of considerable renown, rendering her subjects with an expressionist style influenced by European modernists.

In 1953 she held the first of what would be more than 70 career solo exhibitions, but it was in 1960 that she came to public prominence when she became only the second woman to win the Archibald Prize. In 1967 she was the first woman to win the prize for a second time. Overall, Cassab exhibited 41 works in the competition between 1952 and 1998. (She also won several watercolour awards for landscape works in the Wynne Prize competition between 1973 and 2003.)

In 1959, at the suggestion of author and journalist Frank Clune, Cassab made a journey to Alice Springs. It would be the first of many to the central desert over the next three decades.

Cassab was made a commander of the British Empire in 1969, then an officer of the Order of Australia in 1988. In 1980 she became only the second female trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW trustee. In 2011 she was awarded Hungary’s Gold Cross of Merit and in the same year she generously donated 400 of her works to small Australian galleries. She died in Sydney in 2015, aged 95.