Artist:  Renee SINTENIS (German, 1888 - 1965)
Title:   Art Deco Fox - circa 1934
Medium:   Original Drypoint and Aquatint Etching
Signature:  Hand Signed by the Artist in Pencil, LR as shown
Edition:  Limited Edition; exact print run unknown but  believed to be below 20 impressions
Size:  13 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches (paper)
Provenance:  Hatay Stratton Fine Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
About the Artist:   Renée Sintenis (real name Renate Alice Sintenis) is an important and influential German sculptor and graphic artist.  Coming from a well-to-do French family, she first took drawing lessons from Leo von Konig, then those of sculpture by Wilhelm Haverkamp at the Academy of the Royal Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. She left her studies around 1910, and became a model for Georg Kolbe. Together, they take part in the exhibitions of Free Secession (of), a movement founded in 1914 and whose members include artists such as Max Lieberman and George Mosson. A self-portrait she presented in 1915 was noticed by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she then began a long friendship, and who introduced her to her own and important circle of relations.
She married in 1917 with the painter Emil Rudolf Weiß. She gained fame and recognition throughout the 1920s, and in 1931 she was the second woman elected to the Berlin Academy of Arts (after Kathe Kollwitz).  The Nazi regime brutally put an end to these successes.  Being of Jewish descent -- with a boyish hairstyle and bearing a French name -- she was soon ranked among the top "degenerate artists," as was many of her friends, often Jewish or homosexual.  She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures and prints and female nudes.  She is especially known for her Berlin Bear sculptures, which was used as the design for the Berlinale's top film award, the Golden Bear.