Note: Hilda Goldwag was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria on 28 April 1912. Her father, Moses, also an artist, died when she was nine. Goldwag attended Anna Schantruch’s Art Classes for gifted artistic children and, at the age of 14, helped paint murals for the new St Leitener Kindergarten. She graduated from the Graphiscme Staatslemtr und Versuchs Anmalt, Vienna with special commendation in 1938, but following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria) in March 1938, subsquently managed to secure a permit allowing her to travel to Scotland in March 1939. Her family was due to follow her six months later, but World War II was declared the day they received their travel permits, causing them to be trapped in Austria. In 1942, during The Holocaust, they all were murdered in concentration camps: her mother at Treblinka and her brother, sister, brother-in-law and nephew at MalyTrostenets. Her sadness at the loss of family members can be felt in much of Goldwag's art. In Glasgow in 1940 Goldwag met fellow refugee and lifelong friend Cecile Schwarzchild, and both undertook war work as turners at McGlashlan's engineering works. Post-war Goldwag became head designer at Friedlanders in Hillington, designing scarves for Marks & Spencer (1945-55). She also worked as a freelance illustrator for Collins Publishers, and later, as a part-time occupational therapist at Forresthall Hospital (1962-75). She resumed painting and exhibiting in the 1950s, working principally with oils and a palette knife, mostly outdoors and in situ, carrying both paintings and materials with her on the local buses. Her subjects included the nearby Forth and Clyde Canal, the tenements and warehouses of Cowcaddens, and, from the 1980s, exuberant flower pieces, panoramic farm landscapes, waterscapes, and ‘imagined’ figure paintings. Although most of her work was done in the Glasgow area, she did travel on holiday to Italy, Holland and the islands of Scotland. Her paintings are usually large and dramatic. It is amazing that Hilda was able to see any happiness in her views of her world. Others would have been blighted by the traumas she experienced. She exhibited in Gourock, Greenock and at the Lillie Art Gallery, and received awards from the Glasgow Society of Women Artists. She was also a professional and exhibiting member of the Scottish Society of Women Artists, the Paisley Art Club and the Milngavie Art Club. In 2005, an exhibition of her work was held at the Collins Gallery, Glasgow. She died in Glasgow, Scotland on 28 January 2008. Thirteen of her works are held in UK public collections including Strathclyde University, The Ben Uri Collection (London) and the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre. "...deeply embedded in the European tradition and, coming from the city of Klimt, Schiele, Freud and Wittgenstein, as an outsider in Glasgow, she documents a city moving from the old to the new. As well as people, she paints buildings, townscapes as designs, old tenements giving way to the modern".
