Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) suffered an unimaginable agony, and a lasting wound. In 1939, aged 27, she left her native Austria – a year after its annexation by the Nazis – for the relative safety of Britain. As the beneficiary of a scheme set up to provide an escape route for Jews, she worked in domestic service near Edinburgh before moving to Glasgow, where she remained for the rest of her long life. Her family were meant to follow her, but they perished in the Holocaust – the papers which might have allowed them to travel arrived on the day war was declared.
Hilda Goldwag, 2005
As Goldwag told The Scotsman newspaper in 2003: 'How can one rationalise? I am here and they are not. Angry? I don't know, even now, after all this time, how I truly feel. I cannot paint my mother, even though I have her image in my mind to this day. I think of her, my sister, her husband, and little Paul [Goldwag's nephew], who was eight months old when I last saw him. I understand he survived until he was four. Such evil was visited on them, and on so many. I still have them in my heart. I think of them every day and I dream of them'.
Old Woman
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Having trained as an artist in Vienna, Goldwag took life drawing classes at the Glasgow School of Art in 1945. She was Head of Design at a Glasgow printworks (1945–1955) which designed scarves for Marks and Spencer, and over the following years worked as a freelance illustrator of book covers, magazines and greetings cards.
By the 1960s, Goldwag had turned to painting full time, in a manner that drew on the rich vein of European Expressionism. From her Vienna days, she would have known the work of the Austrians Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka, but it is the German artists of Die Brücke (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) whose style she more closely follows.
Die Brücke was a style described by Norbert Lynton in Concepts of Modern Art (1994) as consisting of 'bright colours and assertively primitive form, [with] at first sight no sign in their work of direct social comment or even of personal anxieties'.
Woman in Blue
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
As we shall see, while social commentary appears largely absent in Goldwag's work, the acute feeling of unease in several of her figure studies can be readily understood as expressive of the horror suffered by her family.
Expressionist art has its effects by making a direct emotional appeal to the viewer through its simplifying and distorting use of form and colour. It may seem unconcerned with conventional ideas of beauty. Yet Goldwag's trees in Spring (reminiscent of the heavy boughs in Kirchner's Bathers at Moritzburg) convey with relish the dense confectionery of pink blossom in their flat daubed fields of solid colour.
Some of Goldwag's female figures recall those of Paula Modersohn-Becker in their outline and colouration, while her rendering of the heads in Old Couple brings to mind the style of Georges Rouault – thick, dark lines delineate areas of vivid colour applied in a heavy impasto.
A recurrent theme in Goldwag's figure painting is the couple – whether young or old, male and female or female and female. The latter variation appears most frequently, in poses of defiant yet affectionate embrace, emblematic in their symmetry. Goldwag's long and devoted relationship with Cecile Schwarzschild (who she met in Edinburgh in 1939 and lived with until Cecile's death in 1998) surely finds expression in these works, but these are images which affirm the female/female union beyond the particular and autobiographical.
Some of Goldwag's couples offer each other tender, sometimes desperate, solace as they huddle in undefined space, hugging for dear life, in clothes that might be the uniform of the prisoner. Although Goldwag said that she could not paint her murdered mother, might these be the artist's memorial to those doomed death camp inmates? Are these the scenes she saw in her sleep?
Couple
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Like Goldwag, Käthe Kollwitz suffered the trauma of personal loss (her son died in the First World War), and in Die Mutter the mothers form a collective embrace, seeking consolation in their shared grief, in a work made in the aftermath of that terrible conflict. We don't know what Goldwag knew of Kollwitz, but these seem the natural shapes of sorrow, converging in the work of these two artists.
Along with her figure studies, it is her adopted home of Glasgow which most preoccupied her art. These Glasgow scenes, while they capture the tenor and appearance of a city in desperate need of regeneration, do not emphasise the deprivation of Glasgow life in its post-war years. The artist Alexander Moffat goes further, arguing that 'her intimate glimpses of canal sides, snow covered streets, trees in blossom, suggest an optimistic view of urban life'. Goldwag seems more concerned with the aesthetics of her subject matter than an urge to reflect societal ills.
Her Ruined Fence finds dynamism in the inanimate, a wildness of spirit in a wreckage. The fence is broken through vandalism or neglect, but for Goldwag it is the performance of the ravaged fence itself, tossed like a ship on a sea, which merits attention on its own terms.
The imposing black structure of The Wheel (1962) is hard to fathom – its rim is an imperfect round, and it seems to be confused with bits of fence. This only adds to a sense of its redundancy as industrial gear, at a time when Glasgow's boom years were long past. But Goldwag doesn't force the symbolism, being more interested in the pattern of strong lines and curves than any need to make social commentary.
October (1962) is neither romanticised nor is it a deliberately demeaning view of a Glasgow canal scene. It is beautifully plain-speaking, but also beautifully true. That grey blocking sky could be dense cloud or dirty air – and that might be the sun weakly showing through, or the moon. Goldwag is presenting us with an everyday view honestly and without prejudice.
Goldwag's interest in the down-at-heel parts of Glasgow – and the surprise this might have invoked – is reflected in a 1962 Glasgow newspaper article headlined 'She Finds Beauty in Cowcaddens'. The accompanying photograph shows Goldwag in the plein air of that run-down area (as it was), painting buildings due for demolition. We can suppose that she pushed her easel, paints and brushes to that spot in a shopping trolley, as was her habit, and it is said that she took buses around the city, storing her wet paintings in the luggage rack.
Hanging washing gives a sign of human life in Tenements (1964), but Goldwag's Glasgow scenes are consistently unpeopled. Unlike other artists and photographers (Joan Eardley, Ken Currie and Bert Hardy, for example) she seems uninterested in portraying the people of Glasgow in their city – the human element in Goldwag's work is reserved for her figure pictures. Eardley (who, coincidentally, also wheeled her materials around the city – an old pram her choice of vehicle) puts scruffy children centre stage, against backdrops of graffitied walls.
Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (1921–1963) 
Among James Morrison's tenement studies, Back Court, Rotten Row, Glasgow (1955), meticulously details the signs of dilapidation – another example of how the impoverishment of Glasgow has been pointedly documented in the post-war decades.
Back Court, Rotten Row, Glasgow
1955
James Morrison (1932–2020) 
But Goldwag continued to find a kind of beauty in her adopted city. In her Church on Maitland Street, walls and tower slant improbably, turning the church and its neighbouring buildings into organic outgrowths, jutting from the substrate of the street. Once again, the experiments of European Expressionism (the cityscapes of the Die Brücke artists come to mind) find voice in Glasgow, in colours suitably toned down.
Her overriding interest is the physical environment of the city rather than its people, as though to include people would be to drift into a type of art she wished to avoid: art that might say too much about human existence in that place. For Goldwag, buildings and other artefacts are imbued with their own character and drama, such that people are superfluous.
To underline the point, imagine L. S. Lowry's precise, perspectival townscapes without their populations: Lowry's art is about life in industrial England – his paintings need people, and as the art historian T. J. Clark acknowledges in Those Passions (2025): 'The human action in an 'industrial scene'... had to be shown as something framed, confined, dictated by its built environment'. Social class (and its consequences) is Lowry's subject. Goldwag, perhaps because she was not a native Scot, a native Briton, is not concerned with class.
As the architectural historian John R. Hume remarks, there is a 'powerful sense of pattern, observed as well as modulated' in Goldwag's work. She not only finds pattern in her surroundings, but imposes it, as in On the Canal and September, and in the greater abstraction of later works.
On the Canal
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Archerhill Tall Towers (1983) reaches a level of abstraction which recalls Paul Klee's evocative and playful use of line.
Archerhill Tall Towers
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Consider the sullen energy of Turbulent River. Goldwag seems fascinated by how the currents shift and shape the visible surface – while at the edge the water breaks white against a wall or shore. It is spared from greater abstraction by that flurry of white water where the shore contains it, and which gives the painting its scale.
One of her finest achievements is a quite untypical work: a glossy, veined, blue beach rock, found at her feet, we assume, as she walked the shore. Goldwag glories in the rock's otherworldliness – its own real-life Expressionistic structure and colour.
Beach Rock
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Hilda Goldwag honoured her murdered family, as many others did theirs, by living a long and productive life. She found love and constancy in Cecile, her companion of nearly 60 years. No doubt their common stories bonded them and gave consolation. Goldwag painted Lone Woman a year after Cecile's death in 1998.
Lone Woman
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Mirror shows a reflected woman appearing as two, her white hair a sign of old age. The reflection conjures up a companion yet reminds the looker of their singularity, their loneliness.
Mirror
artwork by Hilda Goldwag (1912–2008) 
Those who knew Goldwag in her later years speak of a spirited yet unassuming woman, pleased but also surprised by the attention she received towards the end of her life. She carried with her the awful fact of her family's fate, but through her prolific and varied creativity, made Glasgow not only her home but her subject and left a mark that is only beginning to be properly recognised.
Adam Wattam, writer
This content was funded by the PF Charitable Trust
Further reading and watching
Hilda Goldwag's Glasgow, Collins Gallery, Glasgow, 2005
Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Expressionists, Thames & Hudson, 1996
Colin Rhodes, Expressionism, Thames & Hudson, 2025
