Eva Roemer
Artist of masterful color woodcuts

28 March to 26 October 2025 

The painter and illustrator Eva Roemer was born in Berlin in 1889 and, from the 1920s onwards, lived by Lake Starnberg. Her work was characterized by water and mountains, by wind and light. Again and again, nature forms the central focus of her images: reeds bend in the storm, the lake glows in the evening light, a spring cloud rises in front of the distant mountains. In fine lines and delicate colours, Roemer depicted a world poised between change and continuity. She left behind a broad body of work, in which colour woodcuts take pride of place. In the visual language of her woodcuts, Roemer expresses a clear fascination with Japanese art—an enthusiasm that also swept through the modernist avant-gardes in the early twentieth century.

In stark contrast to Roemer’s carefully balanced compositions, her life was marked by upheaval. She came from the Mendelssohn family; the composer Fanny Hensel, sister of Felix Mendelssohn, was her great-grandmother. Roemer was orphaned as a small child and raised first by her grandparents, and later by her aunt. Being a woman, she was denied access to art academies and instead received private tuition from prominent painters. In the late 1920s, she moved to Lake Starnberg to live with her great-cousin Martha Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The two women survived the Nazi era in seclusion in their own house in Kempfenhausen. Eva Roemer died in 1977. Her work is now being extensively presented for the first time in this exhibition at Museum Starnberger See.

special thanks to
Dr. Monika Demmler-Siebenwirth, Doris Fuchsberger, Sabeeka Gangjee-Well, Armgard Heidegert Hoesch, Elke Link, Holger Paul, Heinz Rothenfußer, Wulf Schmid-Noerr und Dr. Felix Winter

Sponsored by the Museum Starnberger See Friends Association.