Penn South painter perseveres through thick and thin

Penn South resident and painter Eva Deutsch Costabel fields a question from the audience after presenting a slide show of her art recently.

By Edward Rueda

Art helped sustain local painter Eva Deutsch Costabel through her darkest times. During World War II, when Nazi soldiers took over her house in Yugoslavia at gunpoint, Costabel could only take away one knapsack but included her watercolors, pencils and ink. Later, when she was taken to a concentration camp, Costabel used those art supplies to make greeting cards for her fellow inmates.

More than six decades later, the 83-year-old artist still paints every day in her Penn South apartment in Chelsea. The finished paintings hang in her hallway, which serves as an impromptu gallery. The living room doubles as a studio, with her easel and acrylic paints placed next to a window that faces her beloved Empire State Building.

“I love New York City at night,” said Costabel, who paints New York in a semi-abstract way, transforming the lit skyscrapers into a flashy grid. But Costabel’s flamboyant color choices, including bright pinks and fluorescent yellows, stem from distant childhood memories of bright peasant dresses in the markets of her native Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia).

As a girl in Zagreb, young Costabel, then Eva Deutsch, was trained by her Viennese-born parents to have an eye for design, and eventually run her mother’s dress shop. Costabel’s happy childhood abruptly ended at age 16, when the Nazi occupation marked her Jewish family as targets of persecution. Her father, Arnold Deutsch, was arrested and eventually killed in the Treblinka concentration camp, a loss that Costabel still deeply mourns today.

The rest of the Deutsch family was transported to Italian concentration camps on the Adriatic coast. When the Italians capitulated in 1943, the majority of the inmates were sent to Auschwitz, but Costabel and her mother and sister joined a small group that escaped on a tugboat and reached partisan-occupied Serbian territory. Filled with renewed hope, Costabel joined the partisan forces, worked as an army nurse and drew intimate pictures of the Serbian peasants’ lives.

Costabel used these wartime drawings to open a slide lecture on her life’s work held on Dec. 20 at Penn South Program for Seniors, a Chelsea senior center. Costabel remembered how she used the backs of old letters and official documents for drawing paper, and how resistance soldiers sought her out to draw their portraits to send to girlfriends.

“It was my first taste of fame,” joked Costabel.

The Communist regime in Yugoslavia proved to be rabidly anti-Semitic, forcing the Deutsch family to leave for Italy, where Costabel studied fine art in Rome before seeking refuge in the United States. Shortly after arriving in New York on June 10, 1949, Costabel began her career as a package designer and studied under Franz Kline, the famous abstract expressionist painter.

Kline introduced Costabel to the world of abstraction, and for several decades Costabel would paint after her workday, creating enigmatic, geometric paintings well into the night. This artwork augmented Costabel’s therapy, helping her to come to terms with feelings of loss and guilt as a Holocaust survivor.

“Painting helped me,” said Costabel. “As a young woman, I had to make a choice to buy paints or a new dress. So, I wore my sister’s old clothes.”

For the past 14 years, Costabel has lived in semi-retirement in Penn South, where her artwork has thrived. As shown in her hour-long lecture, Costabel can paint in several styles, depending on her mood. Her range includes realistic portraits and still lifes, illustrative landscapes, and calligraphic doodles that she transforms into abstract mosaics of color. Her art recalls the textures of Van Gogh, the decorative flair of Klimt and the playfulness of Paul Klee. (Her work can be seen at www.evadeutschdesign.com.)

Costabel closed her lecture for the Penn South Program with her recent paintings of Israel, which has been a haven for her extended family since the 1930s. Her familiarity and love for the Israeli landscape comes through in her depictions of ancient stone villages, complete with lush palm trees and fiery desert skies. Costabel last toured Israel in May with “Israel Always,” an evangelical Christian group from Charleston, S.C., that she met through mutual friends. Costabel was impressed by the group’s concern for bombed Israeli villages and, in reaction, painted the stormy landscape “Israel Under Siege,” which referenced bombings in the Israeli town of Sderot. The “Israel Always” evangelicals invited Costabel to Charleston in October, where she raffled the original canvas for $4,000 to help build bomb shelters in Israel.

Costabel’s wide-ranging lecture on her art and personal history was part of “Show and Share,” a program where Penn South residents can share their passions and talents and reinvigorate their fellow co-op residents of advanced age.

Sandi Sacks, the group service coordinator for Penn South Program, met Costabel in the center’s painting class and immediately invited her to prepare a talk. “At any age we can expand our horizons and grow, and our members are an example of that,” said Sacks.

Eva Deutsch Costabel, as she tries to expand her own horizons, feels that her best work is yet to come. “I’m still developing,” Costabel said. “To develop a style, you need maturity. I’m glad at my age I didn’t dry out like a prune.”