Suzanne Eisendieck - Miss Toto Koopman (1936)
Koopman was born on the Indonesian island of Java in 1908, to a half-Indonesian mother descended from Chinese ancestry and a Dutch father. Colonized some three centuries earlier, the country still ran rampant with prejudice and hostility against its biracial inhabitants when Koopman was born. She, her mother, and brother were all derisively called “green Dutchmen” for the color of their skin. Yet throughout her life, Koopman remained proud of her heritage and would speak openly of it in a society that wouldn’t catch up to her progressivism for decades.
In high society circles, Koopman’s charm, mystique, and polyglot tongue matched well with her love of thrill and sexual freedom. She would court throughout her life all manner of distinguished ladies and gentlemen, including actress Tallulah Bankhead and Randolph Churchill, son of Winston Churchill. Also among her paramours was newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, owner of England’s Daily Express, Evening Standard, and Sunday Express, a man 30 years her senior. It was through and for Beaverbrook that Koopman began to gather intelligence on the Fascist and Nazi occupation of Europe beginning in 1934. She was rumored to have had a dalliance with the son-in-law of Mussolini, but was known to have had an affair with Lord Beaverbrook’s son, Max. They were together for four years, but would never marry, as Beaverbrook said he would offer them both lifelong pensions not to. It suited Koopman well. She was not and would never be the marrying kind, so enjoyed spending her pension.
Visiting friends in Florence in 1939, however, Koopman would fall for an Italian Resistance leader. She would even engineer her society connections and sell her furs and jewelry to back his anti-Fascist endeavors. Working for the Allies, she spied on meetings of the Italian Fascist Party’s paramilitary wing, the Blackshirts, and reported their intel back to England. After two years, the Italian police caught on and sent her to remote prisons and detention camps, the latter of which she successfully escaped from. From the safety of the mountains outside Perugia, Italy, she also helped detention camp escapees find asylum while also continuing to help the Resistance. The Fascists would eventually catch on to her tactics, however, and capture her once more, only to have her flee from their grasp again. She made her way to the palatial, luxurious Danieli Hotel in Venice, where she would hide in plain sight: at an aristocrat friend’s elegant dinner the night the hotel was being raided by German forces in hopes of discovering spies. “In a brazen gambit, the aristocrat threw an opulent dinner for the German general in charge of the operation and seated him directly next to Toto,” The Daily Beast wrote in 2013. “Dressed to the nines and flirtatious as ever, Toto was so conspicuous that it never occurred to the Germans to suspect her.” But in October 1944, she would be discovered, then imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which would prove far more difficult to get out of.
Ravensbrück was a concentration camp primarily for women. From the time it opened in 1938 to the time it was shut down in 1945, approximately 132,000 female prisoners would pass through its gates and 90,000 would die. Koopman survived the camp on her wits, lying to Ravensbrück guards in perfect German, telling them she was a trained nurse. She then worked in the camp's infirmary, and would often sneak food to the hospitalized in attempts to heal them, something that could have cost her life. Some of the camp was liberated when the Swedish Red Cross’s Vice President, Count Folke Bernadotte, convinced Nazi Commander in Chief Heinrich Himmler to release 7,500 women. Koopman was one of them, slender frame shriveled, her head shaved, her body ravaged from medical experimentation.
With the help of Randolph Churchill, who would also get her a wig, as well as Beaverbrook and the Red Cross, Koopman was able to settle in Ascona, on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. There, in 1945, she would meet Erica Brausen, a London gallerist who, incidentally, had also been involved in the Resistance. After working at London’s Redfern Gallery, she was set on opening a space of her own. (source)
Particularly formative for Erica Brausen was her private partnership, from 1946, with the model Toto Koopman, who also supported the management of the gallery, maintained the card index of clients and guests, and oversaw the invitations and exhibition openings (Liaut 2013, 135). The two partners undertook joint studio and art trips to the European continent, for example to the Venice Biennale, in search of new artists for the gallery. Their shared flat was located at 26 Bolton Studios, Gilston Road, Chelsea from 1946. In 1959 Brausen and Koopman moved to 70 Eaton Place, Belgravia and had bronze furniture designed by Alberto and Diego Giacometti. They lived surrounded by works of classical modernism, including works by Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and Joan Miró.
Erica Brausen was one of the progressive gallery owners of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe who, through huge commitment and strategically planned exhibitions, helped contemporary art gain recognition. In addition to painting, an important emphasis was placed on sculpture: in group exhibitions such as Sculpture from 1959, Hanover Gallery not only brought together abstraction (Kemény) and figuration (Maillol) and artists of different generations. It also showed lesser-known sculptors such as César, Clatworthy and Marini in the context of established positions - Maillol, Matisse, Picasso. In this way, Brausen was able to draw the attention of collectors and critics to new artists and open a door to the London art market for them.
Many of those who championed the art of their time were emigrants, including women such as Erica Brausen, Lea Bondy Jaray and Ala Story. This leads to the thesis that, on the one hand, the emigrants brought with them their diverse experiences with contemporary art in their places of origin and exile stations along the way. On the other hand, the as yet unrecognised terrain of contemporary art, less affected by competition from local art dealers, also offered opportunities for them to establish themselves in the art market and the art scene in London. (source)
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