Wolter Heukelslaan 62

Karoline (Carry) van Biema was the eldest child of the lawyer and notary Adolf van Biema and his wife Hedwig Burg. From an early age she walked around with a sketchbook; at fourteen she knew, as she later said, that she would become a painter.

After an apprenticeship at the Hannoverse Gewerbeverein - as an only and moreover shy child among adults - she traveled to The Hague at the age of seventeen to further her education at the Academy of Visual Arts. (Women were not admitted to official academies in Germany until 1919.) After training in The Hague, she took private lessons at the Meyer painting school in Hanover from 1903 to 1910. In the parental home at 22 Körnerstrasse, which she shared with her mother and sister - her father had died at a young age and her two brothers had left the house - she had access to her own studio.
While Hanover was awakened during the First World War, Carry van Biema also switched from traditionalism to modernism. From 1910 she exhibited at the traditional Kunstverein Hannover, from 1916 at the modern Kestner-Gesellschaft and immediately from 1917 at the Hannoversche Sezession. Yet she did not directly belong to the avant-garde circles in Hanover. Her path to modern art ran through Stuttgart.

Between 1914 and 1919, Van Biema, who had also had pupils of his own since 1908, took lessons with Adolf Hölzel (1853-1934), who had been appointed professor at the Stuttgarter Akademie at the end of 1905. Van Biema's application of Hölzel's leather led to her work leaning towards applied art, with a strong emphasis on material treatment and decorative use of color.

From the end of May to mid-July 1921 Carry stayed in the Netherlands, probably in The Hague to see an aunt and uncle and some college friends again. In the Netherlands, there appeared to be a wider interest in Hölzel's ideas, especially from the applied arts and related arts.

Back in Germany Carry considered publishing Hölzel's ideas. She had several times published articles on Hölzel's and Goethe's color theory and several times on other subjects. Over the years, Van Biema worked on the intended edition, which eventually appeared in 1930 as Farben und Formen als lebendige Kräfte. The book was widely praised, only the circle around Hölzel reacted critically. Soon the book was almost completely sold out, the small remaining edition was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. Thanks to a reissue in 1997, it is now possible to take cognizance of it again.

Teaching - sometimes to just a single student - was the constant factor in Van Biema's life. From the beginning in 1927 she was a member of the Gedok Hannover, the Gemeinschaft Deutscher und Österreichischer Künstlerinnenvereine aller Kunstgattungen Ortsgruppe Hannover. Van Biema was on the list of advisors for painting within the Gedok. She gave lectures and, thanks to her good reputation as a teacher, she counted several Gedok members among her students. The Gedok Hannover grew rapidly, reaching its provisional peak in 1932 with 409 members. In the years that followed, many Jewish names disappeared from the membership list. Van Biema increasingly stayed abroad, especially in Spain. In 1933 she even had an extensive solo exhibition in the Galerías de Arte Syra in Barcelona.

After Carry had given another lecture in Berlin in January 1938, she too left Germany. She moved to the Netherlands and looked for accommodation in The Hague. In April 1938 she informed her family that her lectures were well attended and that she already had thirteen students.

Van Biema would live in various places in the Netherlands before finding rooms in Utrecht in June 1941. Shortly before her departure to Westerbork, Carry van Biema had written down the following lines in a folder with poems and diary notes left in her room in Utrecht: 'Versunken ist was meine Erdentage oft thinkelt und beschwert / ins ewige Licht, nach dem ich je und je mich sehnte bin ich heimgekehrt.' With the addition 'Mein Grabschrift, für mich selbst Schrieben'.

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