Rosemarie Inge Koczy

KOCZY--Rosemarie Inge 68, of Croton-on-Hudson, NY, internationally renowned artist, succumbed on December 12, 2007 to inflammatory breast cancer. Born March 5, 1939 in Reckling-hausen, Germany to Jewish parents, she was deported in 1942 and survived two concentration camps. In 1959 she left Germany for Geneva to study art at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. Graduating with distinction in 1965, she soon gained recognition throughout Europe as a tapestry maker. A chance encounter with Peggy Guggenheim in Venice in 1973 led to an abiding friendship (and the commissioning of a tapestry) and contact with then Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Messer. By the mid-1970's the unexpressed trauma of her early years forced a change of direction in her work toward an open acknowledgment of the Holocaust. By the time Koczy accepted a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony in 1980 at Messer's invitation, she had already begun to create the signature pen and ink drawings memorializing the victims of the Shoah reverenced today throughout the world. In addition to hundreds of paintings, wood sculptures and other works, they alone numbered over 12,000 at the time of her death. Of them she wrote: "The drawings I make every day are titled 'I Weave You A Shroud.' They are burials to those I saw die in camps." Esteemed in both mainstream and outsider art worlds but in the moral dimension apart from both, Koczy's work renowned in the Guggenheim, the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, to give partial sense of its reach. Rosemarie Koczy's first marriage (which brought her Swiss citizenship) ended in divorce. She wed composer Louis Pelosi in 1984 and became an American citizen in 1989. She is survived by her husband, a sister Gisela and a half-brother Walter, both of Germany. She was interred at Bethel Cemetery, Croton on December 14. Her gravestone will read: "I weave you a shroud...of love."