Malva Schalek, aka Malvina Schalková (18 February 1882 — 1944), was an Czech-Jewish painter.
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Malva Schalek was born in Prague, to a German-speaking Jewish intellectual family active in the Czech national movement. [1] She went to school in Prague, Vrchlabi (Hohenelbe), and began to study art, first at the Frauenakademie in Munich and then privately in Vienna. She earned her living as a painter in Vienna, in her studio above the Theater an der Wien, until July 1938, when she was forced to flee from the Nazis, leaving her paintings behind. Only some 30 works from this period have been recovered; two were found in the Historisches Museum Wien. One of these, a nearly life-sized oil portrait of the actor Max Pallenberg, is currently being returned to the family by the restitution authority.
Schalek (aka Malvina Schalková) was deported to Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto in February, 1942, where she produced more than 100 drawings and watercolors portraying fellow inmates and their life there. Because of her refusal to portray a collaborationist doctor, she was deported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944, where she perished.
Her work, especially her drawings of the camp at Theresienstadt, is characterized by a sober realism. These drawings have been described by Tom L. Freudenheim, Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1978 as "perhaps the finest and most complete artistic oeuvre to survive the Holocaust." Miraculously recovered after the liberation, most are now in the Art Collection of the Ghetto Fighters' House museum at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot in Israel.