Studio Stanislaus Bender

Stanislaus Bender (1882-1975) came from Łódź, where he trained as a lithographer. He went to Paris and Munich to study art and settled in Munich in 1914 with his wife Jadwiga, née Freistadt, and daughter Marylka Bender. Jadwiga died of the Spanish flu in 1919. Stanislaus Bender worked as a commercial artist with his own studio, where Marylka also worked. Artistically, he explored his Jewish-Polish origins and painted genre scenes from the so-called shtetl. 

In 1938, Stanislaus and Marylka Bender emigrated to Paris. In 1940, they fled to Lourdes to escape the German invasion. In 1942, there were mass deportations in the occupied and unoccupied parts of France, which Marylka Bender narrowly escaped. Stanislaus and Marylka Bender then went into hiding under false names in a village north of Lourdes. After the end of the war, Stanislaus Bender painted a fresco for the Église du Sacré-Cœur du Lourdes in gratitude to the inhabitants who had helped them. Traumatized and in poor health, he returned to Paris, where he worked again as a commercial artist.

Marylka Bender married the Munich philosopher Christan Kellerer in 1948, but went back to Paris with him, where she founded a greeting card publishing house. From the 1980s, the couple lived permanently in Munich again. Stanislaus Bender returned to Munich in the early 1970s. After his death, Marylka Bender-Kellerer lived in Munich as an artist and author into old age.