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Elisabeth [Caroline] Moses (14 January 1894, Cologne- 21 December 1957,San Francisco) was a German-American art historian and curator.

Early life
Elisabeth Moses was born in Cologne as the eldest daughter of the Jewish ear, nose and throat doctor Sally (Salli) Moses and his wife Luise, née Rothschild. The father had his own practice in downtown Cologne, and headed the ENT department at the Cologne Jewish Welfare Centre; he also practiced at the Catholic St. Franziskus Hospital in Ehrenfeld. Her mother was a member of the board of the Cologne Association for Jewish Nurses.

Elisabeth Moses passed her Abitur in 1912 at the Prussian Humanist Girls' High School]] at Marienplatz in Cologne. She then completed a degree in art history, taking as minor subjects archaeology, architecture and philosophy, at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität; she also studied at Berlin and Munich. Amongst her teachers was the art historian Paul Clemen, with whom she studied to take her PhD.

At the Museum of Applied Arts
After completing her studies, she took a position as a research assistant in the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne in 1920. Study trips took her and her brother through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. On one of these trips she met Vicky Baum, with whom she had a lifelong friendship.

In the museum she was involved in the redesign of the museum under the director Karl Schäfer. Among other things, she revised the museum's textile and porcelain collection. In the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum she worked in the department  Old Paintings . She regularly gave lectures in the arts and crafts association and in the museum about  Die neuere Kunst  (1919), about various aspects of Cologne's art history (1924), Martin Schongauer (1925) or  Costumes of the Gothic Era  (1926). In addition, she published in the Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte on cultural-historical topics and on Jewish art in the Rhineland.

On the occasion of the Millennium Exhibition of the Rhineland 1925 taking place in Cologne in 1925, she and the Rabbi and Historian Adolf Kober supervised the newly established department  Jews and Judaism in the Rhineland  'at the Art History Museum. She conceived the Jewish art and Jewish cultural equipment section for the exhibition and brought together numerous valuable exhibits from Judaica from all over the Rhineland, some of which are still in the holdings of the Cologne City Museum.

In 1926 Elisabeth Moses became a curator of the museum. In the following years she edited and cataloged among other things. the jewelry collection of the Cologne Museum of Decorative Arts, donated by Wilhelm Clemens. In addition, from the mid-1920s onwards, she specialized in the academic processing of Jewish art history in the Rhineland. For the international Pressa exhibition, which took place in Cologne in 1928, she worked on the conception of the "Jewish Special Show".

In 1928 she was accused of being involved in the  Cologne Museum Scandal . She was dismissed together with the museum director Karl Schäfer, but reinstated in 1929 after it was found that she had been wrongly accused. Together with the new director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Karl With, Elisabeth Moses was involved in the redesign of the museum. In the spring of 1931 the special exhibition '' 150 Years of Fashion. From Rococo to Art Nouveau '' at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Cologne, for which she also wrote an extensive catalog.

America
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Elisabeth Moses was dismissed from service in March 1933, before the  Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In 1934 she fled to Italy and emigrated in the same year to the  United States.

In San Francisco in the fall of 1934, Elizabeth Moses was employed as a curator for arts and crafts at M. H. de Young Memorial Museum under the direction of Walter Heil. As in Cologne, she redesigned the arts and crafts department of the museum in America. and curated numerous special exhibitions, including '' Design in '49' '(1949)' ',' 'the' 'Contemporary Handweavers Exhibition' '(1950, 1955) or' 'Designer Craftsmen of the West' '(1957)' '. '' Since 1947 she has regularly organized special shows with contemporary ceramics in the museum. At the MH de Young Memorial Museum she occupied herself from the end of d he intensified the 1930s with the art history of tapestries.

Elizabeth Moses died in San Francisco on December 21, 1957 after a long illness.

Legacy
In memory of the achievements of Elizabeth Moses, the  Elizabeth Moses Award  is regularly presented to promote young ceramists.

On March 21, 2013, on the initiative of the Cologne City Museum in front of the former home of the Moses family at Elisenstrasse 3, Elisabeth Moses and her parents Sally (Salli) and Lucie (Luise) and her brother, Doctor Paul Moses moved by the artist  Gunther Demnig four stumbling blocks.

Books

 * The screen. Cultural-historical study.  Commissioned by Hieronymus Eck. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1924
 *  The jewelry of the W. Clemens collection , DuMont-Schauberg, Cologne 1927
 *  150 years of fashion. From Rococo to Art Nouveau , catalog of the exhibition April / May 1931 in the Kunstgewerbe-Museum der Stadt Köln, Köln 1931, 208 pp.

Attachments

 *  Depictions of plants in German art of the 14th / 15th centuries Century. Their shape and their meaning . In:  Journal for Christian Art,  Issue 34, 1921 pp. 157–165; Extract from her dissertation
 *  The section 'Jews and Judaism in the Rhineland' at the Millennium Exhibition in Cologne June-August 1925 . In:  Soncino-Blätter,  Heft 1 (1925/6), pp. 86–88
 *  Caspar Benedikt Beckenkamp (1747-1828) . In:  Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch / Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte , Issue 2, 1925, pp. 44–77
 *  Cologne women's costumes . In: KÖLNISCHE ZEITUNG: 1st to 4th special issue for the Rhenish millennium. Cologne, May to August 1925
 *  Gothic goldsmith work from the Clemens Collection in the Kunstgewerbemuseum of the City of Cologne , In: Die Uhrmacherkunst, Heft 51, 1926, p. 602
 *  About a Cologne manuscript of the Mischnah Torah des Maimonides . In:  Journal for Fine Art , Leipzig 1926/7, pp. 71–76
 * “Do we need museums?” In: Festschrift Gymnasiale Studien-Anstalt, 1928, pp. 69–77
 *  Jewish cult and art monuments in the Rhineland . In:  Journal of the Rheinischer Verein für Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz , vol. 24 (1931), pp. 99–201 (with Adolf Kober)
 *  Agraffe . In: "Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte", Vol. 1, Stuttgart 1933, pp. 216–220
 *  Pendant (Gem) . In "Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte", Vol. 1, 1935, pp. 699–705
 *  California museum metamorphosis . In: `` Art News, '' Issue 36, 1937, pp. 12-13
 *  Three centuries of European and American domestic silver M. H. De Young Memorial Museum , San Francisco 1938 (with Walter Heil)
 *  International silver survey . In:  Art News , Issue 37, 1938, pp. 10-12
 *  Gothic riches for San Francisco . In:  Art News , Issue 38, 1940, pp. 7–8
 *  A gothic tapestry in the M.H. de Young Museum . `` Hunting rabbits with ferrets woven at Toumai . In: `` The Pacific Art Review,  Issue 1, 1941/2, pp. 24-30
 *  A Gothic sculpture of the Madonna and Child . In: `` The Pacific Art Review '', No. 1, 1941/2, pp. 26-29
 * `` A Dutch armoire of the 17th century . In: `` The Pacific Art Review,  Issue 1, 1941/2, pp. 33-36
 * "Brosche", In "Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte", Vol. 2, 1944, pp. 1217–1219
 * `` Jewish ceremonial objects and items of historical interest, December 14-29, 1945. Celebrating the ninety-fifth anniversary of the founding of the congregation Emanu-El, Arguello Boulevard and Lake Street '', San Francisco, 1945
 *  A case for the decorative arts . In: `` The Pacific Art Review '', No. 4, 1945/46, pp. 36–45
 *  Appreciation of ceramics in the United States . In: `` Faenza '', No. 34, 1948, pp. 54-58

Literature

 * Bettina Mosler:  Elisabeth Moses, art historian from the Adenauer period in Cologne: in search of a lost biography . In: Kölner Museums-Bulletin, No. 4, Cologne 1999; P. 33f.
 * Tobias Arand:  The Jewish department of the Cologne 'Millennium Exhibition of the Rhineland' 1925 , In: Monika Grübel and Georg Möhlich (eds.):  Jewish life in the Rhineland. From the Middle Ages to the Present , Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2005
 *  Moses, Elisabeth , in: Ulrike Wendland:  Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, p. 446f.