The Polish-Jewish artist Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004) was born in Lwów, studied in Vienna and Kraków, and attended the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Attempting to escape Poland in 1942, the Rosenstein family was caught and Erna’s parents were murdered; she escaped, injured, and spent the war years in hiding. Over the next six decades Rosenstein made paintings, assemblages, and poems that refused to look away from what she’d seen and experienced. She rejected Socialist Realism during the Stalinist era in Poland, worked outside the official art scene, and remained one of the most uncompromising figures of the postwar Polish avant-garde. Alongside Tadeusz Kantor, she was a founding member of the second Kraków Group. The Belvedere is now staging the first major retrospective in Austria devoted to Rosenstein. It features around 80 works. —Elena Clavarino