Lisl Weil

From the age of nine, Lisl Weil (1901-2006) began to attend Franz Čižek’s youth art classes at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, after which she studied at the Academy from 1926 to 1930. By the mid-1930s, Weil worked as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist, which she already began as a teenager. Over the course of the 1930s, she contributed to a range of different Viennese magazines and newspapers, including the society magazine Die Bühne, for which she regularly produced cartoons and illustrations that provided humorous commentary on the lives of Vienna‘s high society. A main concern in Weil‘s drawings throughout were the lives of modern women. A particularly entertaining summary of Weil‘s repertoire of modern women is the “A-B-C of Women”, published in Die Bühne in 1933: each letter of the alphabet is represented by a different “type” of modern femininity, starting with Anna, the chef, and ending with the milkmaid Zenzi. In between, there are showgirls (Dolly and Doddy), craftswomen (Etta and Fella), sportswomen (Inge), the divorcee Tilde and the chemistry student Vera. Including Czech and Hungarian names, as well as women from different social classes, Weil‘s alphabet shows a plethora of different characters that she would have encountered on the streets of Vienna and the Austrian countryside.