Gisella Loeffler

Gisella Loeffler, a painter, was born in 1900 in Vienna, Austria. She immigrated to the United States with her family in 1908, where they lived in St. Louis, Missouri. Loeffler studied art at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University from 1918 to 1925.

In 1919 and 1920, Loeffler won prizes from the St. Louis Artists' Guild and from the Author’s League of America. She participated in the Public Works of Art Project while still living in Missouri in the early 1930s, painting a mural at the Michael School in St. Louis in 1933-1934.

Loeffler’s painting is in the Austrian folk-art style, with images of children and the use of bright colors and decorative floral and fauna motifs. She also designed batik textiles. In 1933, she received the Frank P. Crunden Prize for craftwork from the St. Louis Artists’ Guild 20th Anniversary Annual Exhibition. Loeffler also designed greeting cards and decorative posters. Later in her career, she began working in textiles and making wall hangings, and she received an award in fiber arts from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1959 and 1967.

Her best-known work made in St. Louis is the mural in the Johnson-Rand surgical pavilion operating room at Barnes Hospital, which took her nine months to create in 1931. This was commissioned by the surgeon Vilray P. Blair, M.D. Since most of the procedures in the room were done using local anesthetics, the mural was made to distract patients as a therapeutic experiment and to make the operating room less intimidating and more inviting. On the ceiling, Loeffler painted forty mermaids and four different deep-sea animals. Around the room there were five major scenes, including fairy tale images such as Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Cat and the Fiddle,  and Santa Claus. In total, the mural included three hundred figures. The mural was  paid for by private subscriptions.

Around 1934, Loeffler moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her daughters. There she made murals for the Federal Art Project, as well as continuing her other work. The most well known of these murals were made for the Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Around 1940, Loeffler moved to California, where she painted camouflage on airplanes for Lockheed as part of the war effort during World War II. In 1941 Loeffler began illustrating children’s books. Her first book was a collaboration with author Margery Bianco titled Franzi and Gizi. In 1942 Loeffler produced the book The Spanish American Songs and Game Book for the Federal Writers Project. In 1948 Loeffler returned to Taos, where she spent the rest of her life and where she also published her own book, El Ekeko in 1964.

Gisella Loeffler died on September 12, 1977, in Taos.