Posted on July 30, 2010
Lily Renée Phillips, photo by Jo Ann Toy for Newsweek
You can see in her work flashes of Klimt, Schiele, Dix, and other painters she studied as a wealthy young girl in prewar Austria. You can also see the influence of what happened next: World War II.Phillips spent two years as a Jewish war refugee in England, wondering if her parents were still alive, and ultimately escaped to the U.S. with the kind of derring-do you might find in Señorita Rio, an immigrant turned spy who became Phillips’s most celebrated comic creation.