Elza Severin

In the youth hostel ’t pannekoekhuis in Nijlen, 1950, she designed a mural. In the rectorat of the Free University of Brussels (VUB), 1976-1980, she also designed and placed a mural. This last one she needed to perform it herself because of the lack of budget. Elza collected all of her journals and notes of herself.

In 1950 Renaat Bream designed their house called “Huis Braem-Severin”. Elza Severin helped with the interior design. It is located in Deurne, Antwerp, Menegemlei 23. The house can now be visited as a museum. There you find a collection of letters and wood blocks, and plaster figurines of Elza. The exterior and interior are based on the natural ratio of the golden ratio. The style of the building belongs to the modernist architecture movement. The work of Elza Severin also belongs to the modernist movement. When they bought their house Renaat was thinking about the aesthetics and Elza was thinking about practical things. “Does this window have to go open or not? Should it better be a sliding door?” she wrote in the epilogue of the biography of her husband “Het schoonste land ter wereld”.

In 1941 Elza and Renaat accompanied and joined the resistance movement. Therefore Elza Severin designed cartoons for the anti-nazipropaganda. After the war she officially was recognised as a 'fighter by the clandestine press'. Her cartoons were signed with the pseudonym ‘SUS’.

From 1940 she was more and more involved in the business of her husband Renaat Bream. She did the administration of his architectural firm, but helped as well with the design of the interiour of the buildings and the decorative elements of the projects. She designed several sculptures, tiles, tapestries, and pillows for the interior.

The design for the commercial expenses formally differ greatly from the expressionist woodcuts that she performed as a free work. Her woodcarvings are often signed with the monogram ‘ES’. Elza, as a graphic design artist, she tried to make her name in the art world and from 1933 till 1938 she took part in exhibitions for it. Some of them were group exhibitions but she also had solo exhibitions. In the Sint-Nicolaasplaats she once had an exhibition together with her father. Juliaan Severin was a secretary of the art circle AKOS and he arranged the exhibition place in de Sint-Nikolaasplaats. In 1933 she was selected for an international exhibition for woodcuts in Warsaw and Kraków.

Elza Severin was an independed graphic designer from around 1930 till 1940. She made illustrations for children and youth books, letterheads, occasional printing, posters, advertising and a lot of ex libris. Elza signed her work often with ‘Els Everin’ or ‘Els’.

In 1929 she met Renaat Braem in the Academy. They both were members of the Joe English Gilde, a Flemish-humanist-oriented association consisting of art and architectural students. Bream founded it a year earlier. They held debate evenings, lectures and exhibitions. In October 1936 she married Renaat Bream. Elza accompanied him on the study trips abroad to Paris, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Venice.

Elza Severin (21 May 1913 - 18 May 1988) was a Belgian artist.

Severin was born on 21 May 1913 in Kalmthout, Belgium. Her father, Juliaan Severin, was a painter and graphic designer. She was surrounded by art and the visual world and so she easily made her way into the art sector. Her father was a teacher and home schooled her and her sister. The homeschooling was in the educational vision of Ovide Decroly, a Belgian doctor, pedagogue, and psychologist who developed a revolutionary education system that assumes that every child is unique, and that a school or teacher had to adapt to the child, and not the other way around. From this artistic and alternative family background, the step into the artistic was easily taken.