Gela Forster, an artist whose fame survived her work

With Walter Spies in 1930

Gela Forster (born Angelika Schmitz 1893 in Berlin, died in 1957 in the US) was a German sculptor whose works are completely lost. Her mother was a singer, her father an architect, whose speciality where huge monuments and mausoleums.

As a sculptor, she worked in Berlin and Dresden and exhibited her sculptures in 1919 in the Dresden Secession Group. Herwarth Walden appreciated her primitive-looking figures and in September 1921 showed one of them  in the 100th Sturm exhibition in Berlin. In 1922 she married the sculptor Alexander Archipenko and one yerar later they emigrated to America.

How did her many works dissapear ? Did the Nazis destroy them ? I sure would like to know the answer to this artistic enigma.

One of her works, from the magazine "Menschen", 1919

From an article in Die Zeit by Petra Kipphoff, 27 July 1984 :

The biggest and saddest find of this exhibition is probably Gela Forster, whose work is missing altogether. Three of her works, nudes, can be seen in the exhibition in a contemporary photo sequence. But even without seeing the original works, it is clear which powerful artist she was. "The whole sculpture culminates in a scream," wrote Theodor Däubler about Gela Forster's "The Man". 
 
An excerpt from another text, by David Cateforis :

"Angelica Schmitz was herself an expressionist sculptor. She exhibited under the name of Gela Forster and was a founding member of the Sezession Gruppe 1919 in Dresden. Tall, blonde, and strikingly beautiful, Angelica Schmitz has been described as "an overpowering Brunhilde type . . . cold, composed, and sophisticated."' Her marriage to Alexander Archipenko was a stormy one, yet by all accounts he remained in love with her until her death." 

On their way to the U.S.