She was born in Caracas, Venezuela to a family of wealthy Jewish-Czech textile manufacturers from Brno, who had fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II.
When the war ended, the family unsuccessfully attempted to reclaim their property in Czechoslovakia and settled in St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1950.
From the early 1980s, Hammer-Tugendhat focused on representations of gender in art and analysis of the underlying socio-political meanings women represented in artworks.
In recognition of her work as a pioneer in the history of feminist art, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize of 2009.
[4] Her parents gave the young couple a lot in Brno, and they commissioned Mies van der Rohe to build their home, Villa Tugendhat.
[3] After two years of work, the house was completed in 1930 and the family began occupancy in December, nine months after their oldest son was born.
[12] Fearing that Hitler's troops would invade Switzerland, in 1941 the family fled to Caracas, Venezuela,[4] where Fritz had been hired to run the Lanex textile company owned by a group of Corsican financiers.
[14] The rest of the family lived in Venezuela for almost a decade,[2] but when the war ended, Grete wanted to return home because of better opportunities for her children's education.
[7] That year, Tagendhat married Ivo Hammer,[19] an Austrian art historian, restorer, and conservationist,[7] with whom she had two children, Matthias and Lukas.
[2] Rather than simply commenting on chronicled changes in Bosch's style and influences over his career, the thesis explored the socio-political aspects of his subjects, examining the historic social details and perceptions that his images depicted.
Despite arguments that the courses taught were frivolous and not scientific,[21] women scholars built networks among German-speaking colleagues to collaborate on research projects.
[20] She was successful in 1991, when for the first time coordination offices were established, linking women's studies researchers from universities in Graz, Linz, and Vienna and two positions were created in the Ministry of Education.
[2] That year, she joined Edith Saurer, Irmgard Eisenbach-Stangl, Andre Gingrich, Friederike Hassauer, Cornelia Klinger, Helga Nowotny, Edith Specht [de], and Ruth Wodak in applying for funds to establish the first graduate gender studies program at the University of Vienna.
[1] Some of her works examined how images of women were used by artists as representations of either hidden political meaning or social commentary.
[28] Her major works looked at the ideology behind the imagery depicted in artworks of painting including Bruegel, Rembrandt, Segantini and Titian and what the invisible meanings were in their representation of nudes, gender relations, and sexuality.
After the fall of communism the Tugendhat family did not immediately ask for their property to be restored, as the city promised to open it as a public museum.
[31] The dispute continued until January 2010, when the city finally agreed to return the property, but the high gift tax that was required, again stalled negotiations.