She fled Nazi Germany with her husband in 1934, arriving at the port of Fremantle, Western Australia on the passenger liner Ormonde on 4 January 1938.

These works investigate the unique light and colour of the Western Australian landscape in a style informed by her knowledge of German Expressionism.

Among these were Summer Nude, 1939, which caused a scandal when exhibited in Western Australia in 1944 due to both its depiction of nudity and its bold, simple shapes and lines.

Her work first received national attention in the late 1970s some fifteen years before she died in 1990, aged 93.

She has since been acknowledged as a significant contributor to Australian modernist painting, prefiguring the development of the similarly landscape-based modernism in Western Australia associated with painters Guy Grey-Smith and Howard Taylor.