Irina Subotić Vjera Вiller Paintress of Urban Naive Art Published in: STURM-FRAUEN. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910-1932 / STORM WOMEN. Women Artists of the Avant-Garde in Berlin 1910-1932, ed. by Ingrid Pfeiffer & Max Hollein, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt – Wienand, 2015, pp.356-358. We know about Vjera Biller mostly from her correspondence from 1923, 1924, 1927 and 1928, with the founder of the Zenit movement, author, poet, and critic Ljubomir Micić (1895–1871). 1 During his stay in Berlin in the summer of 1922 she contacted him most probably via the journal DER STURM. She was born on 7 December 1903 in Đakovo (Croatia) the daughter of a respectful and well-situated family, as evidenced by the Commemorative Album of the Sklad- Preradović choir in Đakovo 2 where her father Emil Biller, an Austrian, is mentioned as a member of the steering committee of that eminent society in 1903 and 1904, a position which was considered privileged also for Croatians, Hungarians and Jews. Since he is not mentioned later, it can be assumed that the Biller family moved to Osijek and Zagreb, as Vjera recorded that she spent the first nine years of her life in Croatia and then moved to Budapest: “I am still in fact a Yugoslav since I was born in Croatia and my first language was Croatian; my mother [Malvina Kugler] was also Yugoslav”. 3 She enrolled in the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest when she was fourteen (there are no records of her school education) but left two weeks later when she realized that “art could not be learned”, as she wrote in a letter to Micić on 8 December 1923. 4 Around the year 1918 she made contact with members of the Activists Group linked to the journal MA and took part in the exhibition organized in January 1919 with six of her works, 5 together with the key members Béla Uitz, János Máttis-Teutsch and Sándor Bortnyik amongst others. It was thanks to Lajos Kassák or Ladislaus Péri that she probably made Herwarth Walden’s acquaintance in whose guestbook she had signed her name in 1921, without any date but with her address at Lützowstr. 21. She exhibited several times in the STURM: at the 98th exhibition in June 1921 for the first 1 Vida Golubović, “Pisma Vjere Biller Ljubomiru Miciću”, in Književna reč, no. 154, 10. (Belgrade, November 1980), p. 11. 2 Mato Horvat, Spomenica Hrvatskog pjevačkog društva Sklad—Preradović u Đakovu 1863–1939 (Commemorative Album of the Croatian Choir Sklad—Preradović in Đakovo 1863–1939), Matija Kraljević (ed.), Đakovo n.d. (1939?), pp. 150 and 154. The author would like to thank Mirko Ćurić for this information sent on 31 March, 2015. 3 Vjera Biller in a letter from 8 December 1923 to Ljubomir Micić in: Golubović 1980 (as in note 1), p. 11. 4 Ibid. 5 The catalogue was published in MA, 1, 1919.