Lillian Malcove

Description

Lillian Malcove (1902-1981) was born in Mogilev, near Kiev, into a Jewish family that emigrated to Canada to escape the pogroms in 1905. From a young age he showed a strong intellectual vocation, which allowed him to graduate in Medicine at the University of Manitoba (Canada) in 1925. After suffering from tuberculosis, she moved to New York, where she trained in psychiatry and later in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (O'neil, 2018). She was one of the first Canadian women to become accredited as a psychoanalyst.

Later, in 1937, she married Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Ormos, who died in 1948, an event that deeply marked Malcove's life (O'neil, 2018). From then on, she poured her energy into creating a large art collection, eventually gathering more than 500 pieces. She transformed her New York apartment into a space that functioned simultaneously as a home, office, and private museum (Campbell, 1938). He was aware of the value of his collection, so he decided to bequeath most of the pieces to the University of Toronto.

Bibliography

• CAMPBELL, Sheila (1938): The Malcove Collection: a catalogue of the objects in the Lillian Malcove Collection of the University of Toronto, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
• O'NEIL, Mary Kay (2018): "A Psychoanalyst’s Gift: Lillian Malcove as Collector", vol. 75, nº 4, American Imago, pp. 611-645.