Marianne (Ari) Lahs (nee Matthiae), was born in 1910 in Dessau, Germany. She was the daughter of Curt Matthiae, cellist and concertmaster at the Dessau Theatre. She began painting and drawing at an early age, having been inspired by the Dessau Bauhaus artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandsky, who encouraged her to attend art school in Berlin. In her teen years, Dessau was home to the Bauhaus and Lahs was inspired by the rich theatre, art and music offerings. When she graduated from high school, she traveled to Berlin to become a student at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, where she met Curt Lahs, who would become one of her professors. She and Curt Lahs married in 1934 after they were both expelled from the school by the Nazis in 1933, because they were anti-Nazi and their work had been declared by them to be "degenerate.” They spent the next 12 years moving around Europe--living in Southern France, Yugoslavia, and Italy-- before returning to Germany in 1945. Ari Lahs continued to make her art while she was mother to two children, Angela and Christian. She rarely exhibited and most of her early work was lost in air raids during World War II, but after the war ended, she devoted herself full time to making art and produced a stunning body of work in tempera and later colored ballpoint pen. Ari Lahs passed away in Berlin in 1998.