A Life of Displacement and Artistic Renaissance Baroness Hansi Staël von Holstein was an artist whose very existence was defined by the shifting borders and tumultuous tides of twentieth-century Europe. Born in Budapest in 1913, her early years were shadowed by the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the profound instability brought about by the First World War. This sense of movement—of being a citizen of a world in flux—becam…