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The world outside however, was foreign, different and continued to be uninviting. Often in her works, the world inside, although represented as a part of the transient vanitas world, bears at least some kind of familiarity. In “Room,” the knitting woman, though lonely, is surrounded at least by familiar objects: her modest furniture, the painting, the photographs, the remains of her breakfast. The process and the product of the knitting centered on the bed create a feeling of warmth, of home. The woman is protected from the outside world by the familiar walls of her room. What she sees outside—the roofs of numerous buildings with the windows that look like blind eyes—is uncomfortable and cold.

“Dead Leaves,” painted in the Surrealist style as a kind of nightmare, is a darker, more accentuated version of the ideas in “Room.” In “Dead Leaves,” the almost abandoned inside world has been invaded by the cold of the outside world. The inside world still has some remains of the familiar, such as the cosy teapot standing on the towel, but at the same time it is a decaying world. The outside world, intruding through the open door, destroys the comfort and cosiness of home and brings with it a memento mori, a reminiscence of death, embodied in the dead, dry leaves blown in by the cold wind. The open door is simultaneously a conduit and a mirror for the intrusion and abandonment. For Pregel, whose home was her psychological fortress and an escape from the outside world, the idea of the outside entering inside and imposing its cold Otherness could be a nightmare.

That mood of the inner crisis reappears in Pregel’s semi-abstract works (see front cover, “Flags”). In “Dead Leaves,” Pregel, through pale “dead” colors, conveys the mood of her soul, frozen by despair. In “Flags” however, through dramatic colors— dark and light and their intermediary shades—and the combination of the figurative (red flags moved by the strong wind) and the meeting at the horizon of two almost abstract surfaces of earth and sky, she creates the mood of inner turmoil, of anguish, of the soul ready to rebel. As in many of Pregel’s works, this work does not contain any human figures, which once again stresses her overall feeling of the inner solitude.

The versatility of Pregel’s styles, her ability to use classical ideas and to give to them her own modern interpretation, her search for new ways of expression in Surrealism, Cubism, Precisionism, Abstraction and Figuration, and her striving to find her own styles and colors to express the inner life of her soul and the mood of her generation, make her one of the more interesting painters of the 20th century.