Croatian painter and graphic artist Anka Krizmanić comes from an impoverished noble family. She attended Tomislav Krizman's private painting school from 1910 to 1913, and already exhibited in 1910 at the exhibition of the Society of Croatian Artists Medulić in Zagreb, and later at Yugoslav art exhibitions. Even as a little girl, she started painting mainly in watercolor and pastel her surroundings and her relatives. Tomislav Krizman directed her towards Art Nouveau stylization in drawings, and in graphics she achieves a form synthesis by reducing expressive means. During her education at the School of Arts and Crafts in Dresden, which she graduated in 1917 with a silver medal for the best work in graphics, Margarete Junge encouraged her to paint outdoors. Then drawings of exceptional expressiveness and freedom of line and an anthological woodcut in color are created. In Dresden, she befriended Otto Dix and, engrossed in the beauty of the human body in motion, especially the ballerinas of Anna Pavlova, Greta Wiesenthal and Gertrud Leistikow, creates her own version of expressionism with impressions in ink and woodcut, and in drawings with a pronounced dynamic and erotic charge. After staying in Paris from 1929 to 1930, where she trained as a scholarship recipient of the French government, she sought expression in colorism and intimism. She worked in Zagreb as a freelance artist, and for many years she worked as a cartoonist at the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb. She becomes an excellent painter of atmosphere, ambience and human intimacy, and she also paints portraits of the protagonists of the Croatian cultural scene.