Zara Kriegstein, who left a legacy of public art in Santa Fe that blends German expressionism, Mexican magical realism and American social satire, died last week after a long bout with liver disease. She was 57.

Born in Berlin on July 28, 1952, Kriegstein studied art in Germany and in 1973 moved to Santa Fe, where she became known for her murals — on Empire Builders on Cerrillos Road, on the old state archives building on Guadalupe Street and inside the Santa Fe Municipal Court building.

Her ex-husband, Felipe Cabeza de Vaca, said they first met at the New Delhi airport in September 1970 when he was on his way to Nepal and she was traveling in India with friends.

"Fortunately, I missed my flight and I got to meet her," he said. "We spent, golly, eight hours there at New Delhi International. ... We talked and talked, and I invited her (to come to Santa Fe) — I told her I would be coming back home in six months — because she wanted to go to America."

Cabeza de Vaca, a plumber who has run for public office several times and once ran a private museum dedicated to unidentified flying objects, said Kriegstein visited him in 1971. Although she liked Santa Fe and its people, he said, "she wasn't too impressed with the art scene then. As time continued, I guess, she made her own contribution to it."

Two years later, the two met again by accident in London's Heathrow airport. This time, "she wasn't too excited about Germany," he said, so when he invited her to come to Santa Fe again, she agreed, and this time she stayed, eventually marrying Cabeza de Vaca. The two divorced only last year.

"We got together and started shaking things up a little in Santa Fe," he said. "Every time we tried to do (a mural), we were defacing another wall. ... She might be dead by the American standard of you're not breathing, but to me, she's very much alive."

Longtime acquaintance Jo Basiste, previously known as Eli Levin, recalled meeting Kriegstein in the late 1970s at a show of her art at Forrest Fenn's gallery.

"She looked like a Russian countess," he said. "She had a mink or some kind of animal fur thing with the head and everything. ... I was just blown away. I hadn't seen such a good artist and such a fancy-looking lady all at once."

Basiste and Kriegstein soon joined forces to open The Realist Gallery on Burro Alley, where they showed their own work as well as that of a different artist every two weeks in the summer. Although the gallery closed in six months after losing $12,000, Basiste still remembers the invitation for its grand opening.

"We took a photo of Felipe," he said. "He was riding on the burro with a painting under his arm. He had a big mustache and an old Mexican hat and he was like delivering a painting and we were standing in the doorway. It was an absolutely great invitation."

James Mann of Greenville, S.C., who is working on a book about Kriegstein and her art with Bob Bell, a Las Vegas, N.M., opthamologist who's one of her collectors, said he first met Kriegstein in 1997 when she had a show at the Las Vegas (Nev.) Art Museum, where he was curator. Two years later, he said, she demonstrated her political style with two paintings and a sculpture in the museum's Holocaust exhibit.

"On the left were victims of the Holocaust — an artist with his hands chopped off, a Jewish mother and baby, a transvestite cabaret performer, a communist," he said. "These were all the kinds of people who the Nazis wanted to rid society of. The right-hand painting had a fat German general fawned over by rich women ... the Nazi power and the corrupt wealthy who catered to it, who made it possible."

The Fiberglas sculpture depicted a corpse hung on barbed wire — a re-creation of stories Kriegstein had heard as a child about prisoners shot to death and left hanging on a fence as a lesson to others not to escape. "That was a work of enormous emotional power," Mann said. "I never saw anybody walk past that work without stopping and having a long look at it."

One of Kriegstein's better-known murals is the four-part piece depicting the history of the Santa Fe judiciary on the interior of the Santa Fe Municipal Court building on Camino Entrada. The last piece portrays former Municipal Judge Tom Fiorina dismissing parking tickets in exchange for turkeys and other foodstuffs donated to the poor at Thanksgiving.

Kriegstein left Santa Fe around 2000 to live in Bernalillo, but returned a few years ago to be close to friends as her illness progressed. Dierdra McCarthy, who showed Kriegstein's work at her Eldridge-McCarthy Gallery in Sena Plaza until it closed at the end of 2005, said Kriegstein most recently had been living on Alamo Lane.

"She was essentially a social satirist whose subject matter was too frank to be called comedic," McCarthy said. "She was artistically the daughter of German expressionism. ... In the United States, she became attracted to the great Mexican muralists who became a lifelong inspiration."

McCarthy said Kriegstein's longtime exposure to toxic chemicals in her printmaking probably contributed to her cirrhosis, as well as her "small and steady" drinking.

Earlier this year, Kriegstein went to Los Angeles for an operation, but fell down an escalator in California, breaking her leg in four places. Kriegstein's son and sister brought her back to Santa Fe, where she initially improved before her health began to deteriorate rapidly last week after a visit from her son.

"I knew she would go after he left," McCarthy said. "He left last Tuesday (Aug. 25) morning. She was having trouble breathing by Tuesday afternoon and she died early Thursday (Aug. 27) morning. She was ready to go. She told me, 'Enough's enough.' ... She didn't go through any of the traumatic things you can go through with that condition. She died very sweetly, graceful to the end, the old girl."

A memorial is being planned for early October.

Kriegstein was preceded in death by her father, Wolf-Dieter Friedrich Paul Müller, and survived by her mother, Luise Henriette Müller of Berlin; sister, Christine Müller-Kettner of Berlin; son, Gandalf Gawan Riecks of New York City; ex-husband Cabeza de Vaca and stepdaughter Marla Cde Baca-Rodriguez of Los Angeles.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.