Henry Edion was born into a family of French and Jewish origin in Vienna, Austria in 1905. During the Second World War, he was held in French concentration camps, where he was encouraged to paint by fellow prisoner and German Expressionist painter, Gert Wollheim. Postwar, he worked in many countries, including Indo-China, Australia and America, eventually moving to England in 1962, where his artwork, influenced by Surrealism and the threat of nuclear war, was exhibited by the Arts Council, Ben Uri and Crane Kalman Gallery.
Painter and draughtsman Henry Edion was born Heinrich Edelstein in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1905 into a family of French and Jewish origin. During the Second World War, he was held in concentration camps in France over a four year period, where he was encouraged to paint by fellow prisoner and artist, Gert Wollheim, a German expressionist painter later associated with the development of the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] style of painting.
After the end of the war, Edion studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He also lived and worked in Indo-China and Australia (until 1955), Italy, France, Canada and America, before eventually settling in London in 1962 due to his wife's illness. In England, he became a British subject and changed his first name to its anglicised form, Henry. His abstract work, much influenced by Surrealism and the threat of nuclear war, was exhibited by the Arts Council, Ben Uri and, from 1962, at the Crane Kalman Gallery, established by Hungarian émigré gallerist, Andras Kalman. Art critic Nigel Gosling, reviewing Edion's first exhibition at Crane Kalman wrote: 'Skipping with skill in [Klee's] footsteps over the shaking sands of whimsicality, Henry Edion combines playfulness and poetry in his pastel and gouache fantasies' (Gosling 1962, p. 29). The Times, although noting that his gouaches 'came nowhere near Klee`s formal variety or technical invention', commented that his 'imagination has […] the right blend on fantasy, poetry and wit. One recognises the detached, other-worldly of its images […] A delicate technical control makes the shapes seem to have floated on to the paper […] Birds and figures, suns, moons and whimsical horses are enclosed in a private dream which is wholly unpretentious in its appeal but far from naïve' (The Times 1962, p. 4). On 27 April the same year, the BBC broadcast an interview between presenter, Polly Elwes, and Edion for the influential documentary series 'Tonight'; Elwes also spoke to artist Cathy Gilmour, whose drawings had been the basis and inspiration for paintings by Edion.
Henry Edion died in west London, England in 1987. Crane Kalman Gallery hosted two posthumous exhibitions: Henri Edion: Images of a Central European Misfit (1993) and Henri Edion: An Artist’s Life (1995). In 1994 Ben Uri Art Gallery held a selling exhibition of Edion’s works on paper, fulfilling his wish that his works should be sold posthumously to raise money to plant trees in Israel. More recently his work in the Ben Uri Collection has featured in Paintings Drawings and Sculpture by Austrian Artists Whose Lives Were Disrupted by the Holocaust, Ben Uri Gallery (1996) and Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2018). Henry Edion's work is represented in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, British Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum.
Henry Edion in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Henry Edion]
Publications related to [Henry Edion] in the Ben Uri Library