Adelheid Heimann was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1903. Heimann’s Jewish identity meant that living in Nazi Germany became increasingly dangerous and, in 1936, she immigrated to England, settling in London, where she worked in the photographic department of the Warburg Institute, University of London, while continuing her academic research. She also worked as a freelance photojournalist, before becoming Assistant Curator of the Warburg Institute's photography collection in 1958.
Art historian and photographer Adelheid Heimann was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1903. Heimann studied art history and German at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Bonn and, in 1926, she began a doctorate in art history at the University of Hamburg. Her doctoral thesis on the Rohan House was supervised by the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky who, amongst other members of the university’s art history department, was also associated with the Warburg Institute: an independent centre for art-historical research founded by the art historian Aby Warburg. Heimann completed her doctorate in 1930 and, when it was published in 1932, her thesis represented the first iconological study of the entire series of manuscripts attributed to the Rohan Master (Kauffmann, 1993). In 1931, Heimann conducted research in Florence and Paris whilst working as an unsalaried research assistant to Panofsky. She returned to Paris in 1933 where she spent two years lecturing on Christian iconography in the Middle Ages at the École Practique des Hautes Études (part of the Sorbonne University). Heimann returned to Berlin in 1935 and, as anti-Jewish laws prevented her from continuing with her academic career, she decided to enrol on a photographic course at the Lette-Verein’s excellent photography school for women.
Heimann’s Jewish identity meant that living in Nazi Germany became increasingly dangerous for her and, in 1936, she immigrated to England, settling in London, where she re-established her association with the Warburg Institute, which had relocated its library, collection, and six members of its staff to the city in December 1933. Supported by a Crosby Hall Residential Scholarship from the British Foundation of University Women, Heimann spent the years 1937 and 1938 researching and writing academic articles, several of which were published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (von Oertzen, 2014). In 1939, she was awarded an Aurelia Reinhardt International Fellowship which enabled her to conduct research in France (von Oertzen, 2014). That same year, she took up a post in the Warburg’s photographic department, where she worked under the institute’s chief photographer and bookbinder Otto Fein until 1941. Heimann was required to take photographs of artworks and architecture which would serve as important resources for scholars. Some of her photographs featured in the photography exhibitions organised by the Warburg during this period, most notably the ‘Indian Art’ exhibition in 1940 (Berkowitz, 2015). It has been suggested that working as a photographer enabled Heimann to continue with her art-historical research when funding was not forthcoming (March, 2019). Between 1941 and 1952, she worked as a freelance photojournalist for Picture Post, the pioneering illustrated news magazine founded by Hungarian émigré publisher Stefan Lorant, which gave employment to many Hitler émigrés during its lifetime. in 1952, one of Heimann’s rare attributed photographs featured in the British Journal Photographic Annual (Berkowitz, 2015). During the 1940s, Heimann also designed Spanish and Italian motifs for a series of faïence pots that were to be designed by the Swedish ceramic designer Gunnar Nylund for Rörstrands, one of the most famous Swedish porcelain manufacturers. The details of this commission, including how long she spent in Sweden, are unknown. For Heimann, this decade was also a period of deep personal loss, as her brother and parents died in concentration camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
Heimann became a British citizen in 1947 and, in 1955, she received a part-time appointment in the Warburg Institute’s photography collection which enabled her to resume her academic career (Kauffmann, 1993). She was promoted to Assistant Curator of the collection in 1958 (the only full-time academic appointment she ever had) and remained in this role until her retirement in 1964. During the 1960s and 1970s, Heimann not only published articles on medieval iconography, but also on iconography in contemporary art (such as her 1969 article on the monkey in the work of Pablo Picasso). Her passion for German literature also led her to publish articles on Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann in the Publications of the English Goethe Society. The 1960s also saw Heimann’s home in Barnes, south west London become a meeting place for young medievalists from abroad, and she established particularly close links with German scholars including Reiner Haussherr, Willibald Sauerländer, and Otto Karl Werkmeister (Kauffmann, 1993). She continued to give lectures at universities across the world, including in Freiburg, Jerusalem, Paris, and Santa Barbara. When Heimann died in London in 1993, she left a bequest to the Warburg Institute to enable the acquisition of books and photographs (Berkowitz, 2015). Examples of Heimann’s photography can be found in the collection of the Warburg Institute and were featured in the 2020 exhibition Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, with an accompanying catalogue by Carla Mitchell and John March.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Adelheid Heimann]
Publications related to [Adelheid Heimann] in the Ben Uri Library