Douglas Glass was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1901 and immigrated to London in 1928. Initially working as a journalist, he mixed with European avant garde artists and writers, and later studied at the Central School of Arts, London, producing abstract paintings before turning to photography in the early 1940s. As a talented portraitist, he had many modernist artists as sitters, including Picasso, Max Ernst, Ossip Zadkine, Alberto Giacometti, Serge Chermayeff, and Walter Gropius, the latter two who also migrated to Britain in the 1930s; he also helped to document concentration and displaced persons' camps in 1945-46.
Photographer Douglas Glass was born in Auckland, New Zealand on 5 June 1901. He led a bohemian life in New Zealand – working as a sheep shearer, labourer and menswear salesman – before immigrating to London in 1928. He initially worked as a journalist from 1929–32 in Europe, mixing with avant garde artists and writers in Britain and France. He met George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, among others, and his interviews of London literary figures were published in the Christchurch Sun. Glass also befriended artists Julian Trevelyan and Henry Moore (an article which he wrote on Moore appeared in the magazine The Australian Artists in 1948) and associated with other New Zealand-born writers and artists in London, among them the painter James Boswell. In Paris, Glass became acquainted with prominent modernist artists such as Constantin Brânçusi, Ossip Zadkine and Alberto Giacometti, as well as Man Ray. As Leonard Bell has observed in his book Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand it is significant that none of the sitters were French, but displaced from elsewhere; Glass also established a close friendship with the Australian painter Frances Hodgkins, as ‘both felt we were exiles a bit’ (Bell 2017, p. 225). He subsequently enrolled at the Central School of Arts in London and for some years sought to establish himself as a painter, initially producing figurative works and then turning to abstraction in a European constructivist mode, inspired by Mondrian, Ben Nicholson and the continental 1932 Abstraction-Création artists, especially the French painter Jean Hélion. In 1933 Glass submitted one work to the avant garde group Unit One for their exhibition, but it was rejected on the grounds that it pastiched Hélion. Five years later Glass’ abstractions were exhibited in the group show Towards a Synthesis: Abstract Painting by Nine British artists at the London Gallery. His paintings were also reproduced in important periodicals such Axis (the first and only magazine of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture in Britain the mid 1930s) and Cahiers d’Art in 1938.
In the early 1940s, Glass took up photography, buying his first camera, a Leica, from a German refugee in Camden Town. Among the photographers who assisted him in his studio were the New Zealand born Marti Friedlander and the Australian Antonia Blaxland. The work of émigré German photographer Emil Otto Hoppé was influential on Glass’ work. His first successful photo-assignment, in Brixham Harbour, Devon, was conceived as a sort of pictorial propaganda showing British people in wartime. Portfolios of his documentary photographs, on rural life and potteries featured in The Saturday Book, a well-known arts annual, during the mid-1940s. Glass also worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1945–46 at displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, his photographs contributing to make concentration camps known to the wider public across the Allied nations. In particular, Glass accompanied Canadian J. A. Edmison, one of the first UNRRA officials to enter Dachau concentration camp near Munich in May 1945. Edmison subsequently used Glass’ photographs in his public lectures when he toured through Canada and the USA in 1945–46. In the late 1950s, Glass taught photography at Maidstone College of Art in Kent.
A talented portraitist, Glass produced insightful photographic portraits characterised by careful composition and subtle illumination, mainly of people in the public eye: writers, poets, artists, architects, musician, actors, politicians, scientist and businessman, including modernist artists, such as Picasso, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Ossip Zadkine, Serge Chermayeff, and Walter Gropius (the latter two, also immigrants in London). 99 of Glass`s portraits were exhibited at the Kodak Gallery in 1953. He further made his name as photographer of the 'Portrait Gallery' that ran every week in the Sunday Times between 1949 and 1961. Primarily interested in his subjects' character, he found photography to be 'an effective visual shorthand' (Bell 2017, p. 226). In 1954 his portraits of distinguished musicians were included alongside those by other photographers (among them the Hitler émigré, Lotte Meitner-Graf) in a group show at the Royal Festival Hall.
After his retirement from professional photography, Glass returned to painting in 1961. In 1967 he donated one of his greatest possessions, the painting Orange Bush by renowned British mid-century painter, Ivon Hitchens, to the Auckland Art Gallery. He wrote to the director: ‘I was born in Auckland & thought it might be a nice gesture to leave [the painting] to the gallery in memory of my deceased wife [...] that the young people of Auckland can see a work by an artist whom I consider the greatest landscape artist living today in England & for that matter great beyond England’ (Bell 2017, p. 228). Douglas Glass died in London, England in 1978. His will stipulated that all paintings remaining in his possession be destroyed and only a few sketches survived. His photographic portraits are represented in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Douglas Glass]
Publications related to [Douglas Glass] in the Ben Uri Library