Edith Hoffmann was born into a Czech-Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1907 and raised in Germany during the 1920s. After completing her doctorate on eighteenth-century German portraiture in Munich in 1934, she moved to London. Working first as a volunteer at the British Museum, she went on to become the author of a pioneering biography of Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (1947), and the first woman editor of the 'Burlington Magazine'.
Art historian Edith Hoffmann was born into a Czech-Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1907. She was educated in Berlin, Vienna and Munich, where she gained her doctorate in 1934 with a thesis on eighteenth-century German group portraits. Hoffmann left Germany for Britain later that same year and after working as a volunteer in the Print Room of the British Museum joined The Burlington Magazine in 1939. She contributed over 150 articles, exhibition and book reviews to The Burlington over the course of six decades. Hoffmann was one of the many refugees who contributed to The Burlington shortly before and during the Second World War under the editorships of Herbert Read and Tancred Borenius. She was appointed secretary of the magazine in 1938, becoming acting editor from 1944–45, and assistant editor from 1946–50.
In 1951 she left London to accompany her husband, the Palestine-born Israeli diplomat Eliezer Yapou, on various international postings including Tel-Aviv, Brussels, New York and Jerusalem. Hoffmann's main research interests were German Expressionism and, in later years, Symbolism and its literary connections. She was the author of the first English-language monograph on Oskar Kokoschka (London, 1947) as well as articles on the Belgian artist Félicien Rops (1833–1898). She contributed to art history journals such as Apollo, Art News, Phoebus (Basle), and The Studio, as well as to The Listener, The Manchester Guardian, The New Statesman, Twentieth Century and to Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss German-language daily. Edith Hoffmann retired in the 1990s and died in Jerusalem, Israel in 2016.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edith Hoffmann]
Publications related to [Edith Hoffmann] in the Ben Uri Library