Edmond Kapp was born in Islington, north London to a family of German-Jewish origin in 1890. During the First World War, he produced character portraits to entertain fellow soldiers, subsequently becoming a renowned caricaturist and portrait artist, his likenesses of musicians, literary figures and politicians ranging from subtle academic drawings to incisive interpretations. Kapp published many books of his portraits and exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad; among his many notable sitters were international figures of the day, including Richard Strauss, Albert Einstein and Picasso.
Artist and caricaturist Edmond Xavier Kapp was born in Islington, north London in 1890 to a family of wine merchants of German-Jewish origins. While studying medieval and modern languages at Christ's College, Cambridge University, he began to draw and, after graduating in 1913, he held a small exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. During this time, Kapp’s style was strongly influenced by caricaturist Max Beerbohm whom Kapp had met while he was a student. Until the outbreak of the First World War, he contributed to the Daily News and the Onlooker, among other publications. In 1914, Kapp enlisted as a subaltern with the 11th West Sussex Regiment. While in the trenches, he produced character portraits to entertain fellow soldiers, but also made serious drawings depicting the devastation surrounding him. In 1919 Kapp sent some of his caricatures to Beerbohm, who enthusiastically suggested he hold an exhibition. This resulted in a small solo show at the Little Art Rooms in the Adelphi in London. The exhibition was an instant success and Beerbohm wrote a laudatory introduction to the catalogue. The same year, Kapp published his first book, Personalities, reviewed by Virginia Woolf in the essay ‘Pictures and Portraits’: ‘Oh to be silent! Oh to be a painter! Oh (in short) to be Mr. Kapp’ (McNeillie 1986, p. 166).
Kapp, however, felt that he lacked some formal academic art training, and applied to the Slade School of Art, but Professor Tonks refused to accept him on the grounds that ‘if taught, he would lose such originality as he had and gain little by way of compensation’ (Kapp 2003, p. 75). Kapp subsequently tried, without success, to enter the Vienna Academy of Arts. Back in London, in 1922 he married Yvonne Meyer, from whom he separated in 1930. Although Kapp maintained a reputation as a caricature artist, he disliked to be described as such (Beddoes 2013, p. 43) and refused the traditional newspaper work of the caricaturist because he wanted to retain control over his subjectmatter. After his second solo exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries in 1922, he secured several significant patrons, including Arthur Mayger Hind, art historian and Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Kapp was eventually accepted as a pupil at the Lipinski School of Art in Rome in 1923. In order to make more money, he increased the output of his caricature portraits, through either hand-copying his works, or by producing limited editions of prints. In 1932 Kapp married the Russian sculptor and painter Polia Chentoff, who tragically died the following year of a brain tumour. Kapp never identified with any artistic group and built his career independently. This stylistic and ideological independence enabled him to receive a range of prestigious commissions, such as the 25 lithographs for the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery, of leading figures at the League of Nations (1934–35), and a similar set for UNESCO (1946–47). An official war artist during the Second World War, in 1940–41 he made a series of drawings entitled Life Under London, some of which are now part of the Imperial War Museum Collection. In 1942, the London Philharmonic Orchestra asked Kapp to make 70 drawings of the orchestra’s activities and personalities. Although Kapp throughout his career also produced paintings, turning to abstraction in the 1960s, he was most well known for his skills as a draughtsman. His portraits of musicians, literary figures and politicians ranged from subtle academic drawings to incisive caricatures. The New Statesman observed that his ‘penetrating, though never cruel, studies, reveal not only the personality of the sitters but also that of the artist. His work is always worm and sympathetic’ (Vicky 1961, p. 681). Kapp also showed with Ben Uri from the 1940s into the 1970s, featuring in the gallery's broad Cartoon and Caricature Exhibition in 1975, alongside a range of Jewish notables, such as Vicky and Harry Blacker (Nero), towards the end of his life.
Among Kapp's many notable sitters were Richard Strauss, Albert Einstein, D.H. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, Prince Edward (Duke of Windsor, later King Edward VIII) and Walter Sickert. Picasso offered to sit for Kapp and for no other artist, as he claimed that Kapp would not be ‘influenced’ by him (Porteus 1961, p. 5). James Bolivar Manson, the former director of the Tate Gallery, described Kapp in The Times as a ‘distillateur of the perfume of personality [...] he extracts the quintessential expressions of persons. His drawing is a concrete expression of the soul’ (Beddoes 2013, p. 45). Edmond Kapp died in London, England in 1978. Kapp had many solo shows in London and provincial galleries as well as on the continent, in Canada and the USA. In 1961 the Whitechapel Art Gallery displayed 310 of Kapp’s works in a retrospective. His work is represented in many UK public collections. A group of 243 portrait caricatures was purchased by the Barber Institute, Birmingham, in 1969–71. His work is also held at the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery, London, and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, among others. Kapp’s younger sister Helen Babette Kapp was also an artist and a pioneering art gallery director, who often championed émigré artists.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edmond Kapp]
Publications related to [Edmond Kapp] in the Ben Uri Library