Erna Mandowsky was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany in 1906; she studied art history at the University of Hamburg under Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky. In 1934 she immigrated to England on a visa sponsored by the Warburg Institute and settled in London. During her career in England she worked for various institutions as an art historian, photographer, and film librarian, before resettling in the USA in 1973, initially teaching in Oklahoma and afterwards resettling in Seattle.
Art historian and photographer Erna Mandowsky was born into a middle-class Jewish family (her father was a pharmacist) in Hamburg, Germany in 1906. From 1923–26, she attended the innovative Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg (named after the art historian, art educator, and museum curator, Alfred Lichtwark), where she developed a strong interest in art history. She hoped to attend the Bauhaus in Dessau but, convinced that this famously progressive school of art and design was full of communists, her parents persuaded her to attend the University of Hamburg instead. There, she studied philosophy, before taking up archaeology, historical auxiliary sciences and most importantly, art history, tutored by eminent art historians Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, both associated with the eponymous, independent Warburg Institute for art-historical research. In spring 1932, Mandowsky travelled to Italy to conduct archival research for her doctoral thesis on the iconographer Cesare Ripa, supervised by Saxl. Shortly after Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in March 1933, the Warburg’s staff were prevented from lecturing and its students were dissuaded from using its research facilities. In the role of Director, Saxl accepted the invitation of an ad hoc committee to transfer the Warburg to London University, where its library, collection, and six members of its staff arrived in December 1933.
As a German Jew, Mandowsky’s situation was becoming increasingly precarious (in 1936, her father would be forced to relinquish his pharmacy to a German ‘Aryan’ and also lost his parliamentary position in Hamburg (March, 2019). In 1934, her viva was conducted by Werner Burmeister, a National Socialist recently appointed Head of Hamburg University’s art history department but, fortunately, travelling on a visa sponsored by the Warburg she was able to immigrate to England the same year, settling in London. In 1936 she retrained as a photographer at the Warburg Institute with its chief photographer and bookbinder Otto Fein (photographed by fellow refugee, Irmgard Koppel). This position almost certainly helped Mandowsky resume her art historical career, allowing her to publish her iconographical research in scholarly journals including The Burlington Magazine and Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in her spare time (March, 2019).
In December 1950 she reviewed Focus in Architecture and Sculpture (via photography) for The Burlington Magazine, written by émigré photography historian and collector Helmut Gernsheim. She nevertheless struggled to gain full-time employment and, to make ends meet, she taught German, carried out research for American scientists, and worked in factories. She also designed toys, attracting offers of permanent employment from two British companies (which she was prevented from accepting by the Ministry of Labour), but sold some of her toys to British friends. In 1939, she completed an internship in microscopic photography at a London hospital, subsequently being employed, in 1942, as a film librarian at the Aslib Microfilm Service (AMS), which filmed newspapers and magazines for the exchange of information between the Allies, and later, at the Central Medical Library Bureau (CMLB), which filmed medical magazines. She also worked as a firewatcher during the London Blitz, since, as an ‘enemy alien’, she was required to provide voluntary relief services during the war. Afterwards, she discovered that both her parents and her two sisters had perished in the Holocaust. In 1948, Mandowsky became a British citizen and was awarded the Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Fellowship by the American Association of University Women, enabling her to spend a year in Florence researching the Medici collections. Her academic career finally accelerated and, between 1949 and 1967, she taught evening classes in art history and classical archaeology in London and Oxford. She also taught briefly at Croydon College of Art in south London and at Brighton College of Art between 1964 and 1966. She continued to publish her research and, in 1963, in collaboration with the art historian Charles Mitchell, she published the first major study of Pirro Ligorio’s drawings of Roman antiquities.
In 1973, Mandowsky resettled in the USA, initially in Oklahoma, where she taught during the early 1970s at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. After her retirement she moved to Seattle, Washington and in 1980 the Seattle Art Museum published her Old Master Drawings: Seattle Art Museum Collection Guide. She maintained regular contact with the many friends she had cultivated over the years, including the émigré art historian Ernst Gombrich, with whom she remained close until his death in 2001.
Erna Mandowsky died in Seattle, USA in 2003. Examples of her photography can be found in UK public collections including the Warburg Institute, and her work was 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 [Erna Mandowsky]
Publications related to [Erna Mandowsky] in the Ben Uri Library