Ernst Müller Blensdorf was born in Schleswig, Germany in 1896. After establishing himself as a teacher and sculptor in Germany, he was forced to flee after being denounced as a 'degenerate' artist, immigrating to England via Norway in 1940, where he was interned as an enemy alien in the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man until 1941. After his release he settled in Somerset, where he remained for the rest of his life, sculpting and teaching art in schools.
Sculptor and teacher Ernst Müller Blensdorf was born in Schleswig, Germany in 1896 to doctor Ernst Gustav Müller and Johanna Hedwig, neé Sorge. After his parents' divorce in 1901, he lived with his mother and siblings in Wernigerode, attending from school in Halberstadt from 1905. A rebellious teenager, he travelled to South Africa during the First World War, where he was interned for the first time. After his release, he went to Johannesburg, where he first experimented with carving, following which he briefly trained at Barmen (now Wuppertal) Art School. Afterwards, he undertook an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor with Max Bernuth and Paul Krause in Elberfeld, which he completed in 1922, before working in a furniture factory in Munich. In 1924 he married Ilse Blensdorf, daughter of German educationist Otto Blensdorf, and took the surname Müller Blensdorf. The couple had two daughters and a son. From 1926 onwards, he received numerous public contracts and established himself as a sculptor. These commissions included a war memorial in Neviges which, far from the rhetoric of war, revealed his pacifist views. In addition, he produced a figure for the tax office in Hagen, a stone cast work for the Elberfeld Telecommunications Office in Brillerstrasse, and a cast-iron relief in Oberhausen train station. From 1930, he taught at the Barmen Art School. His rejection of the National Socialist ideologies and his passionate belief in world peace put him at odds with the Nazi regime and, in 1933, he became one of the first German artists to be branded 'degenerate'. Following this, his studios in Dusseldorf and Bonn, as well as his war memorials works were destroyed by Hitler Youth.
In 1940 Blensdorf fled Germany with his wife and moved to Norway, where he had ambitions for a major international peace centre. Settling in Oslo, he made money from selling small ceramic sculptures. In April 1940, Oslo was attacked and subsequently evacuated. The following June, Blensdorf boarded the icebreaker Fridtjof Nansen, the final battleship to leave Norway in 1940, and travelled to England. The painter Kurt Schwitters was also aboard the same ship. Blensdorf’s wife declared her support to the Führer and returned to Germany. In England, Blensdorf was interned as an 'enemy alien' in the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man in June 1940, following the government's policy of mass internment of so-called 'enemy aliens'. During his time there, fellow émigré artist historian, Klaus Ernst Hinrichsen, curated two art exhibitions, one in September 1940 and the second held two months later featuring, among others, Blensdorf’s relief panels carved on mahogany salvaged from a piano. In August 1940, Blensdorf and other interned artists (including Schwitters, Paul Hamann, Siegfried Charoux and Frederick Solomonski) signed the now famous letter published in the New Statesman and Nation, ‘asking our British colleagues and friends and all those interested in Art to help us […] Please bring your influence to bear on the Advisory Committee and restore to us – all refugees from Nazi oppression – the one thing no artist can live and work without: FREEDOM’ (p. 186).
Blensdorf was eventually released in April 1941 as a result of support from the Royal Academy of Arts and the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Professor Koht. In London, Blensdorf was a member of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) and the Ohel Club, a group founded in 1943 and active for a year, open to Jewish artists and intellectuals. After his release, he took part in the Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings, organised jointly by the FGLC and the Artists International Association (AIA) in 1941. Blensdorf settled in Bruton, Somerset, where he bought Sheephouse Old Farmhouse and restored the house and garden, renaming it 'Gladen'. In 1948 he became a naturalised British subject. Blensdorf remained in Somerset with his second wife for the next 35 years of his life, teaching at a number of local schools, including the Hall School, Bratton Seymour, and King's School, where he established the art department. He also continued to sculpt, using local Somerset elm as his main material, and developing his style from the early totemic and monumental to free-flowing abstraction.
Blensdorf also produced a number of church sculptures, including Resurrection Christ (1945, Glastonbury) and Angel II (1958, Liverpool). In 1969 he was awarded an International Arts Guild Gold Medal in Belgium for his semi-abstract Nightclub Dancer. Blensdorf deliberately cut all ties with his native Germany and even instructed his children to say they were Norwegian. Despite his success, Blensdorf remained outside the mainstream art world and has only recently received wider recognition. Ernst Blensdorf died in Somerset, England in June 1976. In 2008 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at King's School, showcasing 200 pieces by Blensdorf and marking the largest collection of his work to ever be publicly exhibited. His work has also been included in more recent exhibitions, such as Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art at the Royal West of England Academy in 2019. In the UK public domain, Blensdorf’s archive is held by the South West Heritage Trust and his art is held in several public collections, including Southampton City Art Gallery, Royal West of England Academy, Bruton Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum.