Fred (Manfred) Uhlman, was born into a Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany in 1901 and trained as a lawyer, becoming a self-taught painter while living in Paris, where he had fled following the Nazis election to power in 1933, and where he gained a reputation as a ‘naïve’ artist. In 1938 he moved to England with his aristocratic wife Diana Croft, and their Hampstead home became a centre of émigré activity. Following internment on the Isle of Man during 1940, Uhlman published a book of drawings, exhibited regularly and later published his autobiography in 1960, and an enduringly popular novel in 1977.
Fred (Manfred) Uhlman was born into a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany on 19 January 1901. He attended the local Eberhard-Ludwig Gymnasium then studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Tübingen, graduating in 1923 with a doctorate in Civil and Canon Law. In 1927 he joined the Social Democrat Party. Following the Nazi party's election to power on 5th March 1933, Uhlman moved frequently, armed with a gun before fleeing to Paris ten days later (his parents, who remained behind subsequently perished in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 and his sister Erna committed suicide en route to Auschwitz in 1944). Unable to work as a lawyer in Paris, Uhlman began painting, encouraged by his cousin, Paul Elsas, and German émigré art historian Paul Westheim. Soon celebrated as a ‘naïve’ artist for his ‘pictorial fantasies’ and ‘poetic’, ‘childlike vision’, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie le Niveau in 1936. Invited by an artist friend, Uhlman spent April to September in the Spanish fishing village of Tossa del Mar, where he met his future wife, Diana (daughter of Conservative politician and aristocrat, Lord Henry Page Croft), but upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he immigrated to Britain, penniless and barely able to say more than ‘ba ba black sheep’ (Fred Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman, 1960).
In 1938 the Uhlmans settled at 47 Downshire Hill in Hampstead where they co-founded the Artists’ Refugee Committee (assisting the flight of many artists from Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Munich Agreement) and the Free German League of Culture - ‘a German, anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist, non-party, refugee organisation’ designed 'to preserve and advance Free German culture' in the UK. In July of that year, Uhlman had a solo show at the Zwemmer Gallery, London, coinciding with his participation, as an artist 'now working in this country', in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, intended as a riposte to the Nazi 'Degenerate Art' exhibition, at the New Burlington Galleries.
On 25th June 1940 as part of the classification and internment of so-called 'enemy aliens', Uhlman was arrested and initially held in a makeshift camp in Ascot before being transferred to Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man which by this time housed around 1200 internees, most of whom were Jewish refugees and many of whom were artists, academics and musicians. Over the next six months Uhlman produced more than 150 drawings in charcoal, black and brown ink which he later divided into three categories, ‘topographical’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘attack on the church’. He considered these drawings to be ‘the best thing I’ve done during my life’, expressing not only ‘the indefinable anguish of captivity’, but also his horror of events unfolding in Europe and his belief in the culpability of the Church in the spread of anti-Semitism in Germany. In 1946 Jonathan Cape published a selection of Uhlman's drawings under the title Captivity.
Post-war Uhlman became well known as an 'Anglo-German Welshman' (Graham Samuel, The Western Mail, 11th March 1968) and was a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy. His engagement with the Welsh landscape began during the war with family holidays to Portmeirion, a village designed and conceived by architect and fellow Hampstead resident, Clough Williams-Ellis, who wrote the text for Uhlman's 1946 publication An Artist in North Wales and later transformed an old cowshed into a small house for the Uhlmans. Over the next three decades Uhlman's North Wales landscapes, alternately fiery and brooding, but always meticulous, evoked his feeling for ‘the loneliness and overwhelming grandeur of the country’, melding sketches made on site with his own impressions and an often exaggerated palette to create mysterious, otherworldly paintings. The last large scale exhibition of Uhlman’s work held during his lifetime took place at the Leighton House Museum in 1968. Two years later he had an operation to reattach his retina and in 1976 ceased painting altogether, recalling this moment as: ‘one of the saddest... in my life’ (Fred Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman, 1960). In 1960 Uhlman published his autobiography, The Making of an Englishman, the final three chapters of which concern his first experiences in England, followed in 1971 by his enduringly popular, semi-autobiographical novella, Reunion. Adapted for film by Harold Pinter in 1989 and for stage by Ronan Wilmot in 2010, Reunion tells the story of an impossible friendship between the narrator Hans Schwarz, son of a Jewish doctor, and Konradin von Hohenfels, a young aristocrat, during the rise of the Nazi regime in Stuttgart. The Uhlmans were also eager collectors of African sculpture and in 1984 donated their 72 piece collection to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.
Fred Uhlman died on 11 April 1985 in London, England. In 2018 ‘The Making of an Englishman’: Fred Uhlman A Retrospective opened at Burgh House & Hampstead Museum. Uhlman's work is held in a number of UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam, the Government Art Collection, the Imperial War Museum and the V&A.
Fred Uhlman in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Fred Uhlman]
Publications related to [Fred Uhlman] in the Ben Uri Library