Hannes (Johannes) Hammerschmidt was born in Vienna, Austria in 1898. He initially trained as an architect, studying in Vienna and Munich, before turning to art, in spite of paralysis on the right side of his body. Fleeing Nazism, he left Berlin for Paris in 1933, moving to England in 1935.
Painter and draughtsman Hannes (né Johannes) Hammerschmidt was born into a (probably) Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1898; his father Johannes was court calligrapher to Emperor Franz Joseph. At the age of six, Hannes developed polio, suffering permanent paralysis in his right arm and hand; longing to draw, he taught himself with a piece of chalk fastened to the end of a stick, later learning to press his elbow into his ribs for support. After initially training as an architect in Vienna and Munich, he turned to art. Hammerschmidt’s earliest extant artworks date to 1928: figurative, predominantly portraits and nudes, his works on paper are Expressionist in style, with thickly drawn black outlines, demonstrating the influence of Kathe Kollwitz and Egon Schiele, his paintings move between post-Impressionism and Cubism, and he later embraced abstraction. He signed his works with a stylised monogram, incorporating his initials and the date, and kept a detailed register of his exhibition history and sales between 1928 and 1951.
After his marriage (year unknown) to Tess (née Margarete Therese Menderschausen), the couple lived in style in Berlin, where Hammerschmidt also exhibited. Following Hitler's accession to the German Chancellorship in 1933, they fled to Paris, where their daughter, Ruth, was born in September 1934. In 1933, Hammerschmidt exhibited works including a portrait of theatre director Max Reinhardt’s wife at Bernheim-Jeune, one of Paris’s oldest and most prestigious galleries. This was followed, in November 1934, by an exhibition of drawings at the avant-garde Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms, praised for their skill and pathos in numerous Parisian journals including Art et Decoration (Janvier 1935).
The family moved to Hampstead, north London, an area densely settled by German-speaking émigrés in March 1935 and in April Hammerschmidt held an exhibition of nude drawings at Viennese émigré art dealer Ala Story’s Storran Gallery, opened by Baron Frankenstein. Interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, as an artist with an established ‘international reputation’, Hammerschmidt commented, ‘Since nobody realises that my works are produced by a man with only half an arm, I am quite satisfied to be as I am’ (Daily Telegraph, 9 April 1935). Jan Gordon praised his ‘supple and massive nudes’ for their ‘sense of power […] lacking from many an artist in full control of all his limbs. Even more miraculous are the smaller nude studies, traced only in an apparently swift sensitive line’ (The Observer, 14 April 1935, p. 16).
In 1939 Hammerschmidt showed a portrait in the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors, sponsored by the Free German League of Culture at the Wertheim Gallery, London. In the same year, his drawings at the annual East End Academy exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery were praised for ‘a touch of real genius’ (Manchester Guardian 1939, p. 6). He exhibited alongside fellow German and Austrian refugees at the 1940 Artists’ International Association exhibition and in 1942, showed his paintings Bathers and Nude at the AIA Members' Exhibition at London's RBA Galleries. Although in 1941, most of Hammerschmidt’s early work, stored in his London studio, was destroyed during the Blitz, his paintings and drawings at the 1942 East End Academy exhibition, were commended as both ‘outstandingly good’ and ‘outstandingly un-English’ (Manchester Guardian 1942, p. 2).
By 1939 the family had moved to the North Riding of Yorkshire, staying briefly in a refugee hostel established by Tess’ sister, Martha, but soon moving to a modest labourer’s cottage, in Sleights, Yorkshire, shared with another couple. Their Austrian-Jewish friend Hilda Monte (née Hilde Meisel 1914–1945), socialist, journalist and spy, also lodged with them, as recounted in her memoir Unser Dorf (Our Village); she was later shot trying to cross the Austrian-Swiss border in April 1945. In 1947 Hammerschmidt was named in the minutes of the Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens (formerly the Germany Emergency Committee), established by the Quakers in 1933 to assist wartime refugees; he was naturalised in Britain in 1950.
Hammerschmidt’s last solo exhibition at the Beaux Art Gallery, London in 1951 included a comprehensive display of his surviving works from the early charcoal "Oppressed” (1933) to his portrait of actress Clare Bradley (1951) and was reviewed in the Yorkshire Post, the Leeds Mercury, the Whitby Gazette and the Sunday Chronicle. After 1951, due to the deterioration of his condition, Hammerschidt was unable to work, but in 1956 held a joint exhibition with Basque refugee sculptor Joxe de Alberdi at Reading Art Gallery. The Times regretted that both artists had ‘experimented considerably in the proliferation of modernist idioms’, their diversity negating ‘a consistent sense of purpose’. Nevertheless, they admired Hammerschmidt’s ‘pleasant Studies of Hands in graphite’, and ‘certain of his charcoal life studies [that] convey a sense of weight and solidity with great economy of life’ (The Times, 16 October 1956, p. 3).
Hannes Hammerschmidt died in Bourne, Lincolnshire, England in 1971. In the UK his work is held in Whitby Museum.