Hannes (Johannes) Hammerschmidt was born in Germany in 1898 but little is known of his life and career. Possibly a Hitler émigré, by the time he moved to England he had already trained as an artist and by 1939 he was living in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Paralysed on the right side of his body, and half incapacitated on the left, Hammerschmidt was nonetheless able to paint by jamming his elbow into his ribs for support, exhibiting with a number of London galleries, and receiving positive reviews in the press for his work.
Painter Hannes (Johannes) Hammerschmidt was born in Germany in 1898. Little is known of his life and career, except that when he moved to England he had already trained as an artist. Possibly a Hitler émigré, according to the England and Wales Register, by 1939 he was living in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In 1939 he showed a portrait in the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors , held at the Wertheim Gallery, London. The show was sponsored by the Free German League of Culture (FGLC), a left-leaning organisation founded in Hampstead, London in 1939 offering cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war. Paralysed on the right side of his body, and half incapacitated on the left, Hammerschmidt was nonetheless able to paint by jamming his elbow into his ribs for support. His nude drawings, characterised by a sense of vitality, were exhibited in 1935 at the Storran Gallery in London, a venue with émigré links through its German-born director, Ala Story, who ran it between 1932 and 1935. Jan Gordon, art critic of the The Observer praised Hammerschmidt’s ‘supple and massive nudes’ for their ‘sense of power that will be found 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’ (Gordon 1935, p. 16). In 1939 Hammerschmidt participated in the annual East End Academy exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The Manchester Guardian noted: ‘Among the works shown are a few that have a touch of real genius, Hannes Hammerschmidt’s powerful drawings for example […]’ (The Manchester Guardian 1939, p. 6). Of his contribution to the 1942 East End Academy exhibition, The Manchester Guardian further commented that ‘his paintings and drawings are outstandingly good, but they are also outstandingly un-English’ (The Manchester Guardian 1942, p. 2). The same year, he exhibited the paintings Bathers and Nude at the AIA (Artists’ International Association) Members' Exhibition, held at London's RBA Galleries.
Postwar, Hammerschmidt held solo exhibitions at the the Beaux Art Gallery (1951) and Reading Art Gallery (1956), the latter jointly with Basque-born sculptor Joxe de Alberdi. The Times commented dryly that both artists had ‘experimented considerably in the proliferation of modernist idioms which is the distraction of any student, but neither can be said to have discovered in such diversity any one style congenial enough to give their work a consistent sense of purpose […] Mr. Hammerschmidt is equally eclectic in his choice of styles, but he shows some pleasant Studies of Hands in graphite, and certain of his charcoal life studies convey a sense of weight and solidity with great economy of life’ (The Times 1956, p. 3). The name 'Hammerschmidt' appears in the 1947 minutes of a meeting of the Friends Committee For Refugees and Aliens (FCRA, now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Established by Quakers in 1933, the FCRA was previously known as the Germany Emergency Committee, and its aim was to help refugees from different European countries suffering persecution and affected by the turmoil of the Second World War. These included émigrés from Nazi Germany and Austria, as well as, from 1936, those fleeing the Spanish Civil War. The FCRA`s most prominent member was its committee secretary, Bertha Bracey, who in 1933 initiated the ‘Kindertransport’ initiative to bring Jewish refugee children and adolescents to the UK.
By the time of his naturalisation in 1950, Hammerschmidt was living with his wife, Margarete Therese, in Sleights, Yorkshire. Hannes Hammerschmidt died in Sleights, Yorkshire, England in 1971. The Whitby Museum holds a still life entitled Red Roses painted by Hammerschmidt in 1948.