Hans Tisdall was born as Hans Aufseeser to a Jewish father and gentile mother in Munich, Germany in 1910. He trained at the Art Academies of Munich, Berlin and Paris before moving to London in 1930 to become a full-time artist. He worked in England as an artist and teacher, and is remembered particularly for his textile designs, book jackets and the typeface named after him, which is based on his signature brushstroke style.
Artist and designer Hans Tisdall was born Hans John Knox Aufseeser in Munich, Germany, in 1910, the son of German Jewish illustrator and graphic designer Ernst Aufseeser and Anglo-Irish artist Kathleen Isabel Tisdall. From 1928 he studied painting, sign-writing and craft skills at the Munich Academy of Fine Art and the Berlin Akademie. In 1929 he was apprenticed for a year with Moisey Kogan, a sculptor in Paris. In the same year, he contributed drawings to the German art and literary magazine Der Querschnitt. He also joined the artists' colony at Ascona in Switzerland.
In 1930 Tisdall moved to London (his father was a close friend of Frank Pick, vice-chairman of the Underground Group), where he was initially employed by an advertising agency for just three days, before leaving to become a full-time painter, his studio at 6 Fitzroy Street next door to the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. He worked on the conservation of various murals, painting the Majorca Restaurant on Brewer Street, Ciros nightclub on Panton Street, and the University Dockland Settlement on Barking Road. His first commercial commission was the dust jacket for The Blue Bed, a collection of stories published by Jonathan Cape in 1937. The following year Tisdall exhibited with The London Group, with fellow émigrés, Austrian sculptors Siegfried Charoux (1896–1967) and Georg Ehrlich (1897–1966), and German ceramicist Grete Marks (1898–1990). Tisdall continued to design for Cape for the next twenty-five years, working mostly in gouache on black paper. He received commissions from architects, German émigré Michael Rachlis, and Oliver Hill to paint decorations for the International Building Club in Park Lane, and to illustrate Hill's children's books Balbus (1944) and Wheels (1946). Paintings were difficult to sell in the 1930s, so he gradually switched media, becoming well-known as a textile designer, his designs often featuring large patterns derived from natural and historical settings. In 1940 Tisdall married Isabel Gallegos, a journalist and daughter of a Spanish painter who ran Edinburgh Weavers, a textile weaving house. Together they designed fabrics and adverts for the company, as well as murals and mosaics, collaborating for nearly two decades. They had two daughters and eventually lived in a modern flat overlooking the Thames in Chelsea.
During the 1940s, he changed his surname from Aufseeser to Tisdall, his mother’s maiden name, in an attempt to anglicise his name and avoid drawing attention to his German and Jewish heritage. Tisdall also joined the Civil Defence Corps in 1940 and worked for the Ministry of Information during the war. By 1943 he had contributed to a series of wartime adverts, Fundamentals of Civilisation for United Steel Companies. His first solo painting show was held in 1945 at London's prestigious Leger Galleries. In 1947 Tisdall became a lecturer in the School of Painting and the Textile Design Department at the Central School of Art, where he remained until 1962, as well as teaching part-time at Dartington Hall in Devon. In 1949 Tisdall produced one of his finest designs for the cover of The Art of the Book Jacket exhibition catalogue, organised by fellow émigré, Hungarian Charles Rosner at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Tisdall was also among the designers who participated in the 1951 Festival of Britain, winning the competition to design the entrance to the funfair in Battersea Park. He was also commissioned by Sir Geoffery Jellicoe to paint a mural for Plymouth Civic Centre, and, in the early 1950s, by His Highness Sheikh Sir Abdulla Al Subah, ruler of Kuwait, to create a fresco for a school dining hall. The 1:50 scale design was included in the Second Exhibition of the Society of Mural Painters, held at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in April 1953 (see Liss LLewellyn's website). In 1964, Isabel founded the company Tamesa Fabrics, to which Tisdall contributed regularly, collaborating with designers such as fellow émigré, Marianne Straub. In later years, Tisdall made long narrow paintings, so-called 'ingots', where canvas carried paint over the faces of the stretchers, adding an additional dimension. He also created painted wooden constructions in his Chelsea home, some based on the towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy. In 1978, Tisdall exhibited in London Artists from Germany at the new London building of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany; other Hitler émigrés who participated included Milein Cosman, Susan Einzig, Fred Uhlman and Hellmuth Weissenborn.
Hans Tisdall died on 31 January 1997. A typeface based on his brushstroke style, known as ‘Tisdall Script’, was created by Michael Harvey in 2001, while ‘Blesk’, loosely based on his lettering for books, was created by Ivor Brown in 2015. As design historian Alan Powers has remarked, 'Despite his long residence in England, Tisdall remained European in outlook and his sensuous enjoyment of colour [...] He cannot be easily pigeonholed as an artist, by generation, genre or nationality so that he has yet to be incorporated in a general history of his period.' (The Independent, 7 February 1997). Tisdall's work is represented in numerous UK collections including the British Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Hans Tisdall]
Publications related to [Hans Tisdall] in the Ben Uri Library