Harry Fischer was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1903 in Vienna, Austria, where he established himself as a book dealer by the mid-1930s. Following the Anschluss in 1938 he fled toZagreb, Croatia, and then to London in 1939 where, after a brief period of internment on the Isle of Man, he became one of the founders of Marlborough Fine Art in 1946, and established Fischer Fine Art in 1971. The Fischer Collection held by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London is an extensive resource, including the only complete known copy of a typescript inventory of works of art removed from German museums and art galleries in 1941-42 by the Nazi regime.
Art dealer and gallerist Harry Fischer was born Heinrich Robert Fischer in 1903 in Vienna, Austria into a middle-class Jewish family. He established himself as a book dealer and, until 1935, co-founded and ran Fischer & Berger Lang, an antiquarian bookshop in Kohlmarkt, Vienna. From 1935 until 1938 he co-owned the bookshop and publishing house Wilhelm Frick, in Graben, Vienna. It was there that he met Walter Neurath, the future co-founder (with his wife Eva) of Thames & Hudson art publishers in London. Fischer and Neurath invented the concept of book packaging, when they decided to conceive subjects for books, find suitable authors, do the design and oversee the book production, eventually offering the finished product to a publisher for distribution. Together, the two packaged a book on Prague entitled Prag: Kultur, Kunst, Geschichte (Schürer, 1935). Fischer also produced, on his own, a volume on the Vienna Philharmonic (Kralik, 1938).
Following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in 1938, Fischer fled to Zagreb, Croatia and then to London in 1939. During the Second World War, he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man in 1940 and then served in the British Army's Pioneer Corps (1940–43) alongside other Austrian and German refugees. After being briefly employed by fellow Viennese émigré Lea Bondi Jaray at her St George's Gallery in Mayfair, Fischer became one of the founders of Marlborough Fine Art in 1946, together with fellow Viennese émigré Frank Lloyd (born Kurt Levai), whom he had met in the Pioneer Corps. Fischer became a naturalised British citizen in 1947. The following year the two founders were joined by a third partner, David Somerset (from 1984, he became the Duke of Beaufort). By 1952 Marlborough was selling masterpieces of the late nineteenth century, including bronzes by Edgar Degas and paintings by Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir, as well as drawings by Constantin Guys and Vincent van Gogh. Under the guidance of Fischer, Floyd and Somerset, in the 1950s–1960s, the gallery inaugurated a series of groundbreaking exhibitions on expressionism and German modernism. This was important since, apart from the Burlington Galleries' 1938 exhibition, Modern German Art (itself a riposte to the Nazis' 1937 touring exhibition, Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art], London had had very little exposure to 20th century German and Austrian art. The gallery's 1959 exhibition, Art in Revolt: Germany 1905–1925, is perhaps the most notable of these, arguably having introduced 20th Century German art to the London art market. Fischer then established his own gallery, Fischer Fine Art, in 1971, together with his son Wolfgang. Fischer died in London in 1977 and Fischer Fine Art closed in the early 1990s when Wolfgang retired and returned to Vienna. Under Wolfgang the gallery also focussed on British (-based) artists, including David Bomberg, Leon Kossoff, Ansel Krut, and Liliane Lijn, among others (a number of whom feature in the Ben Uri Collection or who have exhibited with Ben Uri).
In 1996 Harry's widow Elfriede Fischer donated The Fischer Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A). The Collection, amassed by Fischer over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, contained 69 books, journals and exhibition catalogues published chiefly in Germany between 1900 and 1939, by or about George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Kurt Schwitters, among others, as well as reflecting the work of German publishers, writers, illustrators, typographers and designers. Important original publications relating to the history of Expressionism, Dada and the Bauhaus were also well represented. Unknown to Fischer's wife, however, the gift also included the only known complete copy of a typescript inventory of works of art removed from German museums and art galleries by the Nazi government. The two-volume list was compiled by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda [Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda] in 1941–42 and is one of the key sources on the provenance of works of confiscated Entartete Kunst. Two earlier versions of Volume 1 (A–G) are held by the Federal Archives, Berlin, and one of these includes some information about the fate of individual artworks. Until donation of the Fischer collection, it was thought that much of the information covered by Volume 2 (G–Z) was lost. Fischer's bequest thus marked a new era in crucial research relating to provenance and restitution of these artworks. Fisher's legacy was most recently reassessed in Sotheby's exhibition Brave New Visions: The Émigrés Who Transformed the British Art World, held in London in 2019, as part of the Insiders/Outsiders festival celebrating the contribution made by Hitler émigrés to British visual culture.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Harry Fischer]
Publications related to [Harry Fischer] in the Ben Uri Library