Heinz Koppel was born in 1919 in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, who following the rise of Nazism in 1933 had to flee to Prague and then to London in 1938. In England, Koppel mixed in émigré circles, studying art under Martin Bloch at the School of Contemporary Painting and Drawing, greatly influenced by the German Expressionist movement. Later Koppel moved to Wales where he co-founded the 56 Group, an artists' organisation founded with the aim of promoting Welsh Modernist art, returning to London to teach at Camberwell and Hornsey Schools of Art, then spending his final years in Wales.
Painter and art teacher, Heinz Koppel was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 29 January 1919. His parents divorced in 1930 and his father, Joachim, remarried. Koppel showed an early interest in art and had private art lessons under the painter Grigorij Oscheroff while at Secondary school. Following the rise of Nazism, Joachim, who had established business interests in Prague, took his family there for safety in 1933 and Koppel studied with the painter Friedrich (later Fred) Feigl. Koppel’s mother Paula, however, could not join them as she suffered from arthritis, and was sent to her death in a concentration camp. In 1935–36 Koppel travelled to London and trained under fellow refugee, Martin Bloch, at his School for Contemporary Painting until, after losing their German citizenship, the family became 'stateless persons', living briefly in Italy and Antwerp, before gaining Costa Rican citizenship and returning to Britian in 1938.
Koppel's father set up a zip factory on the Treforest Industrial Estate, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales in 1939, which encouraged emigre commerce, and Koppel resumed lessons with Bloch in London, where he began mixing in émigré circles. Influenced by the German Expressionist movement, his growing reputation was such that he was able to exhibit in 1942 at Jack Bilbo's prestigious Modern Art Gallery of London, together with fellow emigre artists, Jankel Adler, Oskar Kokoschka and Kurt Schwitters. After his studio in London was bombed during the Blitz in 1943, Koppel moved to Dowlais, near Merthyr Tydfil in 1944, working as an art teacher in a school for workers and their families, and establishing the Merthyr Tydfil Art Society the same year.
In his artwork, Koppel reproduced the feeling of a place rather than visual properties of landscape. The surrounding countryside and the decaying industrial areas of the south Wales valleys represented a great source of inspiration for his paintings but, as Eric Rowan noted, he ’changed the grim industrial scene into a world of colour and fantasy’ (Rowan 1979, p. 63). Koppel spread his artistic vision through classes held at the educational settlements at Dowlais and Pontypridd, prompting local artists to ‘see their native environment through the filter of a kind of magic realm’ in which ‘[p]erspective was flattened, proportions distorted, objects simplified, multiple viewpoints used and a child-like, map-like, almost naïve vision of life in the industrial valleys of south Wales [was created]’ (Rowan 1985, p. 22). Among the works produced during this period were The Engine Shed, Dowlais (1951, Leicester's Collection) and Lovers’ Lane, Dowlais Top (1955, Newport Museum and Art Gallery). Koppel’s artistic approach inspired many artists who came to attend his classes from neighbouring valleys, in particular, students from the Cardiff School of Art, including Glyn Morgan, Charles Burton, Ernest Zobole and Esther Grainger. In 1947 the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council organised a touring exhibition of work by Koppel and his students at Gwernllwyn House entitled Some Paintings from a South Wales Town. In 1949 he held his first solo exhibition in London at the Kingly Gallery. Koppel became one of the founder-members of the artists’ organisation 56 Group Wales, which was founded in 1956 to promote Welsh Modernist art and artists. The group held many exhibitions, including in Dublin, Manchester and London; Koppel’s work, characterised by ‘a touch of colourful expressionism’ was singled out in the Times (11 July 1957, p. 5).
In 1956 Koppel returned to London, teaching at Camberwell and Hornsey Schools of Art and lecturing further afield at Liverpool College. In 1958 the gallery owner, Helen Lessore, hosted the first of Koppel's three one-person shows at her Beaux Arts Gallery in London (the others took place in 1960 and 1963). In a review of the 1960 show The Tatler and Bystander noted that ‘To visit the Beaux Arts at the moment is to experience what journalists call ‘an intrusion into private grief’, for Heinz Koppel is an artist who wears his soul on his canvas. […] The agony of suffering burns in the smouldering eyes and the yellow-hot bellies of his distorted nudes. And pity or bitterness cry out form most of his other pictures’ (Roberts 1960, p. 52).
Koppel spent his final years in Wales. Heinz Koppel died in Aberystwyth, Wales, on 1 December 1980. His work is represented in the UK public domain, including in the Ben Uri Collection; Tate; New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester; Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery and National Museum of Cardiff. In 1988 an exhibition focusing on the paintings he made in the 1950s in Dowlais was held at the Gillian Jason Gallery in London. In 2009 the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin presented a retrospective. In 2017 Koppel's work was included in Finchleystrasse: German Artists in Exile in Great Britain and Beyond, curated by Ben Uri for the German Embassy London and, in 2020, in the exhibition, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art, at MOMA Machynlleth. In 2024 his work featured in Painting with an Accent: German-jewish Emigre Stories, curated by Ben Uri, once again, at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, London. (2024)
Heinz Koppel in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Heinz Koppel]
Publications related to [Heinz Koppel] in the Ben Uri Library