Hellmuth Weissenborn was born in 1898 in Leipzig, Germany, where he studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts. Following the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation, he left Germany for the sake of his Jewish wife, Edith, and fled to England via Denmark in 1939, where he was then briefly interned on the Isle of Man. During the war he produced prints reflecting his experiences as an internee and chronicling London life during the Blitz; postwar he developed his career as a wood engraver and illustrator, founding the Acorn Press in 1946 with his second wife, Lesley, and also taught at Ravensbourne College of Art from 1943-70.
Painter and graphic artist Hellmuth Weissenborn was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1898 to an artistic family. In 1917, he graduated from the Schiller-Realgymnasium, where his father was a teacher, and fought in the First World War. After returning to Leipzig, he studied philosophy, art history, and anthropology at the University of Leipzig whilst simultaneously studying typography and printmaking at the Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe (Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts). In 1924, he took up a teaching position in the Academy and was promoted in 1926, making him one the youngest professors. During this time, Weissenborn taught classes on perspective and produced a number of bookplates. Despite Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933 and subsequent anti-Semitic legislation, he was able to retain his position until 1937, as the Academy’s Nazi deputy director, who had overseen activities since 1933, was a great admirer of Weissenborn and tried to employ him for as long as possible. However, Weissenborn’s marriage to Edith Halberstam, a Jewish socialite from a rich, well-educated family of Leipzig fur traders, could not be overlooked. In April 1937, Weissenborn was dismissed.
Fleeing to Denmark alone in 1938, he rejoined Edith and their son, Florian, in England in early 1939, fearing that he would be served with his military papers if he stayed in Germany. His influential contacts such as author Victor Bonham Carter and Oliver Simon of the Curwen Press helped him cross the border and obtain a work permit, a privilege not usually afforded to refugees. However, Weissenborn could not escape the mass internment of so-called ‘enemy aliens’ and was briefly interned at Warth Mills Camp in Bury in the summer of 1940 before being transferred to Hutchinson Camp (the so-called 'artists' camp due to the high number of artist internees) on the Isle of Man, where he was interned alongside notable German artists such as Fred Uhlman, Erich Kahn, and Kurt Schwitters. Throughout his six-month internment, he remained creative and contributed to cultural life in camp, producing etchings and linocuts reflecting his experiences as an internee as well as decorative invitations to various events. He quickly became known among his fellows for his inventive artistic techniques, given the camp’s limited resources: at Hutchinson he improvised a printing press from a washing machine and used an ersatz mixture of margarine and pigment as printing ink. He was released on 26 December 1940 and returned home to London's Notting Hill. He joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1941 and produced a series of 16 linocuts on Japanese paper entitled Bombsite London which highlighted the destructive nature of war through semi-abstract depictions of bombed-out buildings. Despite his apolitical stance, Weissenborn's first public exposure in Britain was in the fundraising exhibition Artists Aid Russia held at the Wallace Collection in spring 1942; he subsequently showed in the 1943 exhibition For Liberty, organised by the left-wing Artists International Association (AIA) in the recently bomb-damaged basement of John Lewis's Oxford Street store, which had over 36,000 visitors. In the same year he also had his first solo show at the Archer Gallery, London. In 1944 Weissenborn confirmed his continued connection with the artistic community in exile, exhibiting with the Free German League of Culture (a left-leaning organisation that provided cultural activities for German speaking refugees) at their Charlotte Street Centre. In 1946 the FGLC featured Weissenborn's engravings in a small publication (Kleine Sammlung), along with contributions by notable refugee artists including Oskar Kokoschka, John Heartfield and Schwitters.
In 1943 Weissenborn began teaching drawing classes at the Beckenham School of Art and took up a part-time position at Ravensbourne College of Art in Bromley, Kent, where he remained on staff until 1970. He continued as a freelance artist during the war years, working on illustration projects for Baynard Press, Macmillan and Methuen, among others, and his first illustration commission was for John Cheveley's A Garden Goes to War (1940). Following his divorce from Edith in 1941, in 1946 he married publisher Lesley Macdonald (1911–2001) who had worked for Baynard. The couple took over the defunct Acorn Press the same year and produced limited-edition books, many of which featured woodcuts by Weissenborn. After the success of their translated edition of Grimmelhausen’s children’s book Simplicius Simplicissimus in 1964, featuring 45 engravings, they attracted the attention of John Randle, founder of the Whittington Press. Throughout the 1970s, they collaborated on more than a dozen books. In 1979, Weissenborn was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Weissenborn died in London in 1982, leaving a legacy of more than 60 illustrated volumes, including by noted English writers, ranging from Enid Blyton to Laurie Lee and Shakespeare. Weissenborn’s paintings in watercolours, oils, and pastels, as well as his woodcuts, have featured in individual and group shows in both the UK and Germany posthumously, including in Ben Uri's touring exhibition Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile In Great Britain c. 1933-45 (2009-10). A small retrospective, including prints, ex libris and other graphic works, curated by Dr Chiara Barbieri, was held at Ravensbourne at the end of 2012, to mark the publication of his biography by Dr Anna Nyburg. His graphic work is held in UK public collections including the British Museum, Imperial War Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and in his native city, Leipzig.