Hilde Goldschmidt was born into a Jewish family in Leipzig, Germany in 1897 and trained in book design at the Academies of Fine Arts in Leipzig and Dresden, where she afterwards joined Oscar Kokoschka's master classes. She travelled extensively during the 1920s then returned to Germany until Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, when she moved to Kitzbühel, Austria. Following the Anschluss (Nazi Annexation of Austria) in 1938, she fled to England and from 1942–47 was part of the Langdale group of émigrés centred on fellow refugee artist Kurt Schwitters in the Lake District, before eventually returning to Austria in 1950.
Painter and printmaker Hilde Goldschmidt was born into a Jewish family in Leipzig, Germany on 9 July 1897; her family's circle included the Expressionist painters Marianne Werefkin and her partner Alexei Jawlensky, and the writers Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann. In 1914 Goldschmidt trained in book design in Leipzig and at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Dresden Academy of Fine Arts), afterwards designing stage sets in her home city for Strindberg's A Dream Play and Lichnowsky's A Game of Death in 1919. In the same year, after the Academy opened its painting classes to women she became one of the earliest to enroll and was initially taught by Otto Hettner, before she became one of Oskar Kokoschka’s four master pupils from 1920-23 and was strongly influenced by his sense of composition and colour (Vinzent, 2006, p. 51). Upon Kokoschka's departure and the dissolution of the class, she left for New York, where she participated in a group exhibition at the New Gallery. From 1926–29 she lived in France, studying in Paris, where she rented a studio in Montparnasse, and summering in the South, where she visited Dr Gachet’s son to view his private collection of Van Goghs, before finally, moving to Italy and settling in Capri. After returning to Germany, she held her first large exhibition in December 1932 at the Galerie Caspari, Munich.
Following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, Goldschmidt left Germany for Kitzbühel in Austria, drawn by the Tyrolean landscape which inspired her painting, and exhibited at the Galerie Wuerthle, Vienna in 1934. After the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) in 1938, she and her mother sought refuge in England the following spring, earning a meagre living making and selling ‘handicrafts’. In 1940 Goldschmidt was briefly employed in a shoe factory, but after visiting Kokoschka (now also a refugee in Britain) in Cornwall in summer 1941 (Görner, 2020), she resumed painting and in 1942 settled in the Lake District, moved by 'the grandeur of the scenery' (Ben Uri exhibition catalogue 1950). There she met fellow German refugee artist and ‘Merz’ collagist Kurt Schwitters, whom she probably introduced to the dancer Rudolf von Laban; both became part of the Langdale Estate group of émigrés, which also included the philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon, supported by local patron Richard Hull, and befriended local printmaker Gwyneth Alban. In 1945 Stapledon's daughter Agnes commissioned Goldschmidt to paint her father's portrait, which she completed in 1948. She also introduced Schwitters to Mr. Pierce, the farmer whose barn became the home for his final Merzbarn collage. Goldschmidt's painting The Sphinx (1948, Tate), which employs her characteristic bold, rich palette and Expressionistic style, was her first to combine self-portaiture and landscape. Emigrée gallerist Annely Juda commented that Goldschmidt 'saw herself a little bit as a 'Sphinx' in front of the Lake District landscape, as she was an unknown quantity up there, living very hidden on the Langdale Estate and in the middle of a wood she painted in a square hut, almost like an air-raid shelter, and that is where Schwitters found her one day and where their friendship began' (cited Tate website). In autumn 1949 Goldschmidt's Lake District body of work was exhibited at Gibbs Bookshop in Manchester.
In 1950, following the death of her mother, Goldschmidt returned to her Kitzbühel house and studio, held exhibitions in Munich and Basel, and received an honorary Professorship from the Austrian President. Her first solo London exhibition (which included her portrait of Stapledon) took place at Ben Uri Gallery in 1959, following her participation in Ben Uri’s Annual Exhibition in 1958. She continued to experiment, embracing abstraction in the 1960s and later in that decade, following her first visit to Israel in 1968, she produced a group of coloured monotypes which she exhibited at Annely Juda in 1969. There were further exhibitions at Abbot Hall Art Gallery (and tour, 1973), the Künstlerhaus, Vienna (1975), Camden Arts Centre, London (1976), and the Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck (1977). Aged 75, she wrote to Prague-born émigré art historian J. P. Hodin, 'I am a late flower. The experience of painting and the creative urge is stronger now than it was when I was thirty or forty’ (cited Leicester Art Gallery website). Hodin published his English-edition monograph on Goldschmidt in 1976 and her work was included in his 75th birthday tribute exhibition of Twentieth-century German and Austrian Art at the Goethe Institute, London in 1980.
Hilde Goldschmidt died in Kitzbühel, Austria on 7 August 1980. Her work has featured posthumously in many exhibitions exploring the émigré context in Britain and Austria at venues including Ben Uri Gallery, London (1996 and 2017), Kulturgeschichtiches Museum, Osnabrück (2001); Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (2003 and 2019), RLB-Kunstbrücke, Innsbruck (2005), and the German Embassy London (2018). Goldschmidt’s work is held in UK collections including Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; the Ben Uri Collection; the German Expressionist Collection at Leicester Art Gallery; and Tate, as well as in Austria and Germany. Her niece was the German émigrée ceramicist Brigitte Goldschmidt (Brigitte Appleby), who later formed Briglin pottery with Eileen Lewenstein.
Hilde Goldschmidt in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Hilde Goldschmidt]
Publications related to [Hilde Goldschmidt] in the Ben Uri Library