Josef Heu was born in Marburg an der Drau, Austria-Hungary (now Maribor, Slovenia) in 1876 and studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in 1938, Heu and his wife, who was Jewish, were forced to flee. Immigrating to England in 1939, Heu continued to carry out sculptural commissions; examples of his work can be seen in Yorkshire at St Aidan's Church in Harehills, Leeds and at Our Lady & St Benedict's Church in Ampleforth.
Sculptor and painter Josef Heu was born on 21 February 1876 in Marburg an der Drau, Austria-Hungary (now Maribor, Slovenia). Between 1893 and 1898 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where his teachers included the renowned sculptors Edmund von Hellmer and Kaspar von Zumbusch. Heu was subsequently the recipient of the Prix de Rome enabling him to spend a year studying in Italy. He began working on public commissions and smaller-scale domestic figures and in 1902 became a member of Vienna's Hagenbund Artists' Association. He exhibited with the association on at least one occasion, displaying a large-scale sculpture entitled Befreiung-der-Quelle-Brunnen [Liberation of the Source Well] (1903) in 1907. The work was subsequently acquired by the Vienna authorities and is now located in Vienna's Stadtpark. During the First World War Heu worked as an official war artist and sculptor for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal War Press Quarters. Between 1930 and 1934 he was President of the Austrian Society of Christian Art and until 1938 he was Professor at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, where his students included Siegfried Charoux (who would become an important émigré sculptor in the UK) and Valerie Lorenz-Szabo.
Following the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) Heu's wife, who was the Jewish daughter of the Director General of the Vienna Opera House, fled to England with their two sons. Heu followed in 1939. The family was given a home by the Benedictine monks at Ampleforth Abbey, a monastery in north Yorkshire and he later lived in nearby Coxwold. While in Britain, Heu continued to work on sculptural commissions. In 1939 he participated in the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors organised by the Free German League of Culture (FGLC, a left-leaning cultural organisation supporting German-speaking refugees in the UK) and held at the Wertheim Gallery, London. In 1943 his landscapes were exhibited at the Austrian Centre's (AC, a similar national organisation set up for Austrian refugees) third annual show of Austrian artists at 34 Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge, and, in 1946, his sculpture Rufer in der Wüste [The Voice in the Wilderness] was exhibited as part of the anti-fascist touring exhibition Niemals Vergessen! [Never Forgotten!] which opened at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.
Josef Heu died in Ampleforth, England on 30 October 1952 and is buried at Our Lady & St Benedict's Catholic church. In 1963 John Heu, the artist`s son, arranged for a bronze sculpture of St John the Baptist – one of the last works his father had completed before fleeing Austria – to be placed in the garden next to the Church of St John the Baptist in Deutsch-Wagram, on the outskirts of Vienna. Examples of Heu's work can be seen in Yorkshire at St Aidan's Church in Harehills, Leeds and at Our Lady & St Benedict's Church in Ampleforth. His work is represented in the UK in the collections of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.