Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Joseph Deliss art restorer

Joseph Deliss was born Josef Karl Delitz in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1917. From 1933 he worked as a restorer in his native city; however, as the Nazi regime threatened Austria (culminating in the Anschluss (annexation) in March 1938), he fled to London with his parents (his father was the painter, Leo Delitz) because of his wife's Jewish heritage. In London, Deliss exhibited with the Free German League of Culture, Austrian Centre and Artists’ International Association, among other organisations; after the war, he was mainly occupied as a freelance restorer for the National Gallery in London and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as for distinguished private clients.

Born: 1917 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 1969 Brill, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938

Other name/s: Josef Karl Delitz, Josef Delitz, Joseph Delitz, Joseph Ch Delitz


Biography

Art restorer and landscape painter Joseph Deliss was born Josef Karl Delitz in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1917, the son of the painter Leo Delitz. After studying at the Vienna Academy and practising as a landscape painter, he was apprenticed to the Viennese artist, art historian and picture restorer, Erich Wagner. In 1933 he began working as a restorer in Vienna.

As the anti-Semitic Nazi regime encroached on Austria in 1938, Deliss fled to London with his father, given the Jewish heritage of their respective wives. In 1939, Deliss participated in the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors held at the Wertheim Gallery in London, under the auspices of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC, a politically inspired organisation offering cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war). During the Second World War, Deliss served in the army as a glider pilot. He was also a member of the Austrian Centre (AC, a cultural and social association founded in London in 1939 by Austrians seeking refuge from Nazi Germany), and participated in its Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings & Sculptures held at Foyle's Gallery in London in September 1945. In 1948 he participated in the Artists' International Association (AIA) exhibition Painters Under 30 and in 1950 in its group exhibition, with Andre Bicât, Louis James and Alan Reynolds, among other exhibitors. (The Artists' International Association was one of the largest anti-fascist and pacifist artistic organisations operating in Europe in the interwar period, of which Deliss was also a member.)

After the war, Deliss worked as a private restorer in London and Oxford, changing his name from Delitz to Deliss, and becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1947. In 1949–53 he worked for the National Gallery, where he cleaned, among other pictures, David Teniers’ Peasants at Archery, Hendrick Avercamp’s Scene on the Ice and Bartolomeus van der Helst’s Man in Black. After the death of his colleague and fellow Austrian émigré restorer, Sebastian Isepp, in 1954, Deliss worked for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and also for local colleges and the university, cleaning the painted ceiling of Trinity College Chapel, Anton Raphael Mengs’s altarpiece Noli me tangere at All Souls College, and paintings at Christ Church. Deliss' private clients included Lord Plymouth and the Duke of Marlborough. Deliss died in Brill in Buckinghamshire, England in 1969. Three portraits by Deliss were sold at Chiswick Auctions in June 2018.

Related books

  • Max Deliss, 'My Father and the Ashmolean', Ashmolean, No. 72, Autumn 2016, pp. 28-29
  • Adrian Clark, British and Irish Art, 1945–1951: from War to Festival (London: Hogarth Arts, 2010) p. 121
  • Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain, 1933–1945 (Weimar/Kromsdorf: VDG Verlag, 2006), pp. 36, 254, 268, 282, 295
  • Ulrik Runeberg, 'Immigrant Picture Restorers of the German-speaking World in England from the 1930s to the Post-war Era' in Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity (Amsterdam, 2005) pp. 339-371
  • James Byam Shaw, 'Obituary', The Times, 31 May 1969

Related organisations

  • Artists' International Association (member)
  • Ashmolean Museum (art restorer)
  • Free German League of Culture (exhibitor)
  • National Gallery (art restorer)
  • Vienna Academy of Fine Art (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Group exhibition, Artists' International Association (1950)
  • Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings & Sculptures, Foyle's Gallery, London (1945)
  • Painters Under 30, Artists' International Association (1948)
  • First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors, Wertheim Gallery (1939)
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Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joseph Deliss]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Joseph Deliss] in the Ben Uri Library