Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1886 Sereth, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary (now Siret, Romania)

Died: 1954 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938

Other name/s: Karol Schenker

Biography

Photographer, illustrator and painter Karl Schenker was born Karol Schenker into a Jewish family in Sereth, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Siret, Romania) in 1886. Schenker completed his artistic training at the Technical University of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) before moving to Munich in 1910 where he ran a photography studio with the German photographer Eduard Wasow. Schenker settled in Berlin the following year and opened his own studio on the cosmopolitan Kurfürstendamm. Hailed by the German press as the 'the born portraitist of elegant people' as well as the ‘stage director of women’s heads’ (Halwani, 2016), Schenker gained a formidable reputation in the 1910s and 1920s for his painstakingly retouched society portraits. He was particularly skilled at making his female sitters look beautiful, commenting that ‘with the former, one tries to highlight their most favourable features, and with the latter [i.e. men] their most distinctive’ (Halwani, 2016). Spurred on by the mass dissemination of silent movie star portraits, Schenker’s images attest to a growing media awareness. His works bring to light the beginnings of a passion for the public image, for pictorial beautification seen taken to extremes in a series of photographs of wax mannequins created and dressed by Schenker.

In 1913, Schenker began teaching at the Lette-Verein, an educational organisation for the applied arts, as well as privately in his studio, where his students included Madame D’Ora and Arthur Benda. In 1915 he married the Russian chemist Olga Labenskaja, the subject of many of his photographs in this period and began working for Ullstein Verlag, a Jewish-owned firm which employed many Jewish photographers and regularly published his photographs in the illustrated women’s magazine Die Dame. In 1923, Schenker married for a second time, immigrating with his new wife, Lilli Behrend, to the United States two years later. Settling in New York he worked as an illustrator and portrait painter, reverting to the use of his birth name, Karol Schenker. In November 1930 he returned to Berlin and enjoyed great success as a fashion photographer, resuming work for Ullstein Verlag, who published his fashion photographs in the monthly magazine UHU, as well as in Die Dame.

Upon Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, the publishing house was ‘aryanised’ and UHU was discontinued. Schenker found it increasingly difficult to find work in Berlin and, in 1936, he travelled to London to marry his third wife, Ruth Elisabeth Engel (whom he had first met in 1932 when she came to work in his studio), as Nazi racial policy made it illegal for a Jew to marry a Christian in Germany. In 1938, after Schenker was expelled from Nazi Germany for a traffic offence, he and Ruth immigrated to England, settling in Putney in south London, where they were joined several months later by her son Hans-Günther Engel. The week before the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, Schenker opened his first London studio in a John Nash town house on Regent Street in the elegant district of Mayfair, specialising in fashion, portrait and colour photography as well as retouching and drawing. His sitters included: the Australian prime minister John Curtin, the American politician Daniel B. Strickler, the British racing-car driver Jacqueline Evans, and the British socialite Moyra Kenny. In 1939 he hired German-Jewish émigrée Inge Ader as his photographic assistant (she stayed for a year before opening her own studio with fellow German-Jewish émigrée Anneliese Bunyard) and in 1942 he relocated the studio to Dover Street, the same year in which his painting,Mother and Child, 'a picture certain to attract noise', was included in a group exhibition of War Portraits, held by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters at Burlington House (Halwani, 2016). Schenker also frequently received advertising commissions from cosmetic companies through which he was able to secure his young step son a job with leading British fashion designer, Norman Hartnell, best known for his work with the royal family.

In 1948 Schenker was granted British citizenship. In his last years his reputation faded. He died in 1954 in Putney Hospital, London, his death unreported by either the English or the German press. More recently, however, Schenker's work has undergone a process of rediscovery. In 2013 his mannequin photographs were selected by American contemporary artist, Cindy Sherman and included in an exhibition at Pinacoteca Agnelli during the Venice Biennale. In 2014 the Museum Ludwig in Cologne purchased around 100 of Schenker’s photographs and, in 2016, staged the first retrospective of his work, Master of Beauty: Karl Schenker's Glamorous Images. In the UK, three examples of his work, photographs of the Austrian-American soprano singer and actress Fritzi Massary, are held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Related books

Miriam Halwani ed., Master of Beauty: Karl Schenker's Glamorous Images (Cologne: Buchhandlung, Walther König, 2016)
Michael Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin: University of Texas, 2015)

Public collections

Related organisations

Lette-Verein, Berlin (teacher)
Ullstein Verlag (freelance photographer)

Selected exhibitions

Master of Beauty: Karl Schenker's Glamorous Images, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2016)
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Venice Biennale (2013)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Karl Schenker]