Olga Lehmann was born in Catemu, Valparaiso, Chile to a French-German father and Scottish mother in 1912. In 1921 she came to England and in 1929 won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1934 and embarking upon a successful career which encompassed the worlds of graphic art, portraiture and mural painting. In the postwar period, her work focused on costume and set design for the film industry before she returned to painting and exhibiting in later life, based in East Anglia.
Painter, graphic artist, costume and set designer, Olga Lehmann was born Louise Olga Mary Lehmann in Catemu, Valparaiso, Chile on 2 October 1912. Her father was a French-German mining engineer and her mother the orphaned daughter of a Scottish minister. Lehmann was educated by an English governess and then sent to an American college in Santiago.
In 1921 she came to England, where she attended Dulwich High School. She was naturalised as a British subject in 1928. The following year, as a precocious 17-year-old, she won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London where she studied under Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe, who was responsible for her first professional commission, painting the scenery for Rossini's comic opera La Cenerentola, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Covent Garden. She also studied portraiture under Allan Gwynne-Jones; then, in her final year, she discovered the theatrical design course taught by Vladimir Polunin (who had been Diaghilev's main scene painter at the Ballets Russes). She was joint winner of the Slade's celebrated Figure Painting Prize in 1931 and also won prizes for Composition and Theatrical Design. In 1933 she contributed a portrait to the London Portrait Society exhibition which was singled out in The Times. After graduating in 1934, she settled in Hogarth Studios in Charlotte Street in London's Fitzrovia and embarked upon a long-lasting and successful career which encompassed graphic art, portraiture and mural painting. After showing with The London Group and the New English Art Club, in 1937 her first solo exhibition inaugurated the newly opened Little Gallery on New Burlington Street, where she showed mural panels (for which she employed ‘Stic B Paint’, a new medium invented in France for mural decoration), sketches, pen and ink drawings and portraits. The Observer art critic Jan Gordon praised her ‘alert and observant pen sketches’ and noted that ‘her flow of happy invention, of an easy fluence proper to her age comes to a head in the larger work Paris 1937 which amusingly epitomises the exhibition’ (Gordon 1937, p. 12). This work, alongside other exhibits, was reproduced in The Sketch in November of the same year. Lehmann’s exhibition was also singled out in The Times (18 March 1938, p. 21). The inter-war period, dominated by Art Deco styling, saw mural painting enjoying a huge renaissance and she received numerous commissions to design and paint decorative schemes for hotels, restaurants and theatres. The modernist architect Wells Coates recommended her to clients and her work was included in major surveys of decorative painting during this period. In 1939 Lehmann's work featured in the exhibition, Mural Painting in Great Britain, Tate Gallery, London.
During the Second World War Lehmann was permitted by the War Office to make sketches of bomb damaged London, which included air raid shelters and Air Raid Precautions (ARP) personnel but, at the height of the Blitz in 1940, her studio-flat in Hampstead was itself destroyed by a bomb and much of her early work was lost. In 1941 she worked on set designs for the morale boosting film Hi, Gang!. She was also involved with decorative schemes for government offices and munitions factories, such as those for the workers' canteen of the Bristol Aircraft Company at Spring Quarry, Corsham, Wiltshire, located 150ft underground, for which she painted over 100 images depicting British life. In 1940 she was the first English artist to paint mural decorations for an ARP headquarters in the Warden’s Club at St. Pancras. Lehmann also produced monthly designs for the Radio Times and The Listener magazines and received regular commissions for book illustrations. In 1944 she became a scenic artist with British National Studios. However, she eventually grew frustrated with the lack of credit for her work and during the 1950s worked as a freelance artist. She contributed to the Festival of Britain in 1951 as one of the artists whose contemporary wallpaper designs were launched by John Line & Sons Ltd as part of their 'Limited Edition' collection. Lehmann went on to design sets and costumes at Pinewood Studios, for MGM and the Associated British Picture Corporation and worked with many distinguished film makers, including Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray. She continued to paint portraits throughout her career and executed private commissions for many actors, including Dirk Bogarde, Peter Sellers, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Errol Flynn. During the 1970s and 1980s she was nominated four times for Emmy awards for outstanding costume design.
Lehmann and her husband eventually settled in Tindon End, Great Sampford, near Saffron Walden in rural Essex. She worked right up to the end of her life, holding solo exhibitions which she organised in Yoxford, near her home. Olga Lehmann died in Great Sampford, Saffron Walden, Essex, England on 26 October 2001. Her work is represented in a number of UK public collections, including the Imperial War Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and the Fry Art Gallery in Essex.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Olga Lehmann]
Publications related to [Olga Lehmann] in the Ben Uri Library