Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Paul Hamann artist

Paul Hamann was born in 1891 in Hamburg, Germany into a part-Jewish family, training in Hamburg and Paris. He co-founded the Hamburg Secession and invented a new painless life mask process, which brought him international fame. In 1933, owing to the rise of Nazism, he fled to Paris and in 1936 to England where he co-founded the refugee organisation, the Free German League of Culture and became a major figure in the émigré network, exhibiting his work in a number of London shows and running an art school with his wife, the painter Hilde Guttmann.

Born: 1891 Hamburg, Germany

Died: 1973 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1936


Biography

Sculptor, photographer and teacher Paul Hamann was born on 8 December 1891 in Hamburg, Germany into a part-Jewish family. He trained at the Hamburg Landeskunstschule under the sculptor Richard Luksch, then, briefly, in Paris, under Rodin, before serving in the German army during the First World War as a dispatch rider and cartographer. Afterwards, he returned to teach at the Landeskunstschule, where among the students was Breslau-born Jewish painter Hilde Guttmann (1898–1987), whom he married in 1920; their daughter, Yvonne (known as 'Butsi'), was born in 1921. Hamann’s work in this period included wood carvings, portraits, and both small and large sculptures, although he specialised in large-scale female nudes for parks and gardens. He held his first solo exhibition in Hamburg in 1924, co-founded the Hamburg Secession and was President of the local Kunstlerfest. During the 1920s the couple joined artists’ colonies, first at Worpswede, near Bremen (though Hamann returned to Hamburg at intervals) and, from 1927, in Breitenbachplatz, Berlin, where he exhibited with the Novembergruppe. During this period he also invented a new painless life mask process, which brought him international fame. In November 1931 the Hamanns, Paul's studio and some of his subjects, including actors Dolly Haas and Conrad Veidt, were photographed by German-Jewish photographer Ursula Wolf-Schneider (1906-1977, who later immigrated to the USA). In 1933, following the rise of Nazism, the Hamanns moved to Paris, settling in Cité Fleurie, where they mixed with an international celebrity clientele, including Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Man Ray, who all sat for their life masks. Hamann frequently photographed his subjects with their masks, although photographs and masks are often unattributed, and the latter frequently erroneously described as death masks. Hamann also worked as a monumental mason.

Another client, the Hon. Harold Nicolson, diplomat, author, MP and publisher, funded the Hamanns first trip to England in 1929–30, resulting in Paul’s exhibition of ‘mask portraits’ at the Warren Gallery, and also assisted their immigration in 1936. Hamann continued to make life masks of English sitters;, while Vita Sackville-West also had her hands cast. The couple became founder members of the Free German League of Culture (1938–46, a left-leaning refugee cultural organisation), with Hamann co-chairing its Fine Arts section with German-Jewish émigré Fred Uhlman (until both were interned in 1940). Hamann showed work in the 1938 exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at New Burlington Galleries and in the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors at the Wertheim Gallery in London (1939), organised partly by the FGLC. At this time, most of Hamann’s public sculptures and all Hilde’s paintings were destroyed in their native Germany. Between 1940–41 Hamann was interned in the so-called ‘artists’ camp’ at Hutchinson on the Isle of Man (after transiting briefly through the notorious Warth Mill camp, near Bury), alongside Uhlman, Erich Kahn and Kurt Schwitters, among other artists. During internment he signed the famous New Statesman and Nation letter protesting against the incarceration of artists, sat to Schwitters for his portrait, taught modelling, sculpted his famous Nude Lady Golfer and a head of pianist Marian Rawicz (in clay), exhibited in both Exhibitions of Art by internees, and contributed to The Camp magazine. After release, he participated in the FGLC and Artists International Association (AIA) Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings in July 1941, and other refugee organisation exhibitions, including Artists Aid Jewry and the AIA For Liberty exhibition (both 1943). He also co-founded the Hampstead Artists Council, established in 1944, which held a number of exhibitions 1946–86, and also exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Hamann was naturalised in 1950 but remained a major figure in the émigré network, running an art school with Hilde in St. John’s Wood, with weekly life classes attended by former internees, including Hugo Dachinger, who sketched his classmates (Ben Uri Collection), and Erich Kahn, who met his future wife there – and from which a sheaf of his female life-drawings (Ben Uri Collection) has survived. In 1954 he exhibited his work in the school, alongside other Jewish artists, showing a maquette of a pregnant woman and child in an air raid which he intended to enlarge to full size and place in the vestibule of a maternity home, among other works. In 1960 Hamann contributed sculptures to the newly opened Queenswood Gallery, founded by fellow German émigré artist Henry Sanders. The AJR Information noted that Hamann ‘reveres Maillol as one of his masters. These influences make him keep the wholeness of the human form and his work is infused with a deeply felt humanism’ (Rosenberg 1961, p. 10).

Paul Hamann died in London, England in 1973. In 2010, a card designed by Hamann featured in Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-45, a Ben Uri touring exhibition, marking 70 years since internment. His work is represented in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection and National Portrait Gallery, London. Four of Hamann’s heads of Noel Coward (1930, recast 1981, bronze), Aldous Huxley (1930/1981, bronze), Raymond Mortimer (1930, plaster) and Edward ('Eddy') Sackville West (1929, plaster) are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London, while his torso of Lee Miller is at Farleys House and Gallery, Sussex, the home she shared with Roland Penrose.

Related books

  • Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'Looks Like Tomato Soup and Smells Faintly of Vanilla: Paul Hamann's Life Mask of Lion Feuchtwanger', Newsletter of the International Feuchtwanger Society, Vol.17, 2014, pp. 6-12
  • Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Ulrike Smalley, 'Astounding and Encouraging: High and Low Art Produced in Internment on the Isle of Man during the Second World War' in Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum eds., Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire (New York & London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 186-284
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'Separate Spheres of Endeavour? Experiencing the Émigré Network in Britain, c. 1933-45', in Burcu Dogramaci and Karin Wimmer eds., Netzwerke Des Exils: Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933 (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2011), pp. 71-89
  • Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006)
  • Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)
  • Zuleika Dobson and Monica Bohm-Duchen, Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-45 (London: Camden Arts Centre, 1986), not paginated
  • Peter Stone, 'Art Notes', Jewish Chronicle, 19 February 1969, p. 20
  • F.G.S., 'Sculpture and Ceramics', Jewish Chronicle, 24 December 1954, p. 9
  • Jan Gordon, ‘Art and Artists’, 23 November 1941, p. 7
  • 'Art Exhibition', The Times, 23 June 1930, p. 12

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Artists International Association (AIA, member, exhibitor)
  • Breichtenbachplatz artists' colony, Berlin (resident)
  • Free German League of Culture (FGLC) (co-founder, member, co-Chair of Arts Section, exhibitor)
  • Hamburg Landeskunstschule (student and teacher)
  • Hamburg Secession (member)
  • Hampstead Artists Council (co-founder, member, exhibitor) (co-founder, member, exhibitor)
  • Novembergruppe (member)Worpswede artists' colony (resident) (memberresident)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • New/Old Homeland - R/Emigration of Artists after 1945 (Dahlem: Kunsthaus, 2017), pp. 191-196
  • Refugees: The Lives of Others, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2017)
  • Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-45, Ben Uri and touring (2009-10)
  • Open Air Exhibition of Sculpture, Hampstead Arts Festival (1961)
  • Queenswood Gallery (1960)
  • Royal Academy (1958)
  • Exhibition of Sculpture and Ceramics, 53b Studio, Clifton Hill, St. John's Wood (1954)
  • Artists Aid Jewry, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1943)
  • AIA For Liberty (1943)
  • FGLC and AIA Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawing (1941)
  • Second Exhibition of Art, Hutchinson Camp (November, 1940)
  • First Exhibition of Art, Hutchinson Camp (September, 1940)
  • First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors, Wertheim Gallery (1939)
  • Twentieth Century German Art, New Burlington Galleries (1938)
  • Mask Portraits, Warren Galleries (1930)
  Paul Hamann
   
Ben Uri collection

Paul Hamann in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Paul Hamann]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Paul Hamann] in the Ben Uri Library