Paul Nietsche was born in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine) in 1885. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Odessa and the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. After a period of extensive travel, he lived in Belfast from 1936–50, becoming an eccentric character at the heart of the Northern Irish art scene.
Painter Paul Nietsche was born to German parents in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine) in 1885. At the age of six his family moved to Odessa where his father established a lithographic printing firm. Encouraged to practice art from a young age, his mother allegedly pawned his brother’s coat on one occasion to buy paints for him (Belfast Telegraph, 1952). After studying under Gennadiy Ladyzhensku and Kiriak Kostandi at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Odessa, Nietsche enrolled at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in 1908. In 1912 he moved to Paris where he befriended the sculptor Auguste Rodin, before returning to Odessa in 1914 and then to Berlin again after the First World War. In 1926 Nietsche visited Belfast, Northern Ireland, invited by the Dubliner Michael O’Brien, whom he had met in Berlin and who was lecturing in Celtic Studies at Queens University Belfast. While there Nietsche showed five paintings with the Ulster Arts Club, after which he travelled throughout Europe for 13 years, exhibiting widely. In 1933 he stayed with the painter Robert Sydney Rendle Wood in Cornwall, England, and a year later he exhibited 28 paintings, mostly of Cornish scenes, in a solo show at Brook Street Galleries, London, described by one critic as ‘Rich in colour and robust in execution’ (The Times, 1934). In 1936 he travelled in the USA and Canada, followed by a period in Devon and Cornwall, before finally settling in Belfast.
An Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Paul Nietsche was held at Belfast’s John Magee Gallery on Donegall Square West, Belfast in 1936. Two years later he showed at the same venue alongside John Hunter and George MacCann, followed by another solo show in 1939. Nietsche applied for British citizenship from an address at 9 Finaghy Park Central in south Belfast, in 1938. During the Second World War he was interned on the Isle of Man ‘with chess-playing intellectuals’, before re-establishing himself on the Belfast art scene (Hewitt, 1991). He set up a studio at 76 Dublin Road where he worked from 1942 until the end of his life, described by Northern Irish poet, Roy McFadden, as a space where the artist ‘flaunted a huge ceramic penis on the wall.’ McFadden also claimed that Nietsche ‘learnt English from the Sunday papers’ (Brown, 1999). In 1943 Nietsche showed alongside Stanley Prosser, Seamus Stoupe, and Newton Penprase in the annual Ulster Arts Club exhibition at Belfast’s Municipal Gallery. Between 1946 and 1948 an Exhibition of Recent Work by Paul Nietsche was held annually at 55a Donegall Place, Belfast. Actor Jack Loudan described Nietsche as a charitable character who distributed repaired toys to underprivileged children, but also as an eccentric who alarmed visitors to his studio by feeding and entertaining a mouse who had taken up residence there (Loudan, 1972). It is said that Nietsche was the model for the bohemian artist in Carol Reid’s film Odd Man Out (1947), a part played by Robert Newton (Fallon, 1984). The author of the original 1945 novel, Odd Man Out, Frederick Laurence Green, wrote the forward to Nietsche’s solo show at the CEMA Gallery (Council for Encouragement of Music and Art), Belfast, in 1949, where he exhibited portraits of stage actors such as James G. Devlin (Snoddy, 2002). Nietsche also taught many students, including Markey Robinson, whom he introduced to the influential art collector Zoltan Lewinter-Frankl.
Paul Nietsche died in Belfast City Hospital, Belfast, Northern Ireland on 4 October 1950, after falling ill at his studio. He was unmarried and had no children. His friends organised a memorial exhibition in the Ulster Farmers’ Union Hall, Belfast in 1952. In 1970 Nietsche’s works were shown in the exhibition, Art in the British Isles Since 1900, at McClelland Galleries, Belfast, alongside other ‘eminent painters’ such as Frank Brangwyn, John Lavery, William Russell Flint, and Augustus John (McBride, 1970). The Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery, also in Belfast, held a retrospective, Paul Nietsche 1885-1950, in 1984, accompanied by a catalogue and an essay published in Irish Slavonic Studies on the artist by Irish art critic Brian Fallon. In the UK public domain, several of Nietsche’s paintings, including a portrait of Irish painter ,James Humbert Craig, are held in the Ulster Museum collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Paul Nietsche]
Publications related to [Paul Nietsche] in the Ben Uri Library