Theo Balden was born Otto Koehler in 1904 in Brazil and trained as a technical draughtsman in Berlin before studying at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1923–24, also working as a freelance artist. From 1928 he was an active member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and in 1929 joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany; following the rise of Nazism and his arrest and detention in 1934, he escaped to Prague on a false passport under the name of Theo Balden. After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he fled to England and following internment in Canada; return to England, where he had some success as a sculptor before relocating to the German Democratic Republic in 1947.
Sculptor and graphic artist, Theo Balden was born Otto Koehler on 6 February 1904 in Blumenau, Brazil, where his parents, Bertha and Otto Koehler, had immigrated a few years earlier from Germany. In 1906, the year after his father's death in an accident, Balden's mother returned to Berlin with her children. Balden had a keen interest in drawing and initially trained as a technical draftsman at the Ludwig Loewe & Co engineering factory in Berlin between 1918 and 1922. He subsequently studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1923–24, under László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, before becoming a freelance artist. Balden was politically active and in 1926 joined the Rote Hilfe (German affiliate of the International Red Aid), linked to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), of which he became a member in 1928, as well as joining the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany (known as Asso) in 1929. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Balden was active in illegal resistance among Communist groups and in January 1934 was arrested and detained for nine months. Following his release under police supervision, he fled to Prague on a fake passport under the name of Theo Balden, which he kept for the rest of his life. In Prague, he founded and co-chaired the Oskar Kokoschka Bund, an association of expatriate German and Austrian artists, and met his future wife, fellow immigrant, Annemarie Romahn, a graphic artist and textile designer.
Following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Balden fled to England, where he married Romahm and became an active member of The Free German League of Culture (1939–46), together with fellow artists in exile, including Oskar Kokoschka and John Heartfield. After the introduction of mass internment in Britain in June 1940, Balden was arrested as an 'enemy alien' and shipped to Canada where he was interned for ten months. He was released in January 1941 after an appeal from the Royal Academy of Art and returned to London, where he took a flat near King’s Cross, before relocating to Derby, where he used the garage of his small home as his art studio. Initially, he worked in a metal foundry and in May 1941 was commissioned by Barbara Winstanly, Director of the County School Museum Service in Derby, to produce teaching materials for schools. Through this initiative, he created a plywood landscape of the Mediterranean to demonstrate different climate zones. In 1943 he founded a branch of the FGLC in Derby with his wife – the International Club – where Germans, Austrians, Czechs and Poles, as well as British locals met to discuss political events and socio-political ideas, including Marxism. During his time in British exile, Balden exhibited in London, including with the FGLC (1941), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1943) and Ben Uri Gallery (1946). As a member of the left wing Artist's International Association (AIA) he also took part in group exhibitions such as the Members' Exhibition in 1942. In his work, Balden explored themes of despair and distress relating to the experience of war, with a water carrier bringing water to bomb sites in London a recurrent theme in his sculpture in 1943–45. Balden`s sculpture was also informed by Socialist Realist subjectmatter, such as Work, Work, Work, exhibited at AIA and FGLC Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings in 1941, as well as by Jewish subjects, such as Der Ewige Jude, exploring the mythical Wandering Jew, which was exhibited at Ben Uri Gallery and reproduced in the FGLC publication by Oskar Kokoschka, Deutsche Kunstler in England in 1946. Among contemporary British artists who had an impact on his work, Balden cited Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein (Feist 1983, p. 48); his sculpture Mutter und Kind (1974) was particularly reminiscent of Moore`s work (Vinzent 2006, p. 61).
In 1947, Balden and his wife returned to Germany, settling in East Berlin. From 1948–50 he worked for the satirical magazine Ulenspiegel, before taking up a teaching post at the GDR Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, AdK) in Berlin Weissensee. In 1952, Balden and Annemarie divorced and he married Edith Egerland in 1955, with whom he had a son. In 1965, 39 pieces of Balden`s sculpture and and a number of drawings were shown in a touring exhibition to the UK which travelled to Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Derby and Coventry. Art critic Myfanwy Kitchin noted in The Guardian that `the immediate and dominant characteristic of his work is its sympathetic portrayal of people`, evident in his bronze portrait heads of renowned actors and musicians, as well as in his 'oriental' types. Other recurring themes in the exhibition were Mother and Child groups, lovers, and the grief and pain of war – explored in works such as Woman with Dead Child and Torso of a Tortured Man, `expressed by forms which explodes outwards, sweep backwards, with sharp angles and twists` (Kitchin 1965, p. 7). In 1970, Balden became a member of the AdK and, in 1974, an honorary member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR. In 1986 his work was included in the landmark exhibition Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933-1945 held in West Berlin before touring in reducing form to the Camden Arts Centre, London. Balden died in Berlin on 30 September 1995. His work is represented at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Berlin State Museums and Kunsthaus Dahlem, among others. His archive is held in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Theo Balden]
Publications related to [Theo Balden] in the Ben Uri Library