Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Walter Trier artist

Walter Trier was born in 1890 to German-Jewish parents in Prague, Bohemia, then in Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), training at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design and the Munich Academy. Trier contributed illustrations to German satirical magazines <em>Simplicissimus</em>, <em>Jugend</em> and <em>Lustige Blätter</em>, becoming one of the most sought after cartoonists in Berlin. Escaping Nazi persecution, he settled in England in 1936, where, until his departure to Canada in 1947, he produced designs for <em>Lilliput</em> and illustrated anti-fascist pamphlets for the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War.

Born: 1890 Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic)

Died: 1951 Craigleith, Canada

Year of Migration to the UK: 1936


Biography

Caricaturist, book illustrator and painter Walter Trier was born into a German-speaking, middle-class Jewish family on 25 June 1890 in Prague, Bohemia (then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Czech Republic). He trained briefly at the Industrial School of Fine and Applied Arts (1905), moving to the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, then, finally, in 1908, to the Royal Academy, Munich, where he was taught by Franz von Stuck. Trier's illustrations were first published in 1909 in celebrated German satirical magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend (Youth), appearing alongside the work of well-known artists including Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz. In 1910 Trier moved to Berlin and became the regular press illustrator of Berlin-based Lustige Blätter (Funny Pages); within ten years he became one of the city’s most sought-after cartoonists. In 1929, he began a longstanding working relationship with children’s author Erich Kästner, for whom he illustrated Emil and the Detectives – an instant sensation and literary classic – as well as most of Kästner’s best-known works including Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom) and Das doppelte Lottchen (Lottie and Lisa), which was the inspiration for the film The Parent Trap. Trier also created murals for the Kabarett der Komiker on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin, in 1929 (destroyed by the Nazis in 1933), and for the liner SS Bremen (1929); stage designs for Spielzeug (1924) and The Bartered Bride (1931) and held a solo exhibition in Prague in 1934.

Following the rise of Nazism, Trier fled Germany with his family to settle in England in 1936. In 1938 he created a mural for the pharmaceutical company Roche UK Pharmaceuticals in Welwyn Garden City and in the same year his work was included in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at New Burlington Galleries, London (intended as a riposte to the Nazi organised Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] show in Munich the previous year). In 1939 his work was also displayed at the First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors held at the Wertheim Gallery in London, prior to the outbreak of war, prompting the critic of The Studio to observe that Trier’s studies of Witches and Magicians, ‘owed something to Hieronymus Bosch’. Trier also designed the first 147 title pages (from 1937 until late 1949) for the humorous monthly magazine Lilliput, founded by the Hungarian émigré photojournalist Stefan Lorant, each depicting a man, a woman, and a Scottish Terrier (memorialising Trier's own dog, killed in a tram accident) in a variety of poses, situations and periods. During the war, he was one of a number of exiled German and Austrian cartoonists who carried out propaganda work for the British Ministry of Information (MoI), where he produced anti-Nazi leaflets. He also contributed regularly to the refugee newspaper Die Zeitung , which was financed by the MoI, and contributed cartoons to The Daily Herald. In 1942 he participated in the Refugee Artists Exhibition of Works at Barrow's Stores, Corporation Street, Birmingham, which also featured fellow émigrés Alexander Jaray and Arthur Segal. A book of caricatures by Z K, Adolf Hoffmeister, Antonín Pelc, Stephen and Trier was produced by the Czechoslovak Institute in London in 1943 and in 1945 he was commissioned to produce caricatures of delegates to the United Nations. Postwar, Ben Uri held a Studio Group evening for Trier on 13 July 1947, followed later that year by an exhibition of Paintings by Walter Trier and Sculpture by Else Fraenkel and Erna Nonnenmacher (1947), and in 1950 he was one of seven caricaturists included in the Ben Uri exhibition Cartoons and Caricatures: Joss, Ross, Sallon, Walter Trier, Vicky, Victoria, Mark Wayner.

In 1947, Trier and his wife became British citizens, but a few months later, followed their daughter to Ontario, Canada, where he designed advertisements for Kilk & Kam, Maple Leaf Cheese, Domestic Shortening, Quix Soap, Imperial Life Insurance and York Peanut Butter. Walter Trier died of a heart attack on 8 July 1951 in his studio in Craigleith, Collingwood, Ontario; his family subsequently gifted more than 1,000 of his drawings to the Ontario Art Gallery, and later the same year an exhibition of his oils and watercolours was held posthumously at the University of Toronto. A further retrospective was held in Hanover, Germany in 2006. In the UK his work is held in the Ben Uri Collection.

Related books

  • Warren Clements ed., The Many Worlds of Walter Trier: Inimitable Drawings of Baron Munchausen, Tom Sawyer, Emil, Brer Rabbit and Many, Many Others (Toronto: Nestlings Press, 2019)
  • Nicola Baird ed., Czech Routes: Selected Czechoslovak Artists in Britain from the Ben Uri and Private Collections (London: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2019)
  • Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (London: Puffin Books, 2015)
  • Antje Neuner-Warthorst, ed., Walter Trier – Politik, Kunst, Reklame [Walter Trier – Politics, Art, Advert.] (Affoltern am Albis: Atrium Zürich, 2006)
  • Jutta Vinzent, 'List of Refugee Artists (Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists) From Nazi Germany in Britain (1933–1945)', in Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933–1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006), pp. 249-298
  • Lilliput: Walter Trier's World (Tokyo: Pie, 2004)
  • Humorist Walter Trier: Selections from the Trier-Fodor Foundation Gift (Toronto: The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1981)
  • Jesters in Earnest (London: Murray, 1944)
  • Walter Trier, Dandy the Donkey (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Daily Herald (contributor)
  • Die Zeitung (London) (contributor)
  • Lilliput (contributor)
  • Ministry of Information (illustrator)
  • New York Times (contributor)
  • Life (contributor)
  • Simplicissimus (contributor)
  • The New Yorker (contributor)
  • Lustige Blätter (contributor)
  • Jugend (contributor)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Czech Routes: Selected Czechoslovak Artists in Britain from the Ben Uri and Private Collections, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2019)
  • Walter Trier retrospective, Wilhelm-Busch-Museum, Hanover (2006)
  • Recent Acquisitions and Selections from the Permanent Collection, Ben Uri Art Society (1988)
  • University of Toronto (1951)
  • Czech Cartoons, Czech Institute, London (1943)
  • Refugee Artists Exhibition of Works at Barrow’s Stores, Corporation Street, Birmingham (1942)
  • Twentieth Century German Art, New Burlington Galleries (1938)
  • Free German League of Culture, Maison de la Culture, Paris (1938)
  Walter Trier
   
Ben Uri collection

Walter Trier in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Walter Trier]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Walter Trier] in the Ben Uri Library