Edith Hoffmann (art historian, 1907)

Edith Hoffmann , also Edith Hoffmann-Yapou, (born July 24, 1907 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died January 4, 2016 in Jerusalem ) was a Czechoslovak-British-Israeli art critic and art historian.

Life

Edith Hoffmann was a daughter of the writer Camill Hoffmann and Irma Oplatka. From 1920 onwards, her father worked as a legation counselor at the Czechoslovak embassy in Berlin . He was interested in the artistic work of Oskar Kokoschka . He and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 .

Hoffmann attended the Neue Schule Hellerau and graduated from the Auguste-Viktoria-Schule in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1928. She studied art history, archeology and Slavic studies in Berlin, Vienna and Munich, where she received her doctorate with Wilhelm Pinder in February 1934 with a dissertation on German painting of the 18th century. In 1934 she began a traineeship at the graphic collection of the Veste Coburg , but was dismissed for racist reasons. She then emigrated to England in 1934.

Hoffmann found a job as an intern in the British Museum's graphic collection and was hired in 1938 by Herbert Read , editor of Burlington Magazine , as an editorial assistant. In 1938 she worked on the preparations for the exhibition "Twentieth-Century German Art" in the New Burlington Galleries, in which works known as Degenerate Art in Germany were shown. In the “Artists' Refugee Committee” (ARC) founded by Fred Uhlman , she helped organize the escape of members of the “Oskar Kokoschka Association” from Prague. From 1946 she acted as deputy editor of Burlington Magazine and was the first woman in Great Britain in such a prominent position in the culture industry.

In 1940 Hoffmann married the Palestinian lawyer and later Israeli diplomat Eliezer Yapou (1908-1998). In 1951 she left London and lived in New York, Amsterdam, South Africa, Paris and finally Jerusalem , where she continued her art history work into old age, contributing to the Encyclopaedia Hebraica and articles for ARTnews and as an art correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote and by the end had published more than 150 articles, exhibition reports and reviews.

Her main interests lay in the painting of German expressionism and artistic and literary symbolism . She wrote the monograph “Kokoschka. Life and Work ”, published by Faber & Faber in 1947 , and various articles on Félicien Rops .

Fonts (selection)

Dissertation (1934)

• The representation of the citizen in German painting of the 18th century . Munich, Univ., Diss., 1934.
• Oskar Kokoschka: Life and Work . London: Faber & Faber, 1947
• (Ed.): Chagall. Water colors . Paris, London, 1948
• Expressionism . 1958
• Anna Ticho . Rotterdam: Museum Boymans van Beuningen, 1964

literature

• Hoffmann, Edith , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical manual of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, pp. 317-319
• Régine Bonnefoit: Edith Hoffmann (1907–2016) , in: Burlington Magazine CLVIII, April 2016, pp. 289f.
• Hoffmann, Edith , in: Ilse Korotin : biografiA. Lexicon of Austrian Women . Vienna: Böhlau, 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , pp. 1327f.

photography

Franz Pfemfert photographed Hoffmann in London in 1937/38; the picture will be in the public domain in 2025.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hoffmann, Edith in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Hoffmann, Edith in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Barbara Pezzini: Hoffmann, Edith , in: The Dictionary of Art Historians
• Shulamith Behr: JP Hodin and Edith Hoffmann: Émigré Voices. Art Writers in Britain , at Tate, 2013
• Edith Hoffmann , in: the applied, University of Applied Arts Vienna