Harry Fischer

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Harry Fischer , actually Heinrich Robert Fischer (born August 30, 1903 in Vienna , † April 12, 1977 in London ) was a British art dealer who, as a Jew , had to leave his Austrian homeland in 1938 .

Life

Fischer was initially a bookseller in Vienna, until 1935 co-owner of Fischer & Berger vorm. Lang, bookstore and antiquarian bookstore on Kohlmarkt (Vienna) and from 1935 to 1938 co-owner of bookstore and publisher Friedrich Wilhelm Frick am Graben (Vienna) . After the annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled first to Zagreb and in 1939 to Great Britain . After a brief internment in 1940, he served in a pioneer unit in the British Army during World War II . In 1945 he was a journalist for the Financial Times .

In 1946 he founded Marlborough Fine Art with Frank Lloyd .

In 1947 he received British citizenship. In the early 1970s, he founded the art dealer Fischer Fine Art with his son Wolfgang Georg Fischer .

Fischer Collection

In the 1960s and early 1970s he built up a collection of books and material on German Expressionism , Dada and the Bauhaus . The collection includes books by or about George Grosz , Wassily Kandinsky , Paul Klee , Oskar Kokoschka , Emil Nolde and Kurt Schwitters .

His widow Elfriede Fischer donated the collection of 69 books, magazines and catalogs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1996 , where it is kept as part of the National Art Library .

Harry Fischer List

Part of Fischer's collection was a list of so-called degenerate art works , although it is unclear how he got them. In 1997, Andreas Hüneke identified it as a complete copy of a machine-written catalog that was compiled by Rolf Hetsch after the summer of 1941 and sorted by museum of origin as a balance sheet of the Degenerate Art campaign in two volumes. There are several copies of the first volume A – G, including a hand copy with supplements in the Federal Archives ; the second volume was thought to be lost by then. After the Schwabing art find , the museum made the list, referred to in the media as the London List or the Harry Fischer List , accessible online in January 2014 because of its paramount importance for provenance research . The list forms the data basis for the database complete directory of the works of the "Degenerate Art" campaign confiscated from German museums in 1937 , which is operated with the collaboration of Andreas Hüneke from the "Degenerate Art" research center at the Free University of Berlin .

Honors

literature

  • Fischer, Harry R. In: Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 1: A-I. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 323 (No. 2513).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History . Marlborough Fine Art, London, UK. Retrieved November 1, 2014. For further history see Marlborough Fine Art in the English language Wikipedia
  2. ^ National Art Library Fischer Collection
  3. ↑ 'Degenerate Art' , accessed on November 1, 2014; History on a page: V&A to publish German 1941-1942 list of 'Degenerate Art' online , accessed November 1, 2014
  4. ^ Database "Degenerate Art". March 12, 2009. Retrieved May 26, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Information from the Federal President's Office
personal data
SURNAME Fischer, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fischer, Heinrich Robert (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art dealer of Austrian origin
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1977
Place of death London