Hilde Hamann

Hilde Hamann (born February 26, 1898 in Breslau ; † November 1, 1987 in London ) was a German painter and ceramist. She was a member of the Hamburg Secession .

education

Hilde Hamann began her training at the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg with Professor Carl Otto Czeschka from Vienna , where she dealt with ivory carving and fabric painting. After a few semesters she went to the private painting school of Hans Hofmann in Munich to study free painting. In 1920 she returned to the Hamburg School of Applied Arts. There she took a course with the sculptor Paul Hamann , whom she later married.

life and work

At the beginning of the 1920s, Hamann orientated herself strongly on the late Paula Modersohn-Becker , who, like herself at the time, lived in Worpswede with her husband on a converted farm. There she painted expressive landscapes, still lifes as well as figure pictures and portraits . Part of the time she also lived in Hamburg. The painter Otto Tetjus Tügel , who was also commuting between Worpswede and Hamburg at the time, was one of her closest friends at the time.

In 1924 she stayed in Paris for half a year , where she studied with Fernand Léger . In the art metropolis she changed her style and developed it in the direction of New Objectivity . Finally, she found her own way of expression in the connection between a kind of “striking expressionism ” (Friederike Weimar, p. 94) and “formal, neo-objective rigor” (ibid.). After her return to Northern Germany, she began exhibiting with the Hamburg Secession .

In 1926 she and her husband moved to Berlin to the artists' colony on Breitenbachplatz, but they still maintain contact with the Hamburg Secession, which the artist has been an official member of since 1927. But in Berlin she began to neglect her own work in favor of that of her husband. She now assisted him with his sculptural work and reduced her own artistic work to her free time.

In the second half of the 1920s, she had achieved wider notoriety and recognition as an artist. However, all of her oil paintings are now lost, so that retrospective appreciation of her art is no longer possible.

Hilde Hamann came from a well-off merchant family with Jewish roots. This was important for their lives, as in Germany, the Nazis became more and more power to them finally in 1933 the government violence passed was. Therefore emigrated it with her husband in 1933 to Paris , where the couple for three years in the artists' colony Cité Fleurie lived. In 1936 the political situation in France became too uncertain for both of them, so they went into exile in London .

In England, too, Hilde Hamann primarily assisted her husband. Between 1940 and 1941 Paul Hamann was imprisoned in an internment camp for a year. During this time, Hilde Hamann earned the family's livelihood with arts and crafts. After Paul Hamann's release, the private relationship broke up, but the couple continued to work together professionally.

From 1947 onwards, the artist studied ceramics again for three years in Kingsway at the Central School and taught this technique at the Paul Hamanns painting school, which has now been founded. One of her students was the former secession colleague from Hamburg Lore Feldberg-Eber . She too had to flee Germany because she had been persecuted as a Jew.

She acquired British citizenship in the early 1950s .

In addition to her teaching activities, Hilde Hamann specialized in the manufacture of utility ceramics in the tradition of English earthenware , created jewelry and continued to finance her husband with these arts and crafts. In the last twenty years of her life she devoted herself exclusively to the enamel technique , in which she created small-format pictures.

She died in London in 1987.

literature

• Friederike Weimar: The Hamburg Secession. 1919-1933. History and dictionary of artists. Fischerhude 2003, ISBN 3-88132-258-2 , pp. 94-95.
• Beate Schmeichel-Falkenberg, Ursula Hudson-Wiedemann: Crossing borders. Women, art, exile. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3147-4 .