Bill Brandt

Bill Jay,  Bill Brandt at home in London, 1969

Hermann Wilhelm Brandt (1904-1083) was born in Hamburg. His English father, Louis Brandt, was the owner of one of Hamburg's traditional trading houses; his mother, born into the German-Russian merchant family von Oesterreich, came from St. Peterburg. Bill's older brother Walter later became the head of the family's private London bank Brandt, William & Co, and his younger brother Rolf was living as a painter also in London. With the rise of National Socialism the Brandt family returned to England. Shortly after the First World War, Bill contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. (So far, Bill Brandt's story is surprisingly reminiscent of Hans Castorp's in Thomas Mann's famous 1924 novel The Magic Mountain).

Bill Brandt, After the Celebration, London 1931

In 1927, Brandt travelled to Vienna, where he was taken up by Eugenie Schwarzwald, an Austrian philanthropist and writer. She found him a position in a portrait studio, and also introduced him to Ezra Pound. Pound apparently gave Brandt an immensely valuable introduction to Man Ray whom he assisted in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of Surrealism, and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography.

Bill Brandt, René Magritte, 1963

Brandt travelled in continental Europe with Eva Boros, whom he had met in the Vienna portrait studio. They married in Barcelona in 1932. Night photography became one of Brandt's specialities and this may be his earliest experiment in the genre. Here he posed Eva Boros as a nightwalker in St. Pauli, the red light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary scenes.

Bill Brandt, Woman in Hamburg, St. Pauli District, 1933

Brandt and his wife settled in Belsize Park, north London in 1934. The majority of Brandt's early English photographs were first published in his book The English at Home (1936). He used his family contacts - for example, his banker uncles - to gain access to a variety of subjects. The book contained a number of pointed social contrasts, such as the high life presented on the front cover and the poor family shown on the back cover.

Bill Brandt, Belgravia, 1951

Taken in the house of one of Brandt's banker uncles, Brandt's photo-essay The Perfect Parlourmaid appeared in Picture Post, the Life magazine of the United Kingdom, in 1938. This photograph was first published, opposite a Matisse painting of a dinner table, in Verve magazine in 1938. Bill Brandt had met Tom Hopkinson, his editor at Picture Post in 1936. He described Brandt as having "a voice as loud as a moth and the gentlest manner to be found outside a nunnery".

Bill Brandt, Parlourmaids ready to serve dinner, 1933

Brandt's second book, A Night in London, was published in London and Paris in 1938. It was based on Paris de Nuit (1936) by Brassaï, whom Brandt greatly admired. The book tells the story of a London night, moving between different social classes and making use - as with The English at Home - of Brandt's family and friends. Night photography was a new genre of the period, opened up by the newly developed flashbulb (the Vacublitz was manufactured in Britain from 1930). Brandt generally preferred to use portable tungsten lamps called photo-floods. He claimed to have enough cable to run the length of Salisbury Cathedral.

Bill Brandt, Policeman in a Dockland Alley, 1938

Spurred by the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 and reading George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and J.B. Priestley's book An English Journey (1934), Brandt visited the industrial north of England for the first time in 1937. Priestley described the condition of the north east, where the effects of the Depression and the closure of ship-building yards had resulted in 80% unemployment: "The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war". Brandt carefully documented coal-searching - the retrieval of small lumps of coal from spoil heaps - and the domestic life of the miners.

Bill Brandt, Miners Returning to Daylight, South Wales, 1931

The blackout photographs, probably Brandt's own idea, were made during the "phoney war" period, after war had been declared but before serious hostilities between Britain and Germany had begun, plus a second set in 1942. Elizabeth Bowen, one of Brandt's favourite writers, wrote in her story Mysterious Kôr: "Full moon drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital - shallow, cratered, extinct. And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified".

Anom., London Blitz, 1940

After the London Blitz began, Brandt was commissioned to record bomb shelters by the Ministry of Information. His photographs were sent to Washington as part of the British government's attempt to bring the US into the war on the allied side. From 1945 onwards, Brandt made a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers which appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. Brandt waited years for the opportunity to photograph Stonehenge under snow. His image provided the cover for the issue of Picture Post for 19 April 1947. This dealt with Britain in crisis, as post-war euphoria gave way to austerity.

Bill Brandt, Isle of Skye, 1947

Although Brandt's career began, decisively, with his close-up portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, portraiture flowered in his career only in the 1940s. The portraits were commissioned by Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper's Bazaar. His portrait of Dylan Thomas, for example, appeared in Lilliput in December 1941. A Gallery of Literary Artists appeared in the same magazine in November 1949, including the Sitwells and Graham Greene. 

 Bill Brandt, Francis Bacon, 1963

Bill Brandt experimented with nude photography since the 1930s but made a decisive breakthrough in 1944 when he acquired a mahogany and brass camera with a wide-angle lens. He enthusiastically acknowledged a debt to the wide-angle, deep-focus cinematography of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). The camera, a 1931 Kodak used by the police for crime scene records, allowed him to see, he said, "like a mouse, a fish or a fly".

Bill Brandt, Hampstead, 1945

Brandt published Perspective of Nudes (with a preface by Lawrence Durrell) in 1961. It featured nudes in domestic interiors and studios, as well as on the beaches of East Sussex and northern and southern France. Brandt used professional models, but also sometimes family and friends as models for his nudes. His second wife, the journalist Marjorie Beckett, modelled for the following photograph - one of my all-time favorites:

Bill Brandt, Campden Hill, 1949

Brandt's last years were spent reissuing his work in a series of books. He taught Royal College of Art photography students and continued to accept commissions for portraits. He was working on a show, Bill Brandt's Literary Britain, when he died in London after a short illness in 1983. The exhibition became a memorial tribute to Brandt the following year. You can see many more of his photos in the Bill Brandt Archive.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1920s

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996) was born in Vienna. Her father Edmund Motesiczky von Kesseleökeö was of ancient Hungarian nobility. A talented amateur cellist and devoted huntsman, he died when Marie-Louise was only three years old. Her mother Henriette came from an extremely wealthy and cultured family of Jewish bankers whose relations included many distinguished names from the social and intellectual life of Vienna (among them Richard Strauss, Anton Rubinstein, and Henrik Ibsen). 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, View from the Window, Vienna, 1925

The family had donated many art works to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, in their palatial salon opposite the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal had read his first poems. Their own art collection at the family's country estate in Hinterbrühl was formidable.The family also made an impact on the origin of psychoanalysis, Motesiczky’s grandmother Anna von Lieben being one of Sigmund Freud’s early patients. Her case is recorded as Frau Cäcilie M. in the annals of Psychoanalysis.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Psychoanalyst, n.d.

Aged 13, Motesiczky left school – a mistake, as she later admitted. She subsequently attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1926 she visited Paris where she rented a studio, and saw Max Beckmann from time to time. There she painted a first masterpiece (Paris Workman, below) and shortly afterwards a remarkable statuesque Self-portrait with Comb, now in the Belvedere, Vienna. A year later she was invited by Max Beckmann to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Beckmann had been introduced to the Motesiczky family in 1920. He left a strong and lasting impression on Motesiczky both as a person and an artist and was to become a life-long friend. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Paris Workman, 1926

Motesiczky spent a decade quietly developing her artistic skills, exhibiting only once, in 1933, with the Hagenbund. In the wake of Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in 1938, she had to  leave her native country, as her family included Jewish descent. Motesiczky’s older brother Karl, a Marxist, was a friend of Heimito von Doderer and a close collaborator of Wilhelm Reich. Karl refused to leave Austria and used the family house near Vienna to shelter Jewish friends. In 1943 Karl was denounced and sent to Auschwitz where he died shortly afterwards. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Portrait of Karl von Motesiczky, n.d.

With her mother Motesiczky went to Holland where she had her first solo exhibition in 1939. Shortly afterwards they left for England and, after a brief stay in London, settled in Amersham. It was here that Motesiczky met the writer Elias Canetti (the 1981 Nobel Prize winner in literature), with whom she became romantically involved. Canetti was a close friend and companion for the next three decades, and she painted him several times. Canetti wrote large parts of his famous Crowds and Power in  Motesiczky's London home. His was the last major portrait she painted in 1993, not long before he died, now in the National Portrait Gallery.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Elias Canetti, 1930s

Motesiczky was one of a menage à quatre, which Canetti himself characterized this way: "One complains, the other staggers, and the third breathes through gills. The proud owner of three very different women." The plaintiff was his wife Veza Canetti, his lurching lover the poet Friedl Benedikt, and Marie-Louise was the wife with the gills: Motesiczky often dreamed of fishes (they often appear in her paintings too). In 1942, Canetti dedicated a collection of aphorisms to Motesiczky, Aufzeichnungen für Marie-Louise, which was only published in 2005. These are records from the time of the Blitzkrieg, in which we already find Canetti's major themes: language, death, time, and utopia.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky,The Travellers, 1940

In 1943, Motesiczky joined the Artists’ International Association and took part in several of their exhibitions. The following year, Motesiczky’s first solo exhibition in London took place at the Czechoslovak Institute. She also renewed her acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka who had been a friend of the family in Vienna. After the war Motesiczky moved to London. Two solo exhibitions in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1952 were followed two years later by one at the Städtische Galerie in Munich and one at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1960. The first success in Austria came in 1966 when the Wiener Secession staged a large solo exhibition which subsequently travelled to Linz, Bremen and Munich. In the early 1960s, she bought the house at 6 Chesterford Gardens where her mother soon joined her. By the time Henriette died in 1978, aged 96, Motesiczky had produced a series of beautiful and moving images of her. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Magic Fish, n.d.

The artistic breakthrough in the United Kingdom came with the major solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1985 which achieved enormous critical acclaim. By the time the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna held a retrospective exhibition of Motesiczky’s work in 1994, she had already established her reputation as an important Austrian painter of the twentieth century. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London on 10 June 1996.

Painters of the Holocaust - Bergen-Belsen

I recently wrote about Czech painter Josef Čapek who died in 1945 - only a few days before the prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were freed by the Allied Armies. The Imperial War Museum holds an important collection of works by British artists who were witnesses of the liberation. They all responded to the overwhelmingly distressing scenes there with images that sought to convey detail and narrative.

"The Camp is large 12 sq miles and divided into compounds like chicken runs with huts bare of any furniture or conveniences. The huts normally accommodate 50 but as many as 400 were put in." (Leslie Cole)

 Leslie Cole, The Compound for Women, 1945

Leslie Cole (1910-1977) was born in Swindon. He trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art in London and became a teacher at Hull College of Art in 1937. Cole wrote to the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) in 1940 asking for work as a war artist, but he was turned down. At this time, Cole also joined the RAF only to be discharged on health grounds soon after. Determined to be a witness to the unfolding events, he approached the WAAC again, sending pieces of completed work reflecting the war situation in Hull and his home town of Swindon. Eventually, Cole became a salaried war artist with an honorary commission as a captain in the Royal Marines.

 Leslie Cole, Sick Woman and the Hooded Men of Belsen, 1945

Cole travelled widely, recording the aftermath of the war in Malta, Greece, Germany and the Far East. Cole's work consistently addressed the suffering of human beings, and in three oil paintings he bears witness to conditions in Belsen at liberation. Cole did not return to Britain until the spring of 1946, having witnessed the horrors of Belsen concentration camp as well as Japanese prisoner of war camps in Singapore. Cole was married to Barbara Price, a former friend of Dylan Thomas and the star witness in what one newspaper called "the trial of the century", in which "the Prostitutes' Padre" Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, was accused of immorality. 

Leslie Cole, One of the Death Pits, Belsen SS guards collecting bodies, 1945

"The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten. First of all was the ghastly smell of typhus. The simply ghastly sight of skeleton bodies just flung out of the huts." (Doris Zinkeisen)

Doris Zinkeisen, Human Laundry (Belsen), 1945

Doris Zinkeisen (1898-1991) was born in Rosneath, Argyll, Scotland. Together with her sister Anna she studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She was a well-known society painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She also designed costumes and stage sets for the theatre throughout her career. During the Second World War, she joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and in 1944 was commissioned by the Red Cross to paint the work of doctors and nurses in north-west Europe. Zinkeisen arrived at Belsen in April 1945, just after the liberation. You can see more of her work at ArtInconnu.

Doris Zinkeisen, Belsen, April 1945

"I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavour to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much." (Eric Taylor)

Eric Taylor, A Living Skeleton at Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

Eric Taylor (1909-1999) was born  in London. He trained at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Art, and at the outbreak of war he was already an established painter and printmaker. In 1939, he enlisted to serve with the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. He took part in the 1944 Normandy landings and crossed the Rhine into Germany. He was among the first liberators to arrive at Belsen. His drawings from 1944 and 1945 document the wreckage left behind by the war; these images of the aftermath of liberation culminated in the drawings he made at Belsen. Human degradation on such a scale was difficult to portray, and Taylor's most potent images focus on single figures. 

Eric Taylor, A Young Boy from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

"I made a drawing of a girl aged 22, and in return I offered her a cigarette. She took it and ate it whilst I was fumbling with my matches to give her a light. Conditions such as these are beyond anyone's power to explain away." (Edgar Ainsworth)

Edgar Ainsworth, Wera Berger aged 13 after a year in Ravensbrück (near Belsen), 1945

Edgar Ainsworth (1906-1975) was the Art Editor for Picture Post magazine. Ainsworth visited Bergen-Belsen three times in the months after it was liberated and recorded in his drawings and photographies the changes he saw among the people he met there. In September of 1945, Ainsworth published a number of his drawings in Picture Post along with an article that gave his witness account of life in the liberated camp. This articl was written in response to the ongoing Belsen Trials and to combat the sentiments of scepticism and indifference he had observed among some members of the general public.

Austin Osman Spare - Self as Hitler

Austin Osman Spare, Self as Hitler, 1936

Hannen Swaffer, the British journalist, reports (Hannen Swaffer, "The Mystery of An Artist", in London Mystery Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 5, 1950) that in 1936 Spare wilfully rejected a chance for international fame. He relates that a member of the German Embassy, buying Spare's above self-portrait, sent it to Hitler. According to Swaffer, the Führer was so impressed (according to this account because the eyes and the moustache were somewhat like his own) that he invited Spare to go to Germany to paint him. Spare, instead, made a copy of it, which came into Swaffer's possession. Swaffer indicates that written at the top of the portrait is the reply that Spare "sent to the man who wanted to master Europe and dominate mankind":

 

“Only from negations can I wholesomely conceive you. For I know of no courage sufficient to stomach your aspirations and ultimates. If you are superman, let me be for ever animal.”

 

In 1941, a German bomb totally obliterated Spare's studio flat, depriving him of his home, his health and his equipment. For three years he struggled to regain the use of his arms until finally, in 1946, in a cramped basement in Brixton, he began to make pictures again, surrounded by stray cats. At the time he had no bed and worked in an old army shirt and tattered jacket. Yet he still charged only an average of £5 per picture.

Hans Feibusch

Hans Feibusch (1898-1998) was born to Jewish parents in Frankfurt under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He served with the German Army in Russia during the First World War and, after a false start in medicine, began his art studies under Carl Hofer in Berlin. Gaining the Rome prize, he went to Italy, and then studies in Paris with Andre Lhote. You can see the influence of Carl Hofer in this magnificent painting:

Hans Feibusch, Trommler (Drummer), 1934 

In 1930, he received the German Grand State Prize for painting. With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, Feibusch’s status as a Jewish artist ensured that his work was outlawed. Later that year he fled to Britain. In 1937, his work was banned and destroyed by the Nazis. He became a British citizen in 1938, just a year after his work had been included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. England was at first parsimonious with honours and critical recognition. Despite the enthusiasm for his work shown by men as perceptive as Maxwell Fry and Walter Hussey, it was not until 1997 that the Tate Gallery acquired a canvas, this one: 

 Hans Feibusch, "1939", 1939

This painting relates to Feibusch’s experience as a soldier fighting on the Russian front from 1916-18. Feibusch had a brother and in 1929 he went skiing. Lutz was tragically killed in an avalanche and Feibusch had to meet the body at the train station. This experience was also much in mind when he painted 1939 his premonition of what was to come.

  Hans Feibusch, Monkeys, 1946

Soon after the second world war, Feibusch established himself as a mural painter and the commissions came flooding in. He was successful not only in ancient buildings, such as St Ethelburga's, in the City of London, where his murals were damaged in the 1993 IRA bombing, but also in modern churches where he worked closely with the architects. His murals in the Civic Centre at Newport, Monmouthshire, are one of the most ambitious 20th century decorative cycles in Britain. You can see them here.

 Hans Feibusch, Newport Civic Centre Mural, The Building of the George Street Bridge, detail, 1960-64

In 1986, Feibusch had a major retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt and in  1967 he had been awarded the German Order of Merit (first class), and in 1989 received the Grand Cross of Merit. He was in his last years the sole survivor of those whose work had been banned in the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition. Hans Feibusch eventually converted to Christianity, but in 1992 he formally left the Church of England and shortly before his death said: "I am just a very tired old Jew." 

You can visit Hans Feibusch's official site here.