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The German Jewish immigrant contribution to Art in South Africa

Author: Published on: Published in: Antisemitism and the Holocaust

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 65, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2010)

“The contribution of the German immigrants was that they recognised the value of African art at a time when others, especially South Africans, were completely unaware of it.”1

This remark made by art dealer and collector Egon Guenther, himself a German immigrant, is an example of what Medawar and Pyke have called ‘Hitler’s Gift’ – the contribution made by Jewish refugees whose flight from Hitler’s Germany enriched their host countries.2 German Jewish refugees to South Africa were Hitler’s gifts, and these gifts included their contributions to its cultural development.

Brought up in a society that valued scholarship, had exacting standards of apprenticeship and where they were exposed to both traditional and experimental art, German immigrants looked at the South African art world with different eyes to those of white South Africans.

The German artists were familiar with early 20th Century art movements. Its art reflected post-war disillusionment and was often designed to be critical, rebellious and shocking. The avant-garde was welcomed – as was seen in the Dada movement. African art was no novelty to them. When it had been introduced to Europe in the 1920s, its shapes and forms had made a tremendous impact. The hunger for the ‘primitive’ had not only reached a fashionable level, but was supported by the evidence of the levels of destruction by civilised man during the war.3 Pablo Picasso included African masks in some of his greatest work and Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Jacques Lipchitz and Constantine Brancusi were all influenced by African art (which had also caught the attention of art historians).4

With the rise of Hitler, openness to different art movements clanged shut. There was a flood of threatening and defamatory articles attacking artists whose work was out of favour. In 1930, the spokesman for the German Arts Society declared, “A huge attack on pictures will have to take place throughout Germany.”5 ‘Un-German’ exhibitions were cancelled or disrupted and “exhibitions of shame” arranged.

This antipathy towards modern art was not a specifically German phenomenon, although it was only in Germany that it took such ruthless forms. In America, too, there was a move to remove avant-garde art from display in galleries and to prevent public monies being spent on their acquisition (“If that is art, I’m a Hottentot”, President Harry Truman once said6). Edward Roworth, the highly influential Director of the SA National Gallery, shared this antipathy.

Soon after the Nazis assumed power, Hitler started ‘cleansing’ the arts. On 22 September 1933, the Reich’s Chamber of Culture Bill made membership of chambers a pre-requisite for the pursuit of a career and professions. Joseph Goebbels explained that “a Jewish contemporary [was] generally not suited to be involved in the administration of German cultural assets”. In 1936, he prohibited art criticism, which was to be replaced by art reports that were to be less judgmental and more descriptive: “Absolute value judgements can only be passed by the State and the Party. Once this has been done, the art writer may use this as a standard”, he declared.7

Modern art, the Nazi Party decreed, was bad, as was anything produced by Negroes, Communists or Jews. Jews, being degenerate, needed to be removed from German life, and hence artworks by Jews could be neither exhibited nor sold.

A Cultural Association of German Jews was set up to provide opportunities for the ousted Jewish artists. In a speech at its inaugural meeting on 17 July 1933, writer and theatre critic Julius Bab remarked: “Hundreds of German artists, actors, musicians and intellectuals in various fields… have been deprived of their fields of activity because they are of Jewish descent. These people, most of whom are inextricably bound to their professions, have no possibility of switching to another occupation. The situation is becoming increasingly desperate.” 8

In 1937 an exhibition of Degenerate Art, one of the original 1933 Exhibitions of Shame, toured Germany, attracting huge audiences: “The exhibition has a cultural-political aim, it wants to reveal the systematic attempts by Jews, those of Jewish descent and others sympathetic to Jews, to poison and destroy the German Volk. At the root of these lies the conscious intention of causing the ‘degeneration’ of the Germans to prepare them for chaos and Bolshevism.”9

Hitler ordered that “products of the age of decay still present in museums, galleries and collections belonging to the Reich, counties or municipalities”10 were to be confiscated, and the Gestapo tackled the job of purging offensive art works with its customary enthusiasm. After the latter destroyed the paintings of Hermann Hirsch in 1934 and he was no longer allowed to sell his work, he committed suicide. Some of his work was brought to Cape Town by his niece, a refugee from Germany, and is now in the collection of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape Council). Recently photographs of these were made at the request of the Göttingen Städtisches Museum for a commemorative exhibition.

For Jewish artists living in Germany, the only future lay in leaving the country and some found refuge in South Africa until the hastily passed 1937 Alien’s Act closed this escape route. Many were assimilated or even baptised – Hanns Ludwig Katz was baptised, with a Jewish father; Katrine Harries was baptised, with a Jewish mother11 – but Jewish descent was sufficient to exclude them from working in Germany, and, later, to qualify them for inclusion in ghettos and death camps.

South African culture, both in art and music, was to be enhanced by the taste and knowledge brought by these new immigrants. “These settlers were… in background, education, callings and interests… in intellectual and cultural tradition, habits and needs, completely different from any previous settlers in South Africa” wrote an art critic in Settlers of the 1930’s: Ernest Ullmann as an Example, concluding that their contribution to South Africa’s cultural life was their distinctive feature.12

Because artists in Germany had been exposed to many different schools and influences, their minds had been opened to different ways of portraying what their eyes saw. To them African art was not inferior but exciting and different. They found, however, that South African attitudes to art were conservative and puritanical. The art of Maggie Laubscher and Irma Stern, South Africans who had studied under German expressionists, was greeted with local hostility and incomprehension – “agonies in oil” and “blatant incompetence” were two of the labels thrown at the latter. Stern’s first Cape Town exhibition in 1920 was even marked with a police investigation for alleged immorality.13

Furthermore white South Africans, brought up with ideas of racially endowed cultural superiority, placed little value on art produced by indigenous people.14 Indeed, The Transvaal Leader newspaper, 29 March 1910, devoted  a major article to an important Johannesburg exhibition of arts, commenting on “the absence of any forms of art by which the native race has revealed itself” (although that exhibition incorporated “Native work for exhibition and sale”, including pottery, carvings, drawings, mats, beadwork, baskets, metal work and jewellery).15 When the refugees arrived in the early 1930s, these attitudes were still entrenched.

‘African’ themes in the work of local artists, like colourful tribal life, portraits or poverty, did not indicate respect for ‘African’ art. FL Alexander, a German Jewish refugee, who played a major role in developing critical art history in South Africa, explained in his ground breaking analysis, Art in South Africa since 1900, that “the strong influence of primitive African art in South African modern artists does not at all derive from their contact with the Bantu. It is the influence of West and Central African sculpture and reaches us via Paris.”16 So even any putative influence on art was due not to South Africa’s indigenous people, but to Paris.

“Hardly anyone in South Africa was interested in African art in the 1940s and 1950s” wrote art historian Sandra Kloppers.17 But these German Jewish immigrants were. They had brought with them profound scholarship and discipline and they judged the art being produced around them, both by the white and the indigenous people, from a different perspective, less parochial and more cosmopolitan, and saw beauty in what they found.

One of these was Dr Maria Stein-Lessing, who had had to abandon her own collection of African art when she left Germany. Her contribution has been recently acknowledged in a fine book edited by Natalie Knight, l’Afrique: A Tribute to Maria SteinLessing and Leopold Spiegel.18

In 1933, Stein-Lessing left Germany, where she had studied art in Berlin, Bonn, Cologne and Heidelberg, obtaining a doctorate from the University of Bonn.19 In 1936, she immigrated to South Africa, obtaining a job as head of Art Appreciation at the Pretoria Technical College. She soon introduced African art appreciation into the curriculum and organised one of the first exhibitions of ‘Bantu art’.20 Her additional appointment by the Department of Native Affairs as Director of Bantu Arts and Crafts in Johannesburg enabled her to make trips around the countryside to gain knowledge of indigenous craft, rock engravings and paintings. She became aware that it was being endangered by the encroachment of industrialisation and modernity and that the craftsmen lived in conditions of great poverty.

Stein-Lessing started a fresh collection of carvings and beadwork made by Zulu, Ndebele, Xhosa and Tsonga/ Shangaan artists. Guests to her flat would be confronted by hundreds of pairs of eyes staring from masks on every square metre of the walls, or would bump into woodcarvings, combs, snuffboxes, headrests and baskets.21 An attempt to persuade the Department of Native Affairs to help her start a non-profit depot where craftspeople could sell their work was unsuccessful. When she married fellow immigrant Leopold Spiegel in 1942, she lost her job at the Technical College – married women could not be employed as teachers.

Needing an income, she decided to start her own shop. She could sell this unappreciated art, develop an appreciation for it and provide a market to ensure its continuity. Her friend Frieda Feldman helped Maria sell some of her jewellery to raise sufficient money to open a shop, l’Afrique, in a small room on the first floor of a building in Loveday or President Streets in Johannesburg.22 Egon Guenther, a non-Jewish jeweller, printer and art dealer, regarded Maria as one of the first people to create an interest in indigenous art as early as the forties, and to bring about consciousness of African art.23

Maria and Leopold travelled into rural areas going on collecting trips as far as East Africa. Her files record visits to Butterworth, Mazeppa Bay, Kentani, Bashee River Mouth, Elliotdale and Matatiele. They visited agricultural fairs and places where suitable objects would be available and wrote to the Native Commissioners in Eshowe and

Nongoma to obtain the dates of those fairs. A letter has survived from Albert Luthuli suggesting she contact Mshiyeni ka Dinizulu, acting paramount chief of the Zulus. She also met with Chief Bhekeshowe Zulu, King Mpande’s great grandson.24 Craftspeople were encouraged to bring work to her shop, which sold African sculpture, beadwork and masks, and by 1951 Guenther recorded that runners were bringing her items from even further afield.

When she was appointed full time lecturer in Arts at the University of Witwatersrand, Stein-Lessing introduced African art into the curriculum and arranged festivals and exhibitions. One of her students was Cecil Skotnes, who played a key role in training black artists in the 1950s through the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg.25 His wife remembered his excitement when he discovered l’Afrique.26 He thought it the only place in Johannesburg where one could see and talk about African art and it was a source of inspiration to him.27 Esme Berman considered l’Afrique to be a valuable resource for collectors and tourists. (The SA National Gallery recently mounted a major exhibition of the works of Mozambique architect Pancho Guedes, one of their customers28).

Skotnes’s openness was an exception. Swiss collector Udo Horstman remarked that he thought the racism of the middle class white community, which believed that all Africans were”primitive people with no culture”, was shocking. Although hardly anyone else in South Africa was interested in African art in the 1940s and 1950s, Kloppers noted that “it was fairly common for collectors – especially Jewish collectors… who had gone to South Africa as refugees in the 1930s – to purchase works by both South African modernists such as Gerard Sekoto and central African carvers”.29

Feldman, Lowens and Staub were examples of such collectors. Peter Staub, who collected masks and beadwork, told Kloppers he left Germany in the 1930s and found there was virtually no interest in South Africa for either this art form or other aspects of the art produced by southern African traditionalist communities.30 Another was German-trained Irma Stern, whose home, now the Irma Stern Museum, is a treasure trove of objects she picked up on her travels round Africa.31

But present collections did not makeup for past suffering. Stein-Lessing was haunted by her memories. Bernard Sachs, after interviewing her, wrote: “The nightmare of Nazi Germany is always there in the background… (a)nd the present condition of South Africa wasn’t so soothing to this wound.”32 A month later she killed herself. In an obituary a former student, Walter Battiss, remembered her art appreciation classes at the Pretoria Technical College: “For all of us, the dry pages of art history suddenly sprang to life”. He further recalled the encouragement she gave to Alexis Preller and Bettie CilliersBarnard.33 Judith Mason, another student, recalled that they had been young and blind to the value of African art, which Europeans had the eye to see.34 In a 1980 study of contemporary Black art, Ute Scholz points out that “until quite recently, the art of the Black people in South Africa was regarded purely as an ethnological phenomenon. Art historical research had concentrated on the European cultural heritage and on White South African artists…Traditional art and the cultural heritage of the Black people have largely been overlooked.”35 Maria and Leopold did much to change this attitude. Their contribution to the development of an appreciation for African art has recently been recognised by Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica, which has named a section of the museum the Spiegel/ Stein-Lessing African Art Wing.36

Another German-trained Jewish immigrant couple whose appreciation of the value of African art had a major impact on art training were the sculptors Eva and Herbert Vladimir (HV) Meyerowitz. They were credited with having “guided, promoted and inspired the ‘rebirth’… of indigenous West African art activity which had lain virtually dormant for generations.”37 The Meyerowitzes had studied art and woodcarving at the Städtische Kunstgewerbeschule und Handwerker Schule in

Berlin, developed there a keen interest in African art. They immigrated to Cape Town in 1925, when HV was appointed lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and Director of the SA School of Fine and Applied Arts. HV designed and carved the Hyman Liberman Memorial Door in the SA National Gallery, whose theme is the migration of the Jews through the centuries until they found refuge in Cape Town; Eva also fulfilled important civic commissions.38

The couple moved to Basutoland (now Lesotho) in 1935, where HV studied local crafts, publishing a report39 and organising an exhibition of African Arts and Crafts for the International Educational Conference in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Like Stein-Lessing, he was not afraid to air his views, comparing the traditional art on show (good, “because it still fulfilled its purpose”), to those from schools and institutions(“trash … which we, in the name of education, had inflicted on the people of Africa”).40

The following year, the Meyerowitzes took up teaching posts at the Achimota College in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), hoping to promote and study its arts and crafts and use European experience to create local craft industries. The Achimota College became the primary centre of early arts activity.41  In 1943, HV was appointed Acting Director of the West African Institute for Crafts, Industries and Social Studies, and was responsible for the inclusion of art in the Ghanaian curriculum,42 much as Stein-Lessing had done at Pretoria and Wits. He even persuaded the British Colonial Office to release funds to develop craft industries and a pottery.

The Meyerowitzes further surveyed the indigenous arts and crafts of the Gold Coast, where Eva’s attention was first directed to the gold ornaments. She bought art for collectors in South Africa, including Ashanti gold weights for Dr Louis Mirvish, founder of the Cape Town Jewish Museum.

When the college ran out of funding, the couple returned to England, where VV, aged 45, committed suicide on learning of the death of his mother during the Siege of Leningrad. Eva returned to Ghana, where she lived for forty years in the Bono-Tekyiman State and, according to one source, was made Queen Mother in 1950.43 She became a well known anthropologist/ ethnologist, publishing a number of books on the Akan/Ashanti people.44

Another German immigrant influenced by African art was Elza Hermine Dziomba who studied sculpture at the Berlin Kunstakademie and in Paris. A sculptor of great originality and power, she is represented locally and in overseas collections, receiving a prize from London’s Tate Gallery.45 Her friend Marie Stein-Lessing thought her yearning for Africa was probably aroused by the exhibitions of African sculpture in the 1920s.46 Dziomba was invited to join the influential New Group, which was outspoken in its contempt for South African contemporary art.47

Knight wrote that Esme Berman had doubts about Dziomba’s Jewish identity, but her emigration to South Africa from Germany in the year 1933 and her participation in the 1949 exhibition of Jewish Art organised by Dr Abt48 seem to indicate Jewish descent.

Dziomba’s work was influenced by African tribal sculpture, but she in turn had an influence on the work of black artists. Lippy Lipschitz introduced Ernest Mancoba (Ngungunyana), whom he called “a remarkable African artist”, to Dziomba during the mid-1930s. Lipschitz believed that Mancoba’s style was undoubtedly influenced by Elza and himself.49 Mancoba moved to Paris in 1938.50

Siegbert Eick, a German Jewish émigré and art enthusiast, was instrumental in persuading Albert Adams, denied entrance to Michaelis School of Fine Art because he was not white, to apply for a scholarship to London’s Slade School. Eick, a book dealer and antique-dealer, saw Adams’ talent, not his colour. Adams won recognition overseas and for many years lectured in art at London’s City University.51 Eick was friendly with Irma Stern who painted portraits of Eick, and his non-Jewish partner, window-dresser and designer Rudolf von Frielingh – they came to South Africa because neither Jews nor gays were safe in Germany.

It was not only an interest in African art and artists that set the German immigrants apart from their South African contemporaries. The high standards and rigid training their German art schools had demanded provided them with greater knowledge and greater craftsmanship. This made them excellent lecturers, teachers and art critics.

Katrine Harries had an enormous impact on South African art through her role as a teacher. Born in Berlin in 1914, she studied at the Studien-Atelier für Malerei und Plastik on the recommendation of Max Pechstein (Irma Stern’s teacher) and at the Vereinigte Staatschulen fur Freie und Angewandte Kunst. In 1939, following other members of their family, she came to South Africa with her mother, Eva Salinger, herself a trained artist who had studied at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule.52

Harries became a lecturer at Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town, where she started its department of graphic art and instituted a course in typography. Prof. Neville Dubow remarked on her dedication and exacting standards, which she refused to compromise and her specialised knowledge and technical ability, as well as on her talents as a freelance artist and illustrator.53 Harries illustrated over 60 books and her drawings, etchings and lithographs “made her a niche of her own in South African art.”54

Ernest Ullmann, who was born in Munich in 1900 and left for South Africa in 1935 with ten marks in his pocket, also made a niche of his own – “a refugee who became a pioneer”, as Dr O. Simon wrote of him.55 Ullmann worked as assistant artist to the director of the Munich University Anthropological Institute before studying art at the University of Munich and the Academy of Fine Arts, in Berlin, Italy and France. Before the Nazi laws prevented him from working in his field, he had been a successful art director and designer with a studio in Berlin.56

“Johannesburg in the middle Thirties was not the most ideal soil into which a European artist could wish to be transplanted, take roots and blossom out into fulfilment” Ullmann admitted ruefully.57 However, he adapted to the new society, making a name for himself in many different fields. He created monumental sculptures, murals (including a mural in Yad Vashem memorial hall in Johannesburg’s Etz Chayim Congregation), tapestries, appliqué wall hangings, exhibition designs, caricatures, posters, book designs, illustrations (including for poems by the Zulu poet BW Vilakazi and for Dr Albert Schweitzer at Lambarene), oils, graphics, illustrations for SA Jewish War Appeal, for charity Yom Tov cards and for Zionist events.

A refugee who became a pioneer in the field of art criticism was FL Alexander, who wrote the major art historical monograph which became the basic handbook on South African art, Art in South Africa since 1900 / Kuns in Suid-Afrika sedert 1900 (1962), and the  posthumously published South African Graphic art and its techniques.58 Like Stein-Lessing, the Meyerowitzes, Ullmann, Dziomba and Harries, he had also studied in Berlin, first at the Berlin

Kunstakademie and thereafter at the Kunstgewerbeschule, specialising (like the Meyerowitzes and Dziomba) in sculpture. Unable to work because of the Nazi laws, he left Germany for South Africa in 1936, with his wife Malve and young son, each with ten marks, leaving behind his parents, who were to die in Theresienstadt, and his sister, who killed herself.

At first, Alexander worked in the shop called Ace run by his sister and brother in law Marie and Paul Kuhn, artists and book binders. Ace, like L’Afrique, sold ethnic art as well as ceramics and antiques and served as an outlet for their work, like book boxes and jewellery. In France and Germany in the 1920s, the craft of book-binding had undergone a renaissance, as part of the Art Deco movement, but in Cape Town it was an unappreciated art form. Alexander and his wife took over the shop but, as their son was to say, “Business and my father were incompatible”. Alexander would tell the customers “You don’t have to buy, only enjoy yourselves.” Not surprisingly, the shop soon folded.

Alexander taught art at the Continental School of Art, established by Maurice Van Essche in 1948, and at the school of Alfred Krenz. He became art critic for Die Burger, which described him as a friendly person but a rigorous critic who set the same high standard for artists that he did for himself. He detested pretentiousness and inauthenticity and demanded a very high level of workmanship.

In 1951, on the request of the Jewish Board of Deputies, Alexander chaired the selection committee for a Jewish Art exhibition, for which he wrote an erudite introduction.59 A journalist from the Jewish Times visited him in his home and reported finding him busy printing a woodcut he had carved the previous day. Like Stein-Lessing, Alexander had an eye for the beautiful: “About him was as exciting a collection of objects d’art as one could wish for – most of it acquired in Cape Town”. There was an Ashanti urn for gold dust, Ituri arrows, a ceremonial harpoon from the Gilbert Islands, an Egyptian medicine flask with hieroglyphics, a Manchu-Chinese bowl, an eighteenth century Kakemono scroll, Mediaeval German woodcuts, Japanese sword hilts and many paintings, including several by Irma Stern.

In 1958, Dr Louis Mirvish appointed Alexander as the first curator of the Jewish Museum in Cape Town, into the development of which he brought his expert knowledge and fine taste. Alexander could offer expert judgement on subjects as diverse as architecture, interior decoration or postage stamp design. His expertise gained him exposure as an art critic. He became an authenticator of 17th and 18th Century Dutch art and the adviser to the Rembrandt Art Foundation and Sanlam, helping them assemble their fine collections of South African art. He joined the committee of the SA National Art Gallery and became chairman of the Western Province section of the SA Society of Art.

Alexander was a major force in the formation of taste. In his books, his unerring eye for artistic excellence distilled the essence of contemporary art in painting, sculpture and graphic work. Mayor A E Honikman, chairman of the SA National Gallery Board of Trustees, said that through his articles, thousands of people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to come into contact with creative talents and exciting achievements in the art world gained an insight and appreciation of art.60 Although artists complained at times that his judgement was too harsh, he contributed immeasurably to raising the standards of local art and the standards of successive generations of art critics.

For some of these immigrants, the gaps in the South African art world provided them with niches to fill, and they achieved great success. Maria Stein-Lessing has been honoured in the Spiegel/Stein-Lessing African Art Wing of Johannesburg’s Museum Africa. Harries’s contribution to book production in South Africa was acknowledged by four major awards, one of which became known as the Katrine Harries prize.61 Alexander was awarded the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns’s medal for Art Criticism – an entirely new category for this institution – which was presented to him five days before his death in 1971. Ullmann was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medal in 195362 and admitted that “(t)he opportunities offered to me were unique. What I have made of them was limited by my own limitations.”63

However, for many German Jewish artists, the change was traumatic and they were unable to transplant themselves successfully. Some could never shake off the psychic scars left by their experiences in Europe, compounded after the war by survivor guilt. Maria Stein-Lessing, Malva Alexander and HV Meyerowitz committed suicide. Others had difficulty in adapting to the standards of taste and the conservatism of the buying public.

Hanns Ludwig Katz never felt at home in Johannesburg. He had been labelled a “degenerate artist”, with one of his paintings on show at that notorious exhibition, his work removed from the collections in German art galleries. Although a leading German expressionist painter who had exhibited frequently before the rise of Hitler, his reputation had preceded him and he had difficulty in exhibiting his work in South Africa. A press review at a posthumous exhibition admitted that “South African society… showed no interest in Katz’s paintings. It did not appreciate either his expressionist use of colour or his subjects. The South African Academy refused to grant him membership and prevented the acceptance of his pictures at exhibitions.”64 Even offers by his widow and his friend Hans Wongtschowski to donate some of his works to museum collections on permanent loan or as donations were turned down. Yet this was an artist whose work had been acquired by major European galleries before the rise of Hitler! It did not help that the conservatism of the South African art scene led to a certain degree of sympathy towards Nazi concepts of art. In 1940, the Director of the SA National Gallery, Edward Roworth, stated approvingly that “In our time, German art has acquired some of the lowest forms known to the modern movement in general; however, recently Mr Hitler has been putting a stop to this flood of ‘degenerate’ art, leaving the exponents of modernism to choose between the lunatic asylum and the concentration camp”.65

Born in Karlsruhre in 1892, Katz studied at Atelier Matisse, Paris, the Technical University, Karlsruhe, and the Grand Ducal Academy of Art, Karlruhe, Rupbrecht-Karls University, Heidelberg, Humboldt University, Berlin and LudwigMaximilian University, Munich, after which he opened a studio. Although his mother was not Jewish, Nazi regulations identified a Jew as any one with one non-Aryan grandparent.66

The Judische Rundschau of 28 April 1933 summed up the new situation: “The question with which Jews have toyed for hundreds of years – namely whether of not one is a Jew – now no longer exists. It has been decided into the third generation. No one is now at liberty to answer the question of whether or not one wants to be a Jew”.67

At first Katz immersed himself in the activities of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, but with the bankruptcy of his painting and decoration business, it was impossible for him to support himself. He arrived in South Africa on the Stuttgart in 1936, with his new wife – his previous wife, a musician, having died two years previously.

In South Africa, a friend wrote, he lacked both material means and that cultural stimulus which was the breath of life to him, nor could he accept its standards of art.68 Nor could South Africa accept his standards of art, and his qualities as a painter were little recognised.69 He supported himself as a house painter and decorator and was invited to contribute a few articles on colour for the South African Architectural Record.

In Johannesburg, Katz’s artistic output did not decrease but his themes changed. Formerly, he painted figures in expensive oils; now, he no longer felt able to paint people, but turned to landscapes in water colours, some of which he was able to sell.

“Even with no personal commentary from the artist himself, one must interpret this as a reaction to the shock of being uprooted and to the insecurity of living in a strange environment. And he, for whom music was so important, never touched his violin again.”70

Four years after he arrived, Katz died of cancer. Only after his death were some of his paintings shown at local Jewish art exhibitions, organised by the Board of Deputies and  the Johannesburg Women’s Zionist League and reviewed by Ernest Ullmann and Dr Joseph Sachs.

It took half a century for Katz to become recognised in South Africa, and that was only because the attention of the SA National Gallery in Cape Town was drawn to the fact that Germany had held a retrospective of his work. Arrangements were made through the German Consulate-General and his friend Hans Wongtschowski to bring some of his paintings to Cape Town for a major exhibition in 1994. Thus it happened that nearly 55 years after his death, the value of his work was at last appreciated. At that time, not a single South African gallery owned a painting by him and when one, The Eye Operation, was offered to Wits University as a donation, the gift was turned down. The painting found a home in Embden, Germany.

“At last”, said Marilyn Martin, director of the SA National Gallery, “the public has been made aware of the extent and the depth of the work and the contribution of Hanns Ludwig Katz; his place in history has been affirmed and reinstated.”71

But by then, it was too late. This article in a small way is also trying to affirm the extent and depth of the contribution made to South Africa by these German Jewish refugees. Although not an exhaustive list of the artists or their contributions, it is hoped that the information will be sufficient to awaken in our generation an awareness of what we owe to the influence of these émigré talents and intellects, an influence both forgotten and insufficiently acknowledged.

NOTES

  1. Knight, (ed); l’Afrique : A Tribute to Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel, David Krut, 2010, p22. Many thanks to Philip Todres for drawing this and other books to my attention. I would also like to thank Dr Ute Ben Yosef and the Jacob Gitlin Library for making material available for me.
  2. Medawar & D. Pyke, Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime, New York, Arcade Publishers, 2000. They only analysed the scientific contribution, but this ‘gift’ extended to many other areas, including art.
  3. N Dubow, Irma Stern, Struik,1974, p8.
  4. Van Robbroeck, Writing White on Black: Modernism as Discursive Paradigm in South African Writing on Modern Black Art, PhD Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2006. She mentions Einstein’s Negerplastik, (1915), Vatter’s Plastik der Naturvolker (1926) and Von Sydow’s Die Kunst der Naturvolker und der Vorzeit (1923), p95.
  5. Feistel-Rohmeder, quoted in H Proud and W. Snyman, in Hanns Ludwig Katz, South African National Gallery, 1993, p38
  6. Alice Marqis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Lund Humphries 2006, pp107ff
  7. H. Proud and W. Snyman, 1993, pp40, 47
  8.  Ibid., p41
  9. Ibid., p47
  10. Ibid., p49
  11. Katrine Harries Collection, University of Cape Town contains the marriage certificate of her maternal grandfather, Gottlieb Salinger, from the Gesamtarchiv der Deutschen Juden.
  12. H O Simon, ‘Settlers of the 1930s: Ernest Ullmann as an Example’, in Jewish Affairs, March 1956, p21
  13. Dubow, 1974, pp9-10
  14. J. Carmen, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Wits University Press, 2006, p216
  15. Johannesburg exhibition programme (28 March – 24 April 1910), South African National Union Schedule and Lectures, in J. Carmen, 2006. Quoted chapter note 49, p325. The note also refers to an article in South Africa, 16 July 1910, which does acknowledge Bushman art which, “if primitive… are far in advance of anything else done by so uncivilised a race” – this is attributed to the fact that the Bushmen had so much leisure before the advent of the European and Bantu races.
  16. L. Alexander, Art in South Africa since 1900, Balkema, 1962, vii
  17. Kloppers, ‘South Africa’s Culture of Collecting. The Unofficial History’”, African Arts, Vol 37 no. 4 Winter 2004, pp20-21
  18. Knight, 2010, p22.
  19. , pp9-10
  20. Girsheik, ‘Maria Stein-Lessing: Setting the stage for African Art’ in Knight, 2010, p37
  21. Jacobson, ‘l’Afrique: A Tribute to Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel’, Jewish Affairs, Vol. 64, no. 1, 2009, p52
  22. Girsheik in N.Knight, 2010, p38
  23. Knight, pp22, 41
  24. N Leibhammer, ‘A fragmented picture The collections of Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel’, in Knight, 2010, p47. Luthuli’s letter was dated 7 June 1946.
  25. Berman, Art and Artists in South Africa, Balkema, 1970, p17
  26. Knight, ‘Hidden Treasures’, in Knight, 2010, p19
  27. Leibhammer, in Knight, 2010, p53
  28. Knight, 2010, p15
  29. S Kloppers, 2004, p19-20
  30. Ibid.
  31. Nobody realised the extent, diversity and value of her collections until the catalogue was compiled. Catalogue of the Collections of the Irma Stern Museum, UCT, 1971.
  32. Quoted in L. Jacobson, 2009, p52.
  33. Sichel, From Refugee to Citizen, Balkema, Cape Town, 1966, p65.
  34. Quoted in L. Jacobson., 2009, p52.
  35. U. Scholz, Phafa –Nyika: Contemporary Black Art in South Africa with special reference to the Transvaal, Art Archives,University of Pretoria, No 4, 1980, p3
  36. Knight, p31
  37. H.Honikman, in HV Meyerowitz, (1900-1945) The Hyman Liberman Memorial Door, SA National Gallery, Cape Town, 1970, p5.
  38. Eva also carved a relief in wood of Lady Anne Barnard in the foyer of the Claremont Civic Centre while for the University of Cape Town Vladimir carved stone urns with images of professors and teak fanlights.
  39. V.Meyerowitz, A Report on the Possibilities of the Development of Village Crafts in Basutoland (Morija Printing Works, 1936), Wikipedia.
  40. Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz, Wikipedia
  41. Coe, ‘Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast’, Africa Today – Volume 49, Number 3, Fall Indiana University Press 2002, pp23-44 muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v049/ 49.3coe.html
  42. Antubam, ‘The story of modern development in Ghanaian arts’, pp.197-215, in: Ghana’s Heritage of Culture. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1963. DT510.4.A6X 1963. OCLC 01326505. www.sil.si.edu/silpublications/…/ maadetail.cfm?subCategory
  43. P. Long, Female Aspects Of Deity: Searching For Lady Wisdom. University College, Lampeter, Wales, 1995.
  44. Meyerowitz, The Sacred State of the Akan, (1951); Traditions of Origin. (1952); The Akan of Ghana, Their Ancient Beliefs (1958); The Divine Kingship in Ghana and Ancient Egypt (1960); And yet Women Once Ruled Supreme (1986).
  45. L.Alexander, 1962, p162; G. Ogilvie, The Dictionary or South African Painters and Sculptors, 1988,198.
  46. Knight, p101
  47. Berman, 1970, p209
  48. Knight, ‘South African Jewish Sculptors’, In Zionist Record and SA Jewish Chronicle, New Year Annual, 25.9.1970, p89.
  49. Quoted in van Robbroeck, 2006, p225.
  50. artnet.de/library/05/0536/t053693
  51. With thanks to Philip Todres for the information and Christopher Peter, Director, Irma Stern Museum (personal communication, 13.11.2009). Von Frielingh was the Dubowdress shop’s window dresser and designed its swing tags; Marilyn Martin, ‘Albert Adams, Obituary’, in Guardian, 5.1.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/mews/2007/jan/05/ guardianobituaries.southafrica.
  52. Katrine Harries 1914-1978, Catalogue, South African National Gallery, undated 1978?
  53. Dubow, ‘Katrine Harries’ in Toerien, Heine and George Duby, Our Art 3, Foundation for Education, Science and technology, Lantern, n.d., pp93-4.
  54. L.Alexander, 1962, pp163, 146
  55. Sichel, p65
  56. Ullmann, Designs on Life, Howard Timmins, Cape Town, 1970, pp60, 69.
  57. , p249
  58. This section owes a great deal to U. Ben Yosef and G Schrire, “FL Alexander: His Life and Contributions”, Jewish Affairs, 2005, pp 60, 20
  59. Jewish Art Exhibition, Cape Town 1951, 29th October – 14th November. I must thank Larna Bronstein for bringing the catalogue to my attention. Her father, Ben Jaffe, loaned many of the works on display.
  60. He held strong views on the value of what he called Africana art and dismissed unenlightened collectors  who regarded themselves as connoisseurs as possessing “the barbarism of fundamental ignorance”. When the South African Government commissioned him to value the Africana collection of Dr William Fehr, he placed such low values on the work that the owner was said to have been most annoyed and RF Kennedy, the Director of the Africana Museum, Johannesburg, was requested to revalue them. Frank Bradlow, ‘Tribute to FL Alexander’, Jewish Affairs, vol 29,  no 8, 1974, p141.
  61. including the Cape Tercentenary Award for lithography and the SA Library Association’s Hoogenhout Award for the best-illustrated children’s book.
  62. Alexander, 1962, p169
  63. Ullmann,1970, p257
  64. Information in the press at the exhibition of his work 1961,
  65. Proud and W. Snyman,1993, p66 65 H. Proud and W. Snyman,1993, p61
  66. , pp14-15
  67. , p42
  68. Dr Joseph Sachs, ‘Hans Katz’, in Jewish Affairs, September 1947, p24.
  69. Jeppe, South African Artists 1900-1962, Afrikaanse PersBoekhandel, Johannesburg, 1963, p46.
  70. Wongtchowski, in H. Proud and W. Snyman,1993, p64.
  71. Marilyn Martin, Foreword, Proud and W. Snyman, 1993, p7.

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