Lore Feldberg Eber

The Art and Legacy of Lore Feldberg-Eber (1895 - 1966) curatorial statement by Ruth Howard The paintings of my grandmother (or Oma as we called her) have always hung on the walls of my parents’ house and later in my and my brothers’ homes. There were many more oil paintings, watercolours, sketches and life drawings wrapped up, stacked in closets, stowed in aging portfolios and piled in drawers. I always worried about what would become of such an abundance of surplus art. This sense of the homelessness of my Oma’s art was entangled in the fact that she and her family were German Jews who escaped to England in 1938 leaving behind half a lifetime of Lore’s artwork. Almost all the work on our walls and in closets had been produced in England in the second part of her life. In 2006 my mother and I travelled to Blankenese, Hamburg, for an exhibition of my Oma’s work, curated by art historian, Maike Bruhns. There I learned more about Lore Feldberg’s early career: how she was determined from an early age to study art, how she gained respect from critics as a “serious woman artist”, something that was considered unusual in Germany at the time; how she was part of a group of avant-garde artists (the Hamburg Secession) breaking away from academic traditions; how she became a lively hostess, attracting a circle of artists and bohemian friends to her home. I realized how rare her surviving pre-war works were. Some were in private homes, some had been found in flea markets, and a few somehow managed to migrate from Germany. The focus of that exhibition and of Maike Bruhns’ scholarship was on the pre-war work, when Lore Feldberg-Eber had a recognized place in a society and its narrative of art history. Although most of her still-existing work was done in England during or after the war, no one seems interested in that. The consensus of German academics is apparently that the members of the Hamburg Secession had either been murdered or that their innovative spirits had been destroyed. Maike Bruhns writes of my Oma that after the war she “no longer had the strength to start afresh” and that “the loss of her Hamburg paintings deeply discouraged her and paralyzed her creativity.” While this wouldn’t be at all surprising, who can say whether, under other circumstances, she would have continued to experiment or would have settled into a more consistent mature style? At any rate, she didn’t die and nor did she stop painting. Far from it, as our cupboards and walls testify. She continued to paint and draw - always from life - in a rapid and unpretentious style and with an eye for the beauty, pleasure and sadness in the everyday. I only knew my Oma when I was a small child and she was a bedridden and fragile older woman, but the force of her personality and talent can be seen in the trace she left through three subsequent generations. My mother learned from her, I learned from my mother, and my daughter learned from me: a way of looking and making marks on paper. Living in Toronto and as Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, I meet and work with refugees from lands torn by war and violence - some of them artists, all of them with uprooted but persistent skills and passions. This leads me to reflect on my Oma and the affirmation of life that her continued work represents. It’s been wonderful to spend time with my mother, going through all the drawings and paintings and listening to the memories they evoke. And it is a huge pleasure for our family to take Lore Feldberg-Eber’s art out of the cupboards and private realm and share it - in this place where we live, far from Germany and England - with friends, family and Island neighbours and visitors. The exhibition is organized into 4 sections: Lore Feldberg-Eber’s surviving Hamburg works, her wartime works from Cambridge, her post-war works from London, and her Toronto legacy in the work of her daughter (Antonie Howard), her grand-daughter (myself – Ruth Howard) and her great-grand-daughter (Helah Cooper). HAMBURG: Eleonore (Lore) Feldberg was born in Hamburg in 1885, to Amalie and Emil Daniel Feldberg. They were an unconventional and progressive middle class Jewish business family, who were supportive of their daughter’s desire to be an artist. At the age of 19 Lore began her artistic training at the Art School of Gerda Koppel in Hamburg. Her teachers there, Franz Nölken, Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann and Paul Kayser, had spent time in Paris and were influenced by artists such as Cézanne and Renoir. In 1917, Lore attended the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Munich, and then studied for another two years in Berlin at a women’s art school run by Dora Hitz. From 1919 on, she worked as a freelance artist in Hamburg, where she joined the Hamburg Secession, an association of artists who were experimenting with new and freer styles of painting. In 1921, Lore married Moritz Eber, a Hamburg businessman. After their marriage she continued to paint, in a style influenced by post-impressionism. Her work was shown at numerous exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin, often with the works of other members of the Hamburg Secession. In 1927, Moritz bought a property in the village of Blankenese, just outside Hamburg, on one side of which stood a thatched farmer’s cottage. This cottage was renovated by the Bauhaus architect Karl Schneider. Later, Moritz commissioned Karl Schneider to build a modern studio for his wife, where hey livedwith their three daughters. After 1933, their home became a gathering place for artists from the, by then disbanded, Hamburg Secession, including Ahlers- Hestermann, Paul Kayser, Alma del Banco, Willem Grimm, Kurt Löwengard, Erich Hartmann and Ivo Hauptmann. Lore continued to paint after the Nazis took power, exhibiting after 1935 at the Jewish Museum of Franz Landsberger and at the Jewish Kulturbund in Hamburg. In November 1938, an exhibitions of her watercolours from Italy, in Harungstrasse, was destroyed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, on November 9,1938. In December 1938, the family escaped to England. They left all their possessions behind, including Lore’s entire body of artistic work. Other close relatives and friends of theirs, unable to escape Germany, were killed in or survived concentration camps. Others committed suicide during or after the war. Years later, one Blankenese neighbour recounted having witnessed Nazi soldiers drive up to the Blankenese studio, roughly pile Lore’s paintings into a truck and drive away. CAMBRIDGE: Lore and her daughters moved to Cambridge, because Lore’s brother, Wilhelm Feldberg had been able to sponsor them and he was a professor at Cambridge University. They lived in a small apartment over a newsagent. Without cooks and nannies, Lore learned to manage for herself in the kitchen, and she and her children saw more of each other. The family took in another German Jewish refugee girl, Eva Jungmann (later Crawley), who was evacuated from London and shared a bedroom with Antonie. Moritz Eber was interned on the Isle of Man for three years as an “enemy alien”. After he was released, he worked in a munitions factory near Welwyn Garden City, between Cambridge and London and only came home at weekends. An accomplished amateur violinist, he was the lead second violin in the Garden City orchestra. Meanwhile, Lore continued to paint: in their small living room, or venturing out to capture nearby landscapes. She did portraits of students and fellow refugees, as well as earning some money through painting portraits of the children of local English families. She also gave art classes at a girl’s boarding school and at the school of architecture at Cambridge University. LONDON: After the war, the family moved to a large house in Highgate, London. Lore was never again well-known or part of an artist movement, as she had been in pre-war Germany. She did, however, take part in some exhibitions, for example at the Bloomsbury Gallery and London’s Royal Academy. She also reconnected with other Hamburg artists who had managed to escape from Germany: Erich Kahn, Maria Wolff, former secessionists Paul Henle and Hilde and Paul Hamann. She would join these friends for regular life drawing sessions. She also resumed her habit of travelling to Southern Europe as well as exploring England, sometimes with a friend or with her husband, Moritz. She lived in the house in Highgate for the rest of her life, continuing to paint and draw at home and everywhere she went - even after she had had several strokes and found it hard to control her brush or pencil. She died on 27 September 1966 in London. TORONTO: Lore Feldberg-Eber’s three daughters are still alive: Dora Helene (or Hela Buchthal) lives in Maine, Anna Sophie (or Anne Tajfel) lives in Oxford, England, and Antonie (or Toni Howard) moved to Toronto with her husband, Ian, in 1966. My aunt Hela, became a serious painter in her middle years, creating huge vibrantly colourful canvases. My mother, Toni, continues to draw and paint prolifically in her Thornhill home: life drawings and still lifes, for the sheer joy of doing so. As I grew up I too absorbed a way to draw and paint and eventually became a theatre designer. As such, I sketch out characters and ideas from my imagination, and still love to sketch from life, often on scraps of paper or in the margins of documents.

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