Biographie
Fritz Solomonski, born in 1899 in Germany to a Jewish family, is a renowned artist and art historian. He studied in Berlin, where he earned a doctorate on German Expressionism and trained in painting under Eugen Spiro and Willy Jaeckel. With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, he fled Germany to settle in London.
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Between 1940 and 1941, Solomonski was interned in the Hutchinson "artists' camp" on the Isle of Man. There, he signed the famous letter "Art Cannot Live Behind Barbed Wire," published in the New Statesman and Nation in August 1940, which pleaded for the release of the interned artists.
In January 1944, he became the first salaried secretary and curator of the Ben Uri Art Society. Despite an exhibition at the Kensington Art Gallery in 1949 and the efforts of his patron Sir Samuel Courtauld to persuade the Tate to acquire his work, his career struggled to take off in England.
In 1954, he emigrated to the United States and spent time in Cuba in the late 1950s, where he exhibited at the National Gallery in Havana. Fritz Solomonski died in 1980 in New Hampshire. His German-language correspondence with his mother, who escaped to Palestine, is carefully preserved in the archives of the Ben Uri Art Society.
