Solomonski Fritz

Biography

Fritz Solomonski, born in 1899 in Germany to a Jewish family, was a renowned artist and art historian. He continued his studies in Berlin, where he obtained a doctorate on German Expressionism and received training in painting under Eugen Spiro and Willy Jaeckel. In the 1930s, faced with the rise of Nazism, he fled Germany to settle in London. 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. Klaus Hinrichsen, a fellow art historian, points out that, although Solomonski was a better singer than an artist, he had undeniable talent. In January 1944 he became the first secretary and salaried 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 in England struggled to take off. In 1954 he emigrated to the United States and spent the late 1950s in Cuba, where he exhibited at the National Gallery in Havana. Fritz Solomonski died in 1980 in New Hampshire. His correspondence in German with his mother, who escaped to Palestine, is carefully preserved in the archives of the Ben Uri Art Society.