A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of Britain's preeminent German Jewish émigré artists

The Wiener Holocaust Library is showing an exhibition about German Jewish refugee sculptor Fred Kormis. He was born Fritz Kormis in Frankfurt in 1894 to Jewish Austrian parents. He served in the Austrian army in World War I and became a prisoner of war in Siberia for five years from 1915, first as a prisoner of the Russians, then of Imperial Japan during the Russian Civil War. This terrible experience provided the inspiration for much of his later work.

In 1920 he managed to escape and made his way to Germany, where he became an artist. As Jews and radical socialists, Kormis and his wife Rachel fled to the Netherlands in 1933. There he found work in an art school and had well-received exhibitions in Amsterdam and The Hague. In 1934 the couple moved to London, where they lived in relative poverty. Kormis worked as a storefront window dresser to make ends meet. Many of the works he left behind in Germany were either damaged or lost.

In the 1930s, Kormis held his first British exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery, followed by a show at the Ben Uri. He was one of the 64 artists who showed works at the famous Exhibition of 20th Century German Art (1938) at Mayfair's New Burlington Galleries. The show became famous as a response to the Nazi's Entartete Kunst (Degenerative Art) exhibition held in Munich the previous year.

Much of the work Kormis produced in Britain, along with all his large-scale pieces, was destroyed when his studio was bombed in 1940. It was a huge blow, but didn't prevent him from continuing to create. "From 1949 he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions," writes Ben Uri's director of scholarship, Sarah MacDougall, in her essay The Handicaps of Exile: Refugee Sculptors in Britain. In 1951, he participated in Ben Uri’s major Festival of Britain: Anglo-Jewish Exhibition, 1851-1951.

He was best known as a sculptor, but was also noted for his prints, woodcuts and medallion portraits. Perhaps his greatest work, however, was on a very different scale: five large figures making up To the Memory of Prisoners of War and Victims of Concentration Camps 1914–1945, placed in Gladstone Park in north-west London in 1969. It was the first memorial in Britain to the victims of Nazi concentration camps. Kormis died in 1986, in his early 90s, preceded by the death of his wife in 1971.

Sculpting the 20th Century – which is laid out chronologically, but with artworks arranged by genre and accompanied by photographs, documents from the Wiener archives and biographical information – provides a powerful and moving tribute to one of the leading German Jewish refugee artists who came to Britain in the 1930s.

By David Herman

Header image: Fred Kormis in his studio c.1980s © Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

Fred Kormis: Sculpting the 20th Century runs until Thursday 6 February. Wiener Holocaust Library, London, WC1B 5DP. wienerlibrary.co.uk