This event is organised as part of the Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century event series. Visit the exhibition page to find out more.

When Fritz (later Fred) Kormis arrived in England (via Holland) in 1934 he was among more than 300 artists, around one-sixth of them sculptors, who found refuge from Nazism in Britain.

This talk situates Kormis within this wider context and among a cohort of refugee sculptors who included Benno Elkan, Georg Ehrlich and Willi Soukop, among many others.

It explores his interaction with émigré networks and their pre- and interwar exhibition platforms, most notably, the groundbreaking Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, held at the New Burlington Galleries, London in 1938, intended as a riposte to the famous Nazi Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) show, mounted in Munich the previous year.  Simultaneously, it also seeks to answer why in other ways, Kormis stands apart from other refugee sculptors, working largely beyond the émigré sphere and how this affected his pre- and postwar career trajectory.

About the Speaker

Sarah MacDougall is Director of Scholarship at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum and heads the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish Refugee and Immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900, and collections and exhibition programming. She has a particular interest in refugee sculptors and has lectured and published extensively on this subject. A committee member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (University of London), she co-edited Yearbook 18 on Émigrés and the Applied Arts.