Hans Feibusch (lots 45-75)

To stand before an empty wall as in a trance… to let shapes cloudily emerge, to draw scenes and figures, to let light and dark rush out of the surface, to make them move outward or recede into the depths, this was bliss. (Hans Feibusch)

Introduction
The son of a Frankfurt dentist, Feibusch had fought for the Kaiser in the First World War, emerged alive from the Russian Front, and had studied with Carl Hofer in Berlin and with Emil Othon Friesz and André Lhote in Paris. Come the 1930s he had a dealer in Berlin, had exhibited widely, and been awarded the German Grand State Prize for painting by the Prussian Academy of Arts. But Hitler’s rise to power threatened it all. In a meeting of the Frankfurter Künstlerbund which he attended in 1933, a new member appeared in Nazi uniform, jumped on a table and pointing at the Jews with his riding crop said: ‘You’ll never show again’. It was the moment Feibusch determined to emigrate.

Arriving in London Feibusch had his first one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, and was soon a member of the London Group. Further exhibitions with Lefevre followed; then in 1938 he completed his first large scale mural: Footwashing in the Methodist Chapel, Colliers Wood. It was a commission that would result in Feibusch becoming the leading muralist in Britain. Working both for the Church of England and local municipalities, over the next thirty-five years he decorated some forty plus churches, civic buildings and private houses across England and Wales. His work contributed hugely to the re-generation of public buildings after the War and the debate on art in public places. But it also took him away from the Mayfair-centric contemporary art world and its critics, and thus to a large extent out of the public eye and the commercial art world. After his last exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1951 he didn’t have another gallery show until the late 1970s.

Instead Feibusch threw himself into large scale mural projects, designing the decorations for the tea room at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1946, and championed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, embarked on a series of commissions to decorate bomb-damaged churches that were being restored and re-built. These included, for example, designs for a font for the baptistry of Christ Church and St Stephen’s, Battersea (lots 66 & 67), and a study for a mural at Priory Church, Christchurch, Dorset (lot 70). Feibusch also wrote Mural Painting a treatise on the history, theory and technique of the art in 1946, and contributed the foreward to the catalogue of the first exhibition of the Society of Mural Painters held in 1950.

A consummate draughtsman, whether sketching his surroundings (lots 53-56), or studying the model before him (lots 57-60), he captures each scene with a fine eye for detail. And as a colourist, he responded to the light of his surroundings with a breathtaking freshness and immediacy (lots 45-52). But above all it is the manner in which he places the human form at the heart of his work with such ease and fluidity that leaves an abiding impression on the viewer and makes his work so compelling today.

Exhibition Reference: the full reference for the travelling exhibition abbreviated in lots 45-75 is: Chichester, Pallant House Gallery; London, Ben Uri Art Gallery; Northampton, Museum and Art Gallery; Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery; Newport, Museum & Art Gallery, Hans Feibusch, The Heat of Vision, 1995-97

HANS FEIBUSCH (GERMAN-BRITISH 1898-1998)
STILL LIFE WITH A CLASSICAL BUST ADORNED WITH A LAUREL WREATH AND A BRANCH OF APPLES
singed with initals HF and dated 65 lower right
gouache on card
37.4 x 51cm; 14¾ x 20in
unframed