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On The Painter Robert Hammerstiel

J.P. Hodin

    At last, for the first time since 1945, a man whose pictures are images of the naked human condition. Up to now this has been repressed. Now it is here. Hammerstiel is the legitimate successor to Munch, Matisse or Ensor.

    In the autumn of 1986 I saw an exhibition of oils, drawings and graphics by the painter Robert Hammerstiel- in a gallery in north-west London. The exhibition made a very strong impression on me and the following day I returned to examine the works carefully. These pictures radiated something very powerful and convincing, something impressively frank, a confession of the most personal kind, certainly, but valid in some all-embracing sense at the same time. Soon after that I met Hammerstiel at his home and studio in Ternitz near Vienna, where I saw many more of his paintings and wood engravings, and I was convinced that I was dealing with an artist of the first rank. His personality is mirrored without refraction in the work. While other artists shift their positions like shadows there is in his work an intense luminosity in the darkness. We find this also in Munch of whom Hammerstiel so much reminds me (Munch: "Now it's the turn of the shadows"), in his threatening shadows and in the deep humanity that is their common quality as artists. There was no playful experimentation here, no 'I’art pour ‘I'art', no craving for novelty and excitement, just seriousness.

    And in spite of everything that is tragic in human life, there is art and there are individuals who produce works of art: timeless works, unseasonal works. And if we ask ourselves what art is, then we may answer with Heidegger 'Art is real in the work of art. In its essence it is an origin and nothing else; a way distinguished from others, being the truth and historically becoming.' And Heidegger asks, 'Are we each historically in our being an origin? Do we know, or do we take notice of the essence of origin? Or, in our responses to art, do we just refer to cultivated knowledge of the past?' (Holzwege, Frankfurt a, M. 1950). Hölderlin, another great German, has expressed it poetically: 'What dwells near the origin, is unwilling to forsake the place.' (The Walk IV). No words can capture the essence of Hammerstiel's art better than these,

J.P. Hodin

London, 1988

Hodin, Josef Paul

Date born: 1905

Place Born: Prague, Czechoslovakia

Date died: 1995

Place died: London, United Kingdom

    Art critic and popularizer of modern art in England. Hodin’s father, Edouard David Hodin, was a German Jew working in Czechoslovakia as a photographer at the time of his son’s birth. His mother was Rose Klug (Hodin). At his father’s insistence, Hodin studied law at Charles University, Prague, graduating with a J.D., in 1924. He never practiced, however, entering the Art Academy of Dresden in 1931 and the Art Academy of Berlin studying art, 1932-1933. Hodin settled in Stockholm during World War II, joining the Czechoslovak Resistance there. His first books on art were published in Swedish. He then moved to London working as press attaché to the Norwegian government-in-exile. Following the war, Hodin returned to art and criticism. He married [Doris] Pamela Simms in 1945 and began a study of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 1946. He wrote his edition on the artist Edvard Munch in 1948, in Swedish, Edvard Munch: Nordens genius. Hodin developed a friendship with the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, who lived in London from 1938 to 1954. This led him on a career of writing on proto- and Expressionist artists. He met the artists Isaac Grunewald and Ludwig Meidner and wrote monographs on them as well. Hodin also brought to the attention of the British public Germanic artists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann and, to a lesser extent, Kurt Schwitters, Naum Garbo and Moholy-Nagy. Hodin was appointed the first director of studies and librarian of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1949. He continued to lecture, emphasizing in particular the artists outside France, which dominated British art sensibility.In 1954 he won the first international prize for art criticism at the Venice Biennale for his work on Surrealism and Francis Bacon. Hodin assumed co-editorship of the art periodical, Quadrum, in 1956, exploring the avant-garde movements in art. The same year, 1956, his work of esthetics, The Dilemma of Being Modern was published. Hodin and Pamela lived in Cornwall, where she was raised. There he met the artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, both members of the St Ives artists’ group. Hodin wrote studies of them, again, based upon first-hand information, Ben Nicholson: The Meaning of His Art, in 1957, and Barbara Hepworth in 1961. Hodin relinquished his Quadrum duties in 1966, issuing his Oskar Kokoschka: A Biography, one of six pieces he wrote about the artist, the same year. A second major esthetics treatment, Modern Art and the Modern Mind, appeared in 1972. He was made an honorary professor of Vienna University in 1975.

    Hodin's methodology is an example of Geistesgeschichte the notion that an artist is a representative of the spirit of his age (Kleinbauer, 1970). Hodin's biographical studies are characterized by a novelistic treatment of the artist's character employing strong pyschology.

Home Country: Czechoslavakia/ United Kingdom

Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. "Geistesgeschichte and Art History." Art Journal 30, no. 2 (Winter 1970-1971): 148-153; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 154; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 98; Kern, Walter. J. P. Hodin, European Critic: Essays. London: Cory, Adams and Mackay, 1965; [obituary:] “Josef Hodin.” Times (London) December 8, 1995;

Bibliography: Edvard Munch: Nordens genius. Stolkholm: Ljus, 1948; The Dilemma of Being Modern: Essays on Art and Literature. London: 1956; Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time: A Biographical Study. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966; Modern Art and the Modern Mind. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972.