Ludwig Meidner, sketchbook, 1940/41
Ludwig Meidner, sketchbook, 1940/41
Fred Uhlmann is a Sunday painter who has gone on to paint on weekdays as well and who, without too much effort, has surreptitiously assumed the routine and renown of the weekday painter.
Ludwig Meidner, Aphorismen zur Kunst [Aphorisms on Art], 1950-57, Institut Mathildenhöhe, Städtische Kunstsammlung Darmstadt, at Stadtarchiv Darmstadt, ST 45 Meidner 1899
The lawyer Fred Uhlman was an active member of the Social Democratic Party who immigrated to Paris in 1933, where he began to paint. In 1936 he moved to England, where he married Diana Croft, the daughter of a prominent politician who became an undersecretary of state in the Churchill war ministry. Uhlman was one of the founders of the Free German League of Culture in Great Britain. His memoirs, "The Making of an Englishman" (1960), also brought him recognition as a writer.
Uhlman took drawing lessons from Meidner and supported him, for example, by organizing portrait commissions for him. One of the subjects of these portraits was Uhlman’s father-in-law Michael Croft, later Lord Croft. Moreover, during Meidner’s internment a number of his paintings were stored in Uhlman’s studio. Nevertheless, Meidner’s relationship to Uhlman was an ambivalent one. Meidner distanced himself from the Free German League of Culture because he regarded it as too heavily dominated by communist thinking.
Further reading:
Presler, Gerd/Riedel, Erik, Ludwig Meidner. Werkverzeichnis der Skizzenbücher / Catalogue Raisonné of His Sketchbooks, Munich 2013.
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