Kormis Fred (1 results)

First Edition. 15 x 20cm 6pp, good card-covered exhibition catalogue, some minor browning to covers, with two black and white reproductions plus a list of eighteen works. Sculptor Fritz (Fred) Kormis was born into a Jewish family to an Austrian father and German mother in Frankfurt, Germany in 1897. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to a sculpture workshop. During the First World War, he was drafted into the Austrian army, and in 1915 was captured, wounded and imprisoned for five years in Siberia, an experience which profoundly shaped the rest of his life and career. After escaping in 1920 and procuring a Swiss passport in Vladivostok, he returned to Frankfurt, where he resumed his career, married, and held solo exhibitions in Berlin and Frankfurt. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he moved first to Holland, where he held solo exhibitions in Amsterdam and the Hague and taught refugee children, then, in 1934 to England, where he held his first solo exhibition the same year at the Bloomsbury Gallery.