Hans Feibusch was born in Frankfurt in 1898. He was introduced to art, museums, theatre and the opera by his family from a young age. After returning from his service in the army and war in Russia, which he described as "less fighting but a good deal of starvation”, he went on to study art in Berlin and Paris, before settling back in Frankfurt to paint and exhibit his works. Feibusch won the Prussian State Gold Medal for his work in 1931. However, in 1933 he was forced to emigrate to Britain with an Englishwoman, Sidonie Gestetner (his soon to be wife) after the Nazi regime openly brought their hatred of modern art and the Jewish people to Germany. Feibusch’s work was exhibited in the Entartete Kunst or the Degenerate Art exhibition, the notorious 1937 show that the Nazi regime setup to ‘educate’ the public on the ‘degeneration’ of modern art and German society. Feibusch’s work was categorised under the exhibition’s 'Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul' and was displayed alongside Kokoschka and Chagall.

After some years of living and working in Britain, Feibusch became renowned for his Church murals in Southern England, commissioned by the Anglican Church. This brought about his first commission, The Footwashing (1938) for the Methodist Church in Colliers Wood High Street, London. It gained the attention of the Bishop of Chichester, Dr George Bell, who would in the following decades commission many mural works by Feibusch for Chichester Cathedral. In total Feibusch completed works in thirty Anglican Churches over the course of his career.

Spiritual and religious themes

He was informed by German Expressionism and was specifically inspired by Max Beckmann. Feibusch’s main vehicle in his works was colour, but he found a skillful balance of using colour and simplified yet technical forms to highlight and evoke his work’s spiritual and religious themes. This is executed in his work, Two Angels, signed with the artist’s initials and dated ’53, being offered in this sale. In this work, Feibusch has used warm hues of yellows and oranges to suggest the angels being bathed by a heavenly light and has achieved a balance and complementation in the teals, blues and pinks that describe these divine forms. There is an effortlessness to the two divine beings hovering in the air playing their other-worldly hymns, their bodies falling and resting in space, with gravity having no effect on them.

In another way, Feibusch presents something ethereal and angelic in his lithograph print, Three Male Figures, dated 1948. Feibusch uses the negative space and the ground of the paper where no print has been made, to create irregular shapes that swirl around the three laurel-headed figures. The men seem blissful in their abstracted and spiritual surroundings, eyes closed with heads all directed in different directions.

Not all of his works were rooted in religion. As curator and author David Coke puts it, Feibusch's work has many themes, but most of his work could be put into three main groups: the works of the mythological world, the religious works and narratives of the bible, as well as the natural world that he saw around him.

Turning to sculpture in the 1970s

Despite becoming established from his mural works, Feibusch experimented in a variety of mediums: paintings, gouaches, lithographs and drawings. In the 1970s, after troubles with his vision, suffering from glaucoma and cataracts, the artist turned to sculpture after his colour sensation was impeded. This auction includes three works, Sir Robert Mayer, Peter Bander Van Duren and Saint John the Baptist. Feibusch modelled most of his sculptures in clay, then cast in resin, and subsequently bronzed. He described his “playing” with clay as well as desire and “craving for round forms” as giving him new ideas and shapes to explore. Although he regained most of his eyesight later on following surgery, Feibusch continued sculpting for the following decades of his life. The bust of author and co-founder of Colin-Smythe publishing, Peter Bander Van Duren, was one of the first of his post-operation works, dated 1977.

In the early 1990s, after many decades, Feibusch formally left the Anglican Church and returned to Judaism in the later part of his life. He passed away in 1998 and was the last of the artists that had their work featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that Feibusch received major retrospectives of his work exhibited in Britain. These retrospectives at Brighton Polytechnic in 1988 and Pallant House Gallery in 1995, brought reappraisal and interest in the German artist’s work, that continues today.

Colin Smythe

All the Feibusch works in our upcoming Art Online sale have come from the collection of Colin Smythe and some of the works have been dedicated to Smythe by Feibusch himself. Colin Smythe is known as a bibliographer of Irish authors including WB Yeats. He also works as a literary agent and publisher, founding his own publishing house in 1966, and is based in Buckinghamshire. He published the first five novels by Terry Pratchett and later acted as his agent. Colin has also published other fantasy works by the likes of William Barnwell and Hugh Cook.

Auction Details

Friday 30 June | 10.30am BST
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 2JE

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