Fred Uhlman (1901-1985)
FPost war Uhlman became known as an ‘Anglo German Welshman’ for his brooding landscapes
RED UHLMAN was a writer and artist, whose semiautobiographical novella, Reunion was adapted for film by Harold Pinter in 1989 and for stage by Ronan Wilmot in 2010. Reunion tells the story of an impossible friendship between the narrator Hans Schwarz, son of a Jewish doctor, and Konradin von Hohenfels, a young aristocrat, during the rise of the Nazi regime in Stuttgart. “What prevails is strength of spirit,” said the JC reviewer when it was reissued in 2016.
Fred (Manfred) Uhlman, had been born into a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family in Stuttgart in 1901. He studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Tübingen, graduating in 1923 with a doctorate in civil and canon Law. In 1927 he joined the Social Democrat Party. Following the Nazi party’s election to power Uhlman moved frequently, armed with a gun before fleeing to Paris 10 days later. His parents, who stayed behind, perished in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 and his sister Erna committed suicide en route to Auschwitz in 1944. Unable to work as a lawyer in Paris, Uhlman began painting. Soon celebrated by critics as a “naïve” artist for his “pictorial fantasies” and “poetic, childlike vision”, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie le Niveau in 1936.
Uhlman spent April to September of that year in the Spanish fishing village of Tossa del Mar, where he met his future wife, Diana, daughter of a British Tory politician, but upon the outbreak of the Spanish civil war he immigrated to Britain, penniless and, as he later wrote, barely able to say more in English than “ba ba black sheep.”
In 1938 the Uhlmans settled in Hampstead where they aided many refugee artists fleeing to England, and co-founded the Free German League of Culture —”a German, anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist, non-party, refugee organisation” designed “to preserve and advance Free German culture” in the UK.
In 1940, Uhlman was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. Over the next six months he produced more than 150 drawings in charcoal, black and brown ink which he later divided into three categories, “topographical”, “fantasy” and “attack on the church”. He considered these drawings to be “the best thing I’ve done during my life”, expressing not only “the indefinable anguish of captivity”, but alsohis horror of events unfolding in Europe and his belief in the culpability of the Church in the spread of antisemitism in Germany. In 1946 Jonathan Cape published a selection of Uhlman’s drawings under the title Captivity.
Post-war, Uhlman became well known as an “Anglo-German Welshman” for his brooding, fiery, other-worldly paintings of the Welsh landscape. They evoked his feeling for “the loneliness and overwhelming grandeur of the country”, melding sketches made on site with his own impressions and an often exaggerated palette to create mysterious paintings.
Sadly, eyesight problems ended his painting career by 1970. But he was established as a writer with his autobiography The Making of an Englishman (1960) and then Reunion, (1971). He was also a collector of African sculpture. He died in 1985.