100 Artists #13
Erich Kahn 1904-1979
Graphic artist and painter Erich Kahn was born into a Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany on 25 August 1904 and studied art in Stuttgart and Paris. Following Hitler’s accession to power, Kahn was briefly imprisoned in Welzheim concentration camp, and upon release in 1939, fled to England where, in June 1941 he was interned as a so-called “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, at Hutchinson Camp, known as the ‘artists’ camp’ because of the high concentration of artist internees, who included Kurt Schwitters, Siegfried Charoux, Georg Ehrlich, Paul Hamann, Hermann Fechenbach, and Hellmuth Weissenborn, as well as art historian, Klaus Hinrichsen.
The latter recalled Kahn at their first encounter on the boat transporting internees from Liverpool to the island as “a shy man with a strong aversion to the ‘bourgeois’ values which had been his family background”. Kahn’s sketches of this journey revealed dejected groups huddled together like “flotsam tossed upon the sea”. Hinrichsen noted further how Kahn, “drew and painted visions of burning cities and fugitives, running and crouching in despair, thereby lifting the specific experience of emigration and persecution into an indictment of man’s inhumanity.”
In camp Kahn contributed prolifically to the internees’ broadsheet The Camp, designing vignettes, lettering, and layouts, illustrating essays, and providing full-page drawings depicting camp life, reproduced using a stencilling technique he invented, using rasps and household utensils. The stencilled drawing, Lecture on the Lawn II (Imperial War Museum), represents a group of men sitting on the grass, gathered for a talk by an interned academic, as part of the camp’s informal “university”; it was dedicated to Weissenborn on his release on Boxing Day 1940, probably as a farewell present. Kahn also exhibited at the camp’s second art exhibition, held on November 19 1940.
After release in spring 1941, Kahn returned to London; although psychologically troubled, he remained active among the former internee network, regularly attending life drawing sessions at Paul Hamann’s Clifton Hill studio in St John’s Wood.
He was largely neglected by the British art establishment, a 1962 review said: “difficult for the critic to pigeon-hole him, for he is neither completely abstract nor completely figurative […] his extraordinary temperament causes coloristic explosions, so that his canvases mirror in exuberant colours the overflowing passions of this artist, who seems neither willing nor capable of controlling himself.”
Eric Kahn died in London, England on 15 February 1979. His work is held in UK public collections including the British Museum and Tate. The largest collection of his work is at the Berardo Collection in Lisbon, Portugal, which held a major retrospective in 2005.
The Ben Uri Research Unit for the study of the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900 can be accessed at benuri.org/researchunit