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Hans Feibusch

Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1898. Died in London in 1998.

Feibusch was a painter, sculptor and muralist who initially studied art in Munich, moving on to the Berlin University of the Arts and then in Italy and France. He became an established exhibitor with prominent art societies in the 1920s and early 1930s and was awarded the German State Prize for Painting by the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1930.

Three years later, in the face of the growing persecution of Jews, he emigrated to London. One of the Expressionist works he had painted in Germany was included in the Munich exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ organised by the Nazi Party in 1937. Two other works, an innocuous still life with flowers and a study of a Pierrot figure, were seized from another gallery and destroyed.

In 1933 he was welcomed into the London Group of Artists, as were many other émigré artists at that time. His painting 1939, now in the Tate collection, shows the agony of three grief-stricken figures, reflecting his deeply felt concern about the devastating effects of war and displaying the influence of early Renaissance art absorbed during his studies in Italy in the 1920s. It also characterises the style and drama of what became the major part of his output in England – mural painting. Between 1938 and 1970 he completed more than forty commissions mostly in Anglican churches in London and the south of England but including a major series of murals at the Art Deco Civic Centre in Newport, Wales.

Mandrill and Mangabeys

For more information and images of the work of Hans Feibusch visit -

The official site of artist Hans Feibusch 1898 - 1998