Hans Feibusch 1898-1998

Painter, illustrator, lithographer, author, muralist and sculptor Hans Feibusch was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany in 1898. After serving in the First World War, he settled in Berlin in 1920 to study painting, where he won the Prix de Rome and travelled to Italy, before completing his studies in Paris. Upon his return to Germany, as a member of the Frankfurt Künstlerbund, he was tasked with his fellow members with designing a set of murals and undertook to teach himself the necessary techniques and procedures. After winning the Prussian State Prize for Painting in 1930 however, he aroused Nazi antagonism. After his pictures were publicly burned, and he was forbidden to paint he found refuge in Britain in 1933, joining his British fiancée in London. A year later, he began to exhibit regularly with the London Group (until 1939), where his work attracted attention. In 1937 his work was included in the notorious touring Nazi 'degenerate' art show, first mounted in Munich, and in 1938 it also featured in the important exhibition of ‘Twentieth-century German Art’ at the New Burlington Galleries in London, intended as a riposte to the Nazi show. Following his first public mural in England, ‘The Footwashing’, for the Methodist Chapel in Colliers Wood, commissioned by Edward D. Mills in 1937, Feibusch was championed by Dr George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and commissioned to paint a chapel in Brighton, which led to many other Church of England commissions. He featured in the 1951 Festival of Britain as both a painter and a muralist.  In the 1970s Feibusch was forced to abandon painting after his eyesight began to fail and he took up sculpture. He died in London, England on 18 July 1998 and his estate bequeathed the entire contents of his studio to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.