Fred (Fritz) Kormis was born at the end of the nineteenth century to a Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main. At 14 he was apprenticed to a sculpture and moulding workshop, studying art in the evening at Frankfurt Polytechnic.
It was to be the calm before the storm.
Fred Kormis' life and work were shaped and disrupted by some of the most significant events of the first half of the twentieth century. He saw combat and capture in the First World War; five long years of captivity in a Siberian prisoner of war camp; exposure to the radical socialist politics of Weimar Germany; persecution in Nazi Germany; exile and migration to Britain; the Blitz in London; and the precarities of being a refugee in wartime in Britain including, for a time, the threat of detainment by the authorities as an 'enemy alien'.
Drawing on the Fred Kormis Collection held at The Wiener Holocaust Library, this catalogue accompanies the exhibition Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century, at The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2024-25. It contains personal reflections of Kormis by David Aronsohn, and expert assessments of the sculptor's extraordinary life, work and legacy.