Fred Kormis (1894–1986)

Sculptor, medallist and printmaker, born Fritz Kormis to Jewish parents in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. At 14 he began an apprenticeship in the studio of the sculptor and medallist Johann Josef Belz while attending evening classes at the Frankfurt Polytechnic. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. As his father was Austrian, he was conscripted into the Austrian Imperial Army and served on the Eastern Front. In 1915, he was wounded, captured by the Russian army, and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Here he managed to carry on with his art, making woodcut and relief portraits of his fellow inmates, as well as gravestones; the experience of imprisonment had a profound impact on both his life and his art. After five years, in 1920, he escaped, made his way back to Germany and resumed his career, working as a freelance sculptor and participating in a number of group exhibitions. In 1925 he married Rachel Sender and by 1930 was a German citizen. In 1931, he was commissioned to make a sculpture which would form a part of the German national war memorial at Tannenberg, commemorating those soldiers who had died in captivity (his contribution was melted down during the Second World War). In 1933, following the Nazi rise to power, Kormis and his wife left Germany, relocating firstly to the Netherlands and then in 1934 to England, where they settled permanently in north London. In the same year, he had his first solo London exhibition, at the Bloomsbury Gallery, and in 1935 made the first of many appearances at the Ben Uri Gallery. Also in 1935 he showed for the first time – still using his birth name Fritz – at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition. By the time of his second showing, 1940, he had prudently adopted the more English-sounding Fred; he continued to show at the RA on a regular basis until 1981, mostly figure studies and portrait heads. In July 1938, he participated in the New Burlington Galleries’ Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, intended as a riposte to the Nazi’s Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, held in Munich in the previous year. In 1940, during the Blitz, his studio was severely damaged and much of his work lost. He spent the next year in Derbyshire working in a pottery and on his return to London won a couple of significant commissions for portrait medallions, the first from the American collector, Samuel Friedenberg, and the second from the publisher Hodder and Stoughton. In 1948 he obtained British nationality and began teaching modelling and pottery at evening classes organised by the Workers’ Education Association. In 1951 he was elected an Associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and in 1961, a Fellow. In c.1960, he carved an alabaster sarcophagus designed by Paul, 4th Baron Methuen, for the tomb of his wife, Eleanor, Lady Methuen, for St Bartholomew’s Church, Corsham, Wiltshire. Kormis’s public sculptures include Everyman (The Shield Bearer) (1964), for the Corn Exchange, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Memorial to Prisoners of War and Victims of Concentration Camps (unveiled 1969, vandalised in the 1980s, restored in 2003), for Gladstone Park, Dollis Hill, London; The Prophetess (1972), for Swansea Leisure Centre; The Marchers (1975), casts of which are at King’s College London, Nuffield College, Oxford, and University College Swansea; The Ever-lamenting Harp (1978), for Kiryat Gat, Israel; and Angels’ Wings, donated to Queen’s Park, north London, by a friend of Kormis’s, the Labour politician, Reg Freeson, in 2006.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; J. Mackay, Dictionary of Western Sculptors in Bronze, Suffolk, 1977; Mapping Sculpture; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Warwickshire, Coventry & Solihull, Liverpool, 2003, p. 71; The Times, 2 May 1986, p. 14 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, p. 111; B. Warnock (ed.), Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century, London, 2024; Wiener Holocaust Library Collections: ‘Fred Kormis: Record 1934–1986’.

Terry Cavanagh, December 2024