Oskar Herman

Biography

In 1942 Oskar Herman found himself in the Ferramonti di Tarsia internment camp in Calabria. He was fifty-six, and until then he had spent almost his whole adult life at the easel.

He was born on 17 March 1886 in Zagreb, into the Croatian-Jewish family of Danijel and Jozefina Herman. His father died when the boy was four. Oskar was first sent to a business school in Zagreb, although he was drawn to drawing and painting. He then studied at a private painting school run by a Zagreb teacher named Filip.

In 1904 Herman went to Munich and, like his compatriot Josip Račić, studied at the school of the Slovene painter and teacher Anton Ažbe. In 1905 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and studied there until 1910; his teachers included Hugo von Habermann. Munich in those years was one of the centres of European art, where Realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism and Jugendstil met. Herman first exhibited in Zagreb in 1908, while still a student. In Croatia it is usual to speak of four painters of the Munich Circle: Kraljević, Račić, Becić and Herman. They are regarded as the founders of Croatian modernism.

In 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Zagreb. He was judged partially unfit for service, but from 1915 to 1918 he nevertheless served in the army in Zagreb. When the war ended he went back to Munich and lived there until 1933, with occasional visits to Zagreb, Berlin and Paris. In those years he exhibited regularly, in solo shows and at the exhibitions of the Munich Secession, and he was noticed. In Munich he came to know the ideas of the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe about “pure visibility”, and he found points of reference in Giorgione, Tintoretto, Palma Vecchio and Hans von Marées. His Symbolism took shape before Expressionism became a broad movement. His early watercolours are built on strong, brilliant colour, from which his own Expressionist colourism grew, and his main subject became man and his inner world. From 1925 his work increasingly shows a premonition of coming persecution and terror.

In 1933, when Nazism grew stronger in Germany, Herman returned to Zagreb and held a solo exhibition at the Art Pavilion.

During the Second World War he joined the Partisan forces, was captured, and from 1942 to 1944 was held in the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp in Calabria, in southern Italy. After his release he joined the artists’ colony at Cozzano in Corsica. In 1944 he returned to Croatia and went back to the Partisans.

In 1945 Herman became a curator at the Modern Gallery in Zagreb and held the post until he retired in 1954; he was given a studio on Martićeva Street. In 1954 he prepared a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and in 1971 a major retrospective was held at the Art Pavilion. He was a reserved man who kept outside every group, and his painting was accepted and understood late. His work was shown in Zagreb, Split, Osijek, Sombor, Belgrade and Paris. In 1964 he received the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement in the visual arts. A monograph on him by Kelemen and Gamulin appeared in 1978.

Oskar Herman died in Zagreb in January 1974 and was buried in the Mirogoj city cemetery. His last painting, “Two Trees at the Foot of a Hill”, was made in 1973. In 2008 the Croatian Post issued a stamp with that picture. In 2010 about 340 of his works were shown in Zagreb, from the first Munich pieces to the last, of 1974.