Hans Feibusch (1898-1998) - 1946 Lithograph The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Description

A striking lithograph depicting The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from The Revelation of St John the Divine. Printed by The Baynard Press in 1946. Presented in a gilt frame. On paper.

Condition

There is a crease running vertically through the centre of the paper.

Size

37 x 48cm (14.6" x 18.9")
Framed Size: 46 x 58cm (18.1" x 22.8")

Artist Biography

Hans Feilbusch was a painter, muralist and sculptor, born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany the son of a Jewish Dentist. After serving in World War I, Feibusch went to Munich to study medicine but soon left and took up painting studying under Carl Hoefer at the Berlin Academy, 1919-21. He was the recipient of the Rome Scholarship and following 2 years in Italy, studied for another two years in Paris under Andre L'hote and Othon Friesz. In 1933, he returned to Frankfurt and won a Prussian state prize for painting and, at the same time, began stirring Nazi hatred. That same year he emigrated to England where he began to exhibit at the Lefèvre Gallery, Royal Academy, Leicester Galleries with the Artists' International Association and with the London Group but was to soon concentrate on murals. Feibusch was commissioned by the architect Maxwell Fry to paint a mural for the Methodist Chapel in Colliers Wood. Subsequently, he painted numerous murals for cathedrals and churches throughout Britain. He also painted non-religious murals for Portmeirion, the village created by Clough Williams-Ellis in North Wales. In the years immediately following World War II, his work was reproduced in the Pictures for Schools series. A photograph of ‘Apollo and Daphne’, a mural made by him for the house of James Laver in the early 1950's is illustrated in Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art 1953-54. By the early 1970’s, failing eyesight obliged him to abandon painting for sculpture.


His murals were executed extensively for churches and public buildings including Chichester Cathedral baptistery, the West London Synagogue, the Civic Centre Newport, Monmouth, St. John's Wood parish church, The Baptism of Christ at Chichester Cathedral, his Christ Surrounded by Angels at St. Mark's, Coventry, and his Trinity in Glory and Stations of the Cross at St. Alban's, Holborn, London. His work was not without controversy, there were protests that Feibusch's figure of Christ, designed for the parish church of Goring, West Sussex, was un-Christian and 'almost brutal'. Feibusch who was a member of the Art Workers' Guild adopted Anglicanism in the 1950’s but returned to his Jewish roots and beliefs in 1992. He was accorded a retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt in 1986 and three years later awarded the German Grand Cross of Merit in 1967. In Britain in 1995, Paul Werth organised a touring show of his paintings, sketches and other work entitled The Heat of Vision.


Examples of his work are in the collections of Ben Uri Art Gallery, Dudley Museum and Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, National Motor Museum, Newport Art Gallery, Otter Gallery, Tate Gallery, University of Warwick Art Collection and a large collection of his works are kept at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.