Oscar Nemon

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Oscar Nemon
Born
Oscar Neumann

(1906-03-13)13 March 1906
Osijek, Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, Austria-Hungary
Died13 April 1985(1985-04-13) (aged 79)
Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Known forSculpture

Oscar Nemon (born Oscar Neumann;[1] 13 March 1906 – 13 April 1985) was a Croatian sculptor who was born in Osijek, Croatia, but eventually settled in England. He is best known for his series of more than a dozen public statues of Sir Winston Churchill.

Biography

Nemon was born into a close Jewish family in

Princess Marie Bonaparte. Later in his life, Nemon changed his surname from Neumann.[1]

After a short period studying in Paris, Nemon moved to

Montenegrin Serb, Puniša Račić. Nemon returned to Vienna in 1931, to create a large seated sculpture of Freud, now in Hampstead.[4] He staged a one-man exhibition of portrait heads at the Académie, including his Freud and a bust of Paul-Henri Spaak. He made portraits of King Albert I, Queen Astrid of the Belgians, Emile Vandervelde and August Vermeylen, and also exhibited at the Galerie Monteau
in December 1934 and January 1939.

Concerned by the approaching threat of Nazi Germany, he escaped to England in 1938, a year before the outbreak of World War II. He abandoned over a decade of work in progress in his studio, including a 20-foot (6 m) clay model, "Le Pont". Most of his family remained in Europe and were murdered in the Holocaust.

Nemon married Patricia Villiers-Stuart, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel

Sir George Young,[5] and Electra married rock musician Phil May.[6]

Nemon made a bust of

Tate Gallery, and Sir Karl Parker of the Ashmolean Museum
. He became a naturalised British subject in 1948.

After the war, Nemon made sculptures of a number of high-profile figures. He made portraits of the members of

House of Commons[8] and the Guildhall,[9] at Westerham (near Churchill's home at Chartwell), and in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto. His last major piece, a monumental memorial to the Royal Canadian Air Force
in Toronto, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 1984. Meanwhile, in the 1940s and 1950s, he also created a series of lesser-known relief works, which he called "Les Fleurs de mon Coeur" (The Flowers of my Heart).

He was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters at the University of St Andrews in 1977, and a retrospective was held at the Ashmolean Museum in 1982. He was honoured by the tenth Slavonian Biennal. He died on 13 April 1985 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The same year, a memorial exhibition was held at the Galerija Likovnih Umjetnosti in Osijek.

Technique and legacy

Graves of Oscar Nemon (left) and his son Falcon Stuart (right) at Wootton, Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire

Nemon's technique depended on modelling from life directly in clay, quickly making many small studies with no preliminary drawings. He produced works in clay (often fired into terracotta), plaster, and stone, but most of his finished works were cast bronze, often at the Morris Singer art foundry or occasionally at the Burleighfield art foundry (now merged).

His house and studio, Pleasant Land, remained closed for 17 years after his death. It reopened in 2003 as a museum of his life's work, exhibiting many studies and models for his finished works. It also houses the archive of his papers. Other papers, relating to his sculptures of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, are held by the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.[10]

Gallery

References

References

  1. ^ a b "Zaboravljeni kipari međuraća". www.matica.hr (in Croatian). Matica hrvatska.
  2. ^ "Oscar Nemon". www.oscarnemon.org.uk. Archived from the original on March 17, 2012. Retrieved January 27, 2011.
  3. ^ "Moj otac iz Hrvatske, Oscar Nemon, kipar je svjetske slave". www.vecernji.hr (in Croatian). Večernji list.
  4. ^ "Oscar Nemon, Freud's Forgotten Sculptor".
  5. ^ "Aurelia, Lady Young".
  6. ^ "Stars of 60s play at village wedding".
  7. Westminster Hour. 6 August 2017. BBC Radio 4
    . Retrieved 6 August 2017.
  8. ISBN 0-7117-0898-3
    .
  9. H.H. Martyn & Co.
  10. ^ "The Papers of Oscar Nemon".

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Oscar Nemon.
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