No other German art critic was active in his field for so long: his first critiques appeared in 1945, and in May 2005 “Weltkunst” published his obituary of Bernard Schultze.
Barely thirty years old, he returned from the war and captivity in England and immediately got involved “in the service of the interpretation and promotion of contemporary fine art” (H. Th. F. 1952) with programs on Nordwestdeutschen Rundfunk (NWDR) radio, and with newspaper articles. He wrote for “Die Welt,” “Die Neue Zeitung,” “Tagesspiegel,” “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and for magazines, particularly “Das Kunstwerk“. He reviewed exhibitions in Hamburg, Hanover and Berlin, and interpreted the work of those artists whose talent he was the first to recognize. That was Bernard Schultze in 1947, Paul Wunderlich in 1955, Horst Janssen in 1957. But let us not forget, contemporary art of this time also included Picasso, Matisse and Chagall, artists whom he visited in 1951 in Vallauris, Nice and Vence. In 1947 he already visited Beckmann in Amsterdam, and reported on this along with his studio visits with Nolde, Kokoschka, Dali and many others. His conversations with Max Ernst, Duchamp, Miró, Hockney and Warhol appeared mostly in “Die Welt.”
At the same time he completed his art history degree, writing his dissertation on the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882). This at a time when the pre-Raphaelites earned nothing but contempt. Even as assistant professor, and later professor for art history in the School of Design at Hamburg’s Technical University (1959 – 1981), he continued to be active as a amazingly productive newspaper critic. His published books include monographs on Mataré, Moore, Heiliger, Seitz and Hausner. In his articles “Figur und Raum in der Plastik der Gegenwart” (“Figure and Space in Contemporary Sculpture”) in 1964, and “Gedanken zum Beurteilen von Kunstwerken” (“Thoughts on the Assessment of Artworks”) in 1966, Flemming developed a structural analysis of artistic creation and “a kind of theory of relativity of art criticism,” as he called it, the “aesthetic relevance” becoming its criteria.
Flemming was highly active in the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for a long time. In 1951 when a committee formed to establish the German section, including Bruno E. Werner, Franz Roh, Will Grohmann and Carl Linfert, he and Werner Haftmann represented the young generation. At the 1952 AICA congress in Switzerland, two Germans were accepted as “membres sociétaires”: Roh and Flemming, the president and the secretary of the German section. In this way Flemming played the decisive role, next to Roh, in the exchange of ideas amongst German critics, soon to include Hans Hildebrandt, Benno Reifenberg, Hans Maria Wingler and Leopold Zahn. In 1958 he became vice-president. In those first years, no one participated in as many congresses as he did, and each time he wrote about them, thereby informing newspaper readers about the situation of international art criticism.*)
Flemming took his work as an art critic very seriously. In nearly 60 years, he published several thousand critiques. In 2001, when the Hamburger Kunsthalle put out the catalog book “Private Schätze. Über das Sammeln von Kunst in Hamburg bis 1933” (“Private Treasures. Collecting Art in Hamburg Until 1933“), he wrote a piece on his father, consul Max Leon Flemming, and his important collection of modern art which included works by Picasso, Chagall and Kandinsky. In his advanced age, he remembered the man whom he had to thank for his love of art.
Hanns Theodor Flemming passed away on 5 August in his home in Reinbek bei Hamburg. He left his immense literary estate to the Archive for Visual Art in the German National Museum in Nuremberg.
Hamburg, August 2005 HELMUT R. LEPPIEN
*) Flemming’s report on the AICA congress in Dublin, from the 1 Aug.1953 edition of the Berlin “Tagesspiegel,” can be read in the German AICA’s 50th anniversary commemorative publication, “Vom Kunststück, über Kunst zu schreiben”, Nördlingen 2001, p. 60f.
