Heinersdorff and Art

A personal note from Tom Heinersdorff

Art comes with the blood rather than the experience in my case. Over the last 15 years I have gradually come to learn about and understand far more about the connection between Art and my family, and therefore myself. The following is a summary of what I have come to understand:

My paternal great-grandfather (Paul Heinersdorff) and much better known grandfather (Gottfried Heinersdorff) were deeply involved in the European, and particularly German, art world from 1875 to 1939. My great-grandfather's Berlin Art Dealership and stained-glass business was turned by my grandfather into something rather like an employment bureau for artists! Many of the great artists of the Brücke (Bridge) movement and post (First World) War Germany were commissioned by my grandfather to produce designs for architectural glass of all sorts, including windows, mosaic floors and walls, and light fittings. In return for such precious income, they gave my grandfather works of art, some of which (without my knowing it) decorated our walls at home when I was a child. My grandfather's artistic connection mutated when he was expelled as a "half Jew" from the company he co-owned in 1933, and he opened a photographic studio in Berlin.

My father, Peter Heinersdorff professionally known as Peter Dorp, whose earliest years were spent in a home frequently visited by famous artists, was bullied out of school at the age of 16 and went to study photography. This educational twist proved doubly helpful when my grandfather seized an opportunity to flee Germany as a refugee with my father to Paris where they together set up the photographic business, Studio Ego. One of their great commissions, the official portrait of the anti-fascist Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Verdier, remains visible on the French Foreign Ministry web site. The war was to disrupt my father's life even more -- after a period in the French Foreign Legion and subsequently in a concentration camp in the Sahara under Nazi control, he was freed by the British Army and joined the Pioneer Corps (with the job of photographing allied graves, mainly in Italy). Naturalised British in 1949, by which time he lived in London, where 2 of his creative innovations brought him some renown in the 1950’s and then in the 1970’s.

1. He photographed life around the streets of “Pinchester” using pins and needles to show Lovers’ Lane or the Underworld or a Zoo, but he also used dogs' bones, pen nibs, snippets of wool and cotton, pipe cleaners. AW Woodward in Photography 1955 wrote “He creates picture features which are original in conception and photographed in a style which is not influenced by the work of any other photographer. Each feature is a series of images which the mind of Peter Dorp creates from the ordinary mundane things around him…The only photographer I know whose work is absolutely his own is Peter Dorp”.

2. In the 1970s, in his last professionally active decade, my father developed another innovative approach to photography-based graphics, using screens and contours or line-conversions to focus attention on parts of the image. He is quoted in The Designer October 1971 as saying “Someone once accused me jokingly of trying to kill photography. I might as well blind myself! I simply have a natural curiosity to ‘see what happens’ if I do this or the other unusual thing. So I experiment around, and if I come across something useful I try to standardise the procedure by which I arrived at it, so as to make it commercially useful. Now I have a small armoury of tricks, techniques and shortcuts which designers are more and more calling upon whenever some humdrum photograph won’t do. Results can now in most cases be predicted with some measure of certainty, though "Let’s see what happens" is still a very frequently used phrase here.
I started in the direction of line conversions when halftone photographs did not always satisfy me any longer. I like abstract images which leave something to one’s imagination, and I like these to be satisfyingly balanced. Also I am completely unable to draw. Thus my line conversions never have anything added to them ‘un-photographically’, but a great deal has been removed.” He applied this approach to commercial illustrations and pictures and as an artist and sold widely for advertising, book covers, exhibitions and other decorative purposes. As he once wrote, his approach was that of “a luxury product, useful mainly for prestige publications”.
I am delighted that two of the paintings given to my grandfather and a few of my father’s works can be offered for sale on the Room4art.com – it is only a pity that neither my father nor his father can see it!

My photographer mother, Elisabeth, whose work as a photo journalist was principally for Picture Post in the 1940s and 50s, but also as a portrait photographer based in Hampstead, London, needs a mention. Less creative than factual, her clients particularly valued her meticulous care in getting to know them before taking any photographs. I have been told that this was less obvious on the day that the Quakers helped her to leave Vienna for her own safety, when she had been seen taking pictures of the Nazi soldiers beginning their "Anschluss" in 1938!

It is a supreme irony that I have not (yet) met the musical and thespian side of my family in Germany, where Rene Heinersdorff is a well-known actor and his father was instrumental in bringing international pianists to Dusseldorf ‘s Ibach Concert Hall, which his business promoted while selling Concert tickets as well as Steinway pianos.