Hoffnung Gerard (EN)
Gerard Hoffnung was an artist and musician, best known for his humorous works.
Raised in Germany, Hoffnung was brought to London as a boy, to escape the Nazis. Over the next two decades in England, he became known as a cartoonist, tuba player, impresario, broadcaster and raconteur.
After training at two art colleges, Hoffnung taught for a few years, and then turned to drawing, on the staff of English and American publications, and later as a freelance. He published a series of cartoons on musical themes, and illustrated the works of novelists and poets.
In 1956 Hoffnung mounted the first of his "Hoffnung Festivals" in London, at which classical music was spoofed for comic effect, with contributions from many eminent musicians. As a broadcaster he appeared on BBC panel games, where he honed the material for one of his best-known performances, his speech at the Oxford Union in 1958.
Early years
Born in Berlin, and named Gerhard, Hoffnung was the only child of a well-to-do Jewish couple, Hildegard and Ludwig Hoffnung. He was sent to England, where he attended Bunce Court School in 1938. In 1939, his parents left Germany; his father went to Palestine to enter the family's banking business. Gerard went with his mother to London, where she rented a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, where Hoffnung lived for the rest of his life. In 1939 he enrolled at Highgate School, where, according to one biographer, he was "remembered for his anarchic spirit". Among the artists he most admired when he was growing up was Walter Trier, long associated with Lilliput magazine. Hoffnung had his first cartoon published in the same publication while he was still at school.
After leaving Highgate, Hoffnung studied at Hornsey College of Art, but was expelled for his lack of gravity in the life class. He then attended Harrow School of Art, after which he became a schoolmaster. He was art master at Stamford School (1945–46) and assistant art master at Harrow School (1948), with an intervening and overlapping spell as a staff artist on the London Evening News. He was a staff artist to Cowles Magazines Inc in New York in 1950, and otherwise pursued a career as a freelance cartoonist. He contributed to Punch, The Strand Magazine and The Tatler, and to other British, continental, and American magazines. He also produced advertising work for Kia-Ora, Guinness, and other companies. He presented one-man exhibitions of his work, including one at the Little Gallery, Piccadilly (1949), and two at the Royal Festival Hall (1951 and 1956).
Personal life
In 1952 Hoffnung married Annetta Perceval, née Bennett. They had one son, Ben, and one daughter, Emily, who became respectively a timpanist and a sculptor. Hoffnung's uncle was Bruno Adler, a German art historian and writer who, during the war, wrote for the German language department of the BBC.
In addition to his public persona as an eccentric and wit, Hoffnung had a deeply serious and moral side. He joined the Quakers in 1955 and was active in their prisoner visiting scheme. According to a biographical sketch by Joel Marks, first published in Essays in Arts and Sciences (University of New Haven, Volume XXI, 10/1992), "Hoffnung's outlook on race relations, homosexuality, nuclear disarmament, the treatment of animals (especially hunting) and, for that matter, the music of Bartók and Schoenberg liberal and impassioned." A week before he died he took part in a show at the Festival Hall in aid of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, along with Peggy Ashcroft, Benjamin Britten, C. Day Lewis, Michael Redgrave and others.
Death and legacy
Hoffnung collapsed at his home on 25 September 1959, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage three days later in New End Hospital at the age of thirty-four. The obituarist in The Times concluded:
Hoffnung was among other things an artist, a musician, a linguist, a raconteur, a Quaker, a bon viveur, a prison visitor and a mime. It is usual to say that a man has left behind a gap that cannot be filled. For Gerard Hoffnung there would be needed a handful of men, all of them greatly gifted.
Posthumous exhibitions of Hoffnung's work include those at the Berlin Festival (1964); the Brighton and Edinburgh festivals (1968); the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (1970); the Royal Festival Hall (1984); and Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, London (1992).
A memorial tribute, O Rare Hoffnung was published in 1960 and included contributions from Malcolm Arnold, John Dankworth, William Mann, Ian Messiter, Gerald Priestland, Donald Swann and nineteen others. Hoffnung's widow published a biography of him in 1988. In 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Hoffnung – Drawn to Music, a play about Hoffnung, played by Matt Lucas, with Gina McKee as Annetta Hoffnung, and a cameo appearance by the real Annetta Hoffnung.
Написанные книги
| Заголовок | Оценка | Добавлена | Жанры | Серии | Язык | Издана | Написана | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Bricklayer's Lament |
10.0 (1) | 1 | 8 октября 2015 12:41 | Юмористическая проза | 1 | EN | 1958 |