Papers of Josef Paul Hodin

Extensive personal and professional archive comprising correspondence, diaries and journals, writings, publications, printed ephemera, photographs and press cuttings.

This is a summary catalogue of the archive. For the full version please visit https://archive.tate.org.uk/advanced.aspx?this=CalmView.Catalog and search using the reference 'TGA 20062*' Parts of this archive have been digitised and are available to view online at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/tga-20062/papers-of-josef-paul-hodin

J P. Hodin described himself as an author, art historian and art critic and he was certainly one of the leading European art critics of his generation. He was educated in Prague and read Law at Charles University receiving his PhD in 1929. He subsequently studied in the art academies of Dresden and Berlin. While in Dresden, he met his first wife, the Swedish modern dancer, Birgit Akesson. They lived in Berlin and Paris before moving in 1935 to Sweden to escape the mounting tide of fascism. By 1944, the marriage to Akesson had failed, and he came to England where he worked first as personal assistant to Jan Masaryk, the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, and later as press attache to the Norwegian government in exile. In 1945 he married his second wife, Pamela Simms and from 1949-54 was director of studies and librarian of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He and Pamela had two children Annabel and Michael.

From this period onwards, Hodin's output of articles, lectures (he taught at the ICA in London) and books was prodigious. There were seminal books on aesthetics, including 'The Dilemma of Being Modern' (1956) and 'Modern Art and the Modern Mind' (1972), as well as important interpretations of Expressionism and German art from Munch to Schwitters; best seen in the biography of Oskar Kokoschka (1966), who was a close family friend. Hodin also championed emigre artists that had fled the Nazi regime, many of whom settled close by in Hampstead as well as key European masters such as Emilio Greco and Giacomo Manzu. With a second home in Cornwall, it was perhaps inevitable that Hodin would take a special interest in what was happening in St Ives leading to some of the best books on Henry Moore (1956), Lynn Chadwick (1961), Barbara Hepworth (1961) and Elisabeth Frink (1983). From 1955 Hodin was on the Editorial Council of the 'Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism', and he was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Aesthetics. He was also editor of 'Prisme des Arts', Paris (1956-7), and of 'Quadrum', Brussels (1956-66). Hodin said of England that it was a land he admired for its respect of privacy and common sense, that it was a land where he found his 'personal freedom'.