Georg Calmann, furniture designer and framemaker: papers

Designs for furniture and standing lights (1930s); drawings of interiors (1930s); photocopies of designs for door knockers, fire places, furniture, gateways, layouts for interiors, pipe racks and a shopfront (1930s); photocopies of designs for furniture and light fittings with annotations including names of clients (1930s); photographs of furniture and light fittings (1930s); photographs of interiors (1930s); postcards of interiors, furniture and light fittings (1930s); correspondence (1939); photograph of Georg Calmann (undated).

Georg Calmann (ca. 1898 - ca. 1942) was born in Germany into a Hamburg banking family. After service as an officer in the First World War he studied at the Bauhaus. He then worked as an oil painter depicting biblical scenes and flower studies, and also as a framemaker and furniture designer. In Berlin he opened a framemaker's shop called Pygmalion with his wife. With the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, he moved to Prague and took over a firm, Oskar Schulhof, based at Vodizkova 36, Prague. He set up a business designing and making furniture and selling decorative objects, fabrics and lights. In April 1939 Calmann sent his designs and drawings to his brother, Hans Calmann, an art dealer in London, in the hope that the designs would enable him to obtain work in England. Calmann was prevented from coming to England by the outbreak of war. In April 1939 he entrusted his designs and drawings to an Englishman who took them to Calmann's brother in London in the hope that Calmann could work there. World War II, however, broke out and Georg Calmann is believed to have died at Auschwitz in 1942.

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Given by Marianne Calmann, 1988.

Cataloguing supported by the American Friends of the V&;A through the generosity of The David Berg Foundation, New York.

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