Title

Simon, Bruno.

Author

Australian Prints.

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

2010, updated 2020

Type

Biography

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Bruno Simon

Bruno Simon was born in Vienna, Austria on 21 January 1913. The illegitimate child of Erna Stavenhagen (nee Simon), Simon remained with his mother after she legally divorced from Max Stavenhagen on 16 March 1913. Simon went on to study with Julius Bissier in Freiburg and later at the Académie Rason in Paris under sculptor Aristide Maillol. In 1936 he studied in Florence, living for two years in Carrara, Italy, famous for its marble quarries. Throughout his studies he would stay with his mother in Berlin. In August 1939 Simon fled Nazi Germany. He moved to England, where he was subsequently interned and sent to Australia in 1940 as a ‘enemy alien’ on board the Dunera. He produced monotypes, drawings and sculptures while in Tatura and Hay internment camps from 1940 to 1943. For the next four years he was employed by the 8th Employment Company of the Citizens Military Force where he became friends with William Dobell.

After the war Simon returned to England where he lived from 1949 to 1967, later moving to Bergamo in Italy. He travelled often and visited Australia twice in 1973 and 1993. Simon continued to work as a sculptor and printmaker and exhibited frequently. While he never returned to live in Germany, manuscripts held at the Vienna library show that Simon had contacts there as a result of his art practice. He died on 16 September 1999 and his urn was buried at his grandparents’ grave at the Ilandkoppel Jewish Cemetery in the Ohlsdorf district of Hamburg.

© Australianprints

References:

Hildegard Thevs, ‘Erna Simon (1882) biography’, Stolpersteine Hamburg, http://stolpersteine-hamburg.de/index.php?&MAIN_ID=7&p=227&BIO_ID=2492, accessed 8 January 2020.

‘Sculptor on tour in Australia’, The Canberra Times, 20 September 1973, page 19.

‘A stray lamb had no future even to a futuristic sculptor’, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 9 March 1947.