Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Olga Lehmann at the Slade School

Olga Lehmann (1912-2001) was a Chilean-born painter who studied at the Slade School in Britain.


While going through the Slade School archives, some 1992 audio interviews with Lehmann turned up where she describes her experience at the school. They've been uploading those interviews to Soundcloud so now we can listen to the Slade oral history: Olga Lehmann.

Lehmann describes arriving at the Slade School at age 17 in 1929, and meeting the instructors Henry Tonks, (who first told her she should take up knitting instead of painting), and Randolph Schwabe, who had done war art in both World Wars.

Sketch by Olga Lehmann
She said that in the life rooms, men and women never mixed. The instruction was in the form of suggestions. When she talks about Slade teaching in the 1930s, she remembered the exercise of doing a painting from life using only black, white, and red.



Thanks to Stephen Chaplin and the Slade School for putting these online.
Wikipedia on Olga Lehmann

2 comments:

peter senesac said...

How do I follow your blog in blogger. Some people have a box to follow or join. I don't see it here and I don't use other readers.

James Gurney said...

Peter, I have signups on the left column of the blog for subscribing by feed reader and for getting posts by email. Do you know how I would set up the Blogger follow widget?