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