How can stories be put back together when their pieces are scattered across continents? What motivates someone to go in search of a sculptor whose public portraits remain visible in many cities of Europe and Central and North America, while their own identity and life have been largely lost to […]
Oscar Nemon: The Early Years
Beginning Over in London and Oxford: Oscar Nemon’s War Years in a New Exhibition on Boars Hill.
For anyone of European and Jewish heritage, the 1940s would prove a harsh and terrifying decade. Even for those lucky enough to reach safety as refugees from Occupied Europe, the losses remained enormous, as the communities and families amongst which they had grown up were destroyed wholesale. This was the case for sculptor Oscar Nemon. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1906, and came to Britain as an émigré from 1936, settling permanently once war was declared in 1939.
Meeting my future father-in-law, Oscar Nemon.
I first met Oscar Nemon in 1981 when my boyfriend, Nemon’s son Falcon, took me to the studio near Oxford where his father had worked and lived from the 1940s. We drove from London, passing the Cowley car works, which in the 1980s stretched either side of the ring road, […]