Lipman-Wulf, Peter

Peter Lipman-Wulf (1905-1993) was born in Berlin to a prominent lawyer and his wife, a well-known sculptor, and studied at the Berlin Academy. Artistic success came quickly; he took first prize in the Prussian State Competition and had commissions from the city of Berlin for two marble fountains before he was 27 years old.

In 1933 Lipman-Wulf lost his teaching position at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin due to growing anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and he moved to France. Although he did not declare himself to the French government as a Jew, when France began arresting "enemy aliens" in 1939 he and hundreds of other immigrants were interned at Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence. (He was in sterling company, as his fellow detainees included painter Max Ernst, opera producer Friedrich Schramm, journalist Heinz Bieber-Georgi, two Nobel Prize winners in medicine, and numerous other "undesirables.") In 1940 he volunteered for a work detail in Normandy, from which he managed to escape to Switzerland where he remained through the end of the war.

In 1947 Lipman-Wulf moved to the United States, settling in New York and eventually becoming an American citizen. In addition to his own artistic endeavors he taught at Adelphi University on Long Island.

Lipman-Wulf worked in wood, bronze and ceramics in a semi-abstract style that often reflected the influence of German Expressionism. He also did portrait busts, including those of conductors Bruno Walter and Karl Bohm for the Metropolitan Opera. His work is in the permanent collections of museums and galleries in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the British Museum in London and the National Museum in Berlin.

[Portions of this biographical sketch adapted from Lipman-Wulf's obituary in the New York Times (September 30, 1993) and from The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews by Susan Zuccotti (University of Nebraska Press: 1999).]

From the guide to the Peter Lipman-Wulf Papers, 1945-1975, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)