Harry Weinberger

In 2014, Weinberger's family gifted all of Iris Murdoch's letters to the Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University.

In 2014, Weinberger's work was exhibited in Iris Murdoch & Harry Weinberger: Writer Meets Painter at the Kingston Museum & Art Gallery, London.

A symposium, Perspectives on the Paintings of Harry Weinberger, was held at Kingston University, London in September 2014.

Harry Weinberger (1924–2009) was an artist based in England. He was 'a trenchant defender of traditional painting', who fought against the dominant art school conventions of his day. Primarily a painter with a love of colour, Weinberger also taught art and illustrated books. He rarely painted people. Weinberger preferred to paint interiors and objects within them. He never dated his work (which has posed problems for curators, historians and those concerned with sales of his art). Harry Weinberger died at the age 85 on 10 September 2009.

Weinberger lived in Leamington Spa from 1969 until his death aged 85 on 10 September 2009.

In 1995, Cathy Courtney interviewed Weinberger for the Artists Lives oral history series, part of National Life Stories, an independent organisation based within the British Library, resulting in ten hours of recordings. This is the best resource on Weinberger's life. There are also many points of interest regarding to art history, social history and the Second World War.

Weinberger retired from teaching in 1983 to focus on his studio career.

In an exhibition catalogue for a show of Weinberger's work at the Herbert Art Gallery Coventry in 1983, Murdoch wrote:

Weinberger's work was exhibited regularly at Duncan Campbell Contemporary Art in London. Campbell was Weinberger's primary agent in the UK from c. 1980. Weinberger held several one-man shows in Berlin and was invited to participate in many group shows in Germany.

Weinberger was a great friend of the writer Iris Murdoch over a 20-year period from 1977 until her death in 1999. They exchanged over 400 letters during this time. Murdoch was a great champion of Weinberger's work and he painted several portraits of her. They often visited galleries and exhibitions together.

In the 1970s, Weinberger won a travelling fellowship from Goldsmiths School of Art to study icon paintings with the advice of the art dealer Richard Temple.

In 1951, Weinberger married Barbara Herrmann, an artist and later a social historian who had been his muse in Berlin. She was the daughter of the architectural historian Wolfgang Herrmann. They had one daughter, Joanna. Barbara died of cancer in 1996.

Weinberger left Chelsea College of Art to join Goldsmiths School of Art. In 1950 he went to Brighton to train as a teacher. Weinberger taught art at schools in London and Reading, then at a teacher training college in Manchester in the early 1960s and later became Head of Painting at Lanchester Polytechnic where he worked for nearly 20 years.

Weinberger enlisted in the British Army towards the end of World War Two, and served in Italy. After a falling out with a commanding officer over his Jewish identity he endured a brief spell in a military prison in Hamburg, but was duly honourably discharged at the end of 1946.

Harry Weinberger was born in Berlin on 7 April 1924, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Weinberger's father moved the family from Germany to Czechoslovakia. Six years later on 20 July 1939, when Weinberger was 15, he and his sister Ina caught the last Kindertransport train to England, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Weinberger's cousin, the artist Heinz Koppel (1919–1980), who was four years older than Harry, also lived in Berlin, moved to Czechoslovakia in 1933 and came to Britain in 1938. Koppel's connections were to prove useful in Weinberger's early career. Weinberger's older brother and two of his uncles were also already resident in England by then.

On arriving in England, Weinberger initially boarded at schools in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, then took a tool-making apprenticeship at a South Wales factory owned by one of his uncles, and studied engineering. During this time he also took private classes with the Welsh painter and print-maker, Ceri Richards (1903–1971).

Once more, Weinberger looked for private tuition. He resisted studying under Oskar Kokoschka because he thought Kokoschka would try to mould his style too much, so in the end he decided to take lessons from the émigré German artist Martin Bloch (1883–1954), who he greatly admired, and who also taught his cousin Heinz Koppel. Bloch was an affirmed expressionist painter who encouraged his students to study in the National Gallery.