Edith Hoffmann (1) (1907–2016)

Edith Hoffmann was born in Vienna, Austria, a daughter of a Czech-Jewish family. Her parents were Irma and Camill Hoffmann. As a small child, she moved to Dresden, Germany where her father, a well-known arts journalist, accepted an editorial position. After graduating from school in Dresden, she studied art history, archaeology, and Slavonic Studies in Berlin, spending a semester in Vienna, and later at the University of Munich, where she ultimately earned her doctorate. Hoffmann completed her degree with a dissertation on 18th-century German portraiture in 1934, shortly after the Nazi regime seized power, and immediately moved to London on the advice of her father. She worked for four years as a volunteer in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and began writing articles on art and art history. During the period 1934–1937, her pieces were published in the Manchester Guardian, the Listener, the Prager Press and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1939, following the exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art staged in London, she came to the attention of Burlington Magazine and began working there as an editorial secretary. Within six months, she was contributing her own writing to the magazine. In 1940, she married journalist Eliezer Yapou, who worked during World War II for the American Overseas News Agency in London. She later learned that her parents were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, and murdered in the extermination camp at Auschwitz in 1944. That same year, she was named editor of the magazine. She wrote more than 150 articles, exhibition and book reviews for the Burlington in the course of six decades. Her main research interests were German Expressionism and later on, Symbolism and its literary connections. Her publications include the first English-language monograph on Oskar Kokoschka: Life and Work (1947), Expressionism (1958), and articles on Félicien Rops.