Esther Hammerman, Untitled (East River), post 1950, Oil on Canvas, 59.1 x 44 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Esther Hammerman, Untitled (Football), Date Unknown, Mixed Media, Private Collection
Born Esther Wachsmann in Wieliczka, Poland in 1886, Esther Hammerman and her husband Baruch owned a small import business in Vienna, Austria. Along with raising four daughters, Hammerman stitched wall hangings and needlework tapestries. The family fled the Nazis during their takeover of Austria in 1938, first landing in Trinidad, and then the British West Indies where they spent the war years interned in a camp. Upon the end of the war, Esther Hammerman and her family managed to immigrate to New York City.
Encouraged in her artwork by her youngest daughter and son-in-law, Esther Hammerman began painting. She entered two works in a national competition at New York’s Whitney Museum, winning a prize and beginning her career, at the age of sixty, as a serious painter in New York. In 1950, Hammerman joined her youngest daughter’s family in San Francisco, where her exhibited work was again well received.
During her twelve years in the Bay Area, Esther Hammerman had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Oakland Museum of California. In 1963 she returned to New York in failing health, living with her daughter Nadja’s family, but continued painting and showing her work both in New York and California.
Esther Hamerman painted somewhat naturalistically; although. she also abstracted forms and flattened the perspective of her compositions. Her palette was jewel-like and beautifully nuanced. Hammerman devised a personal style by painting in oils on canvas or canvas board, and then outlining the forms in India ink. Occasionally, she used photographs or printed images for reference; but she then transformed the subject in a personal way.
Esther Hammerman died in New York in April of 1977. Completing some seventy-five works that include paintings, drawings, and watercolors, she received recognition and several honors during her lifetime. Fifty pieces of Hammerman’s work remain with her family who withdrew her work from public view in 1993.
There were solo exhibitions of her paintings in the later 1950s and early 1960s at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, the Oakland Museum of California, the Judah L. Magnes Museum, and The Ames Gallery are among the places that featured her work in retrospective solo or in group shows in the 1980s.