Benno Schotz

A National Galleries profiles notes:

Sculptor and teacher Benno Schotz was born in Arensburg on Saaemaa island, Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. Two years later his family moved to the mainland, to the city of Pärnu. In 1911, Schotz went to study engineering at the Technical College in Darmstadt, Germany, where he first visited art galleries. He followed his elder brother to Scotland in 1912, where other family members had already emigrated, and studied engineering at Glasgow Royal Technical College. He worked as a draughtsperson with a Clydebank shipping company while taking evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, later enrolling as a day student thanks to the encouragement of its then Director, Fra H. Newbury. Schotz later became Head of the Sculpture and Ceramic Departments at the school (1938–61). His first solo exhibition in 1926, at Reid’s Gallery, Glasgow, launched a career that made him Scotland’s leading portrait sculptor. Highly sensitive to the individuality of his subjects, Schotz worked very quickly and preferred his sitters to move and speak to him instead of being silent and still. During the Second World War, he helped refugees in Scotland, particularly Jewish artists who had escaped persecution by the Nazis in continental Europe. Schotz experienced deep personal tragedy himself when his sister and her husband were executed in Pärnu in 1941 as part of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish population in Estonia. Schotz’s Jewish faith and ancestry remained of deep importance to him. He and the Polish artist Josef Herman (1911–2000) organised an exhibition of Jewish art at the Glasgow Jewish Institute, which included work by modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine and Chaïm Soutine. He followed this up with a bigger Festival of Jewish Arts coinciding with the Festival of Britain, London in 1951. In 1963, Schotz was appointed as Queen’s Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland. Schotz was elected as an Associate Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1933 and an Academician in 1937. He exhibited in every annual RSA exhibition from 1920 to 1981, and again in 1983 before his death in 1984 aged 93.

This profile notably fails to mention Schotz's Zionism.