Pamina Liebert-Mahrenholz, sculptor and painter, was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, on April 27, 1904. Her father, inspired by Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” named her after the heroine daughter of the Queen of the Night, instilling in Pamina an early connection to the arts. She grew up in a city vibrant with cultural and intellectual life, shaping her artistic sensibilities from a young age.
Graduating at age 16 from the Hohenzollern Lyceum in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Pamina initially followed a traditional career path, apprenticing as a milliner. However, her true passion lay in the arts, leading her to abandon millinery in 1928 to pursue a career in sculpture and, later, painting. She found her artistic home within the dynamic environment of the United State Schools of Fine and Applied Arts in Berlin, under the guidance of German sculptor Prof. Fritz Klimsch. Pamina quickly distinguished herself, becoming known as Klimsch’s “master student”.
Pamina’s initiation into her burgeoning career was marked by early accolades, including a bronze medal in 1931 and the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1932, an honour she regrettably had to decline due to the growing threat of the Nazi regime. Pamina’s 1929 marriage to Rolf Mahrenholz, an emerging non-Jewish portrait photographer, was severely tested in 1933 by a mass of antisemitic legislation, as well as evidence of Nazi rejection of avant-garde art (referred to as “degenerate art”.) Pamina struck gold in 1934 when the Berlin Academy of Arts accepted her life-sized sculpture for its Autumn Exhibition – her first of 25 lifetime exhibitions – but her personal safety forced her to avoid all further public displays of her art while in Germany.
In the mid-1930s, as the political climate in Germany deteriorated, Pamina and Rolf made the difficult decision to seek refuge in Britain. They tested the waters during two long visits there in 1934 and 1935. Rolf immigrated first in 1938, accompanied by his brother Harald and their mother, Helene, a pro-Nazi sympathizer. Complex family dynamics, coupled with the presumed knowledge of the Nazis’ strategies by their father, a colonel in the German army, may have significantly influenced their decision to leave Germany. Pamina joined them at the end of June 1939, two months before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, having to leave almost all her sculptures and possessions behind, and with a meagre British allowance.
Despite being a refugee from Nazi oppression, Pamina, like many others including Rolf, Harald and their mother Helene, fell victim to the British government’s mass internment policy in July 1940. Misclassified as being a high-risk “enemy alien”, she was first held in Holloway Prison in London, where her creative spirit endured, as she transformed her daily bread ration into sculptural forms. She was soon transferred to the Rushen Camp for women at Port St. Mary and later Port Erin, on the Isle of Man. During her internment, Pamina’s health declined, and she was only able to meet her husband, interned separately in Peel Camp, for a few hours each month.
Following her release in September 1942, Pamina returned to London, being granted British nationality in 1947, and eventually settling in a modest flat in West Hampstead. The war years had taken their toll, and she found herself working in various jobs, including in a lampshade factory and for many years as a china restorer, far from her artistic aspirations. But her love of art never left her, and during the 1950s she exhibited her sculptures in six shows.
“The human body has always fascinated me
Pamina Liebert-Mahrenholz, 1994
in its variety and has never stopped inspiring me to further exploration, right from
the time when as a very young child I made a female torso with plasticine.”
Throughout that period, Pamina was expanding her interests beyond sculpture, into the world of painting. She explored the realm of possibilities, and gradually cultivated a bold, expressionist style, infused with vivid bursts of colour and merging into abstraction. Her greatest concentration of subjects in her painting was of nude women, building on her sculptural interests.
“In both three-dimensional forms and on canvas and paper, Liebert-Mahrenholz’s often brightly coloured canvases and sculptures range from representational depictions to highly abstracted forms, including humans and landscapes.”
Sara Angel, PhD, Founder and Executive Director of the Art Canada Institute, 2023
In her 70s and 80s, Pamina featured in 14 exhibitions, of which four were solo shows at the Camden Institute, Ben Uri Art Gallery, Camden Art Centre, and Ben Uri Art Society. She embraced a Bohemian lifestyle with Rolf, exploring New Age ideas and relishing their freedom and youthful spirit. She created her final sculpture at age 89 and her last painting at age 93.
Pamina Liebert-Mahrenholz’s life was a journey marked by immense talent, profound resilience, and adaptability in the face of adversity. Her death at age 100 on September 21, 2004, in London, was not just the passing of a great artist but the end of an era that she had helped shape with her creativity and strength. Her legacy lives on through her works in public collections (including the Ben Uri Collection, the Ruth Borchard Collection, and the Yad Vashem Art Collection), her works in a public archive (the Universitätsarchiv, Universität der Künste Berlin), her more than 500 finished artworks in Canada, and the exhibitions that continue to celebrate her remarkable contributions to the art world.