German-British photographer and art historian whose books include Trinitas Creator Mundi (London, 1938-1939), L’iconographie de la Trinité (Paris, 1943) and Picasso und der Affe (Munich, 1969).
Heidi Heimann was a daughter of the engineer Hans Heimann and Dora Fliess. Her parents were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and perished there. Her brother Fritz Heimann was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp, while her sister, the textile artist Marli Ehrman, managed to escape.
After graduating from the Westend School in 1923, Heimann studied art history, German, philosophy and Romance studies in Freiburg im Breisgau, Berlin, Bonn and Hamburg. She received her doctorate in 1930 under Erwin Panofsky and worked for him as an unpaid assistant. In 1931 she was doing research in Florence and Paris, from 1933 to 1935 she had a teaching position at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at the Sorbonne in Paris. As she was affected by the National Socialist occupational ban for Jews, she trained as a photographer at the Lette-Verein in Berlin in 1935 and emigrated to Great Britain in 1936. She worked there as a freelance photographer in London and from 1940 to 1943 did commissioned work for the photography workshop of the Warburg Institute, London.
Heimann was a photojournalist for the Picture Post magazine from 1944 to 1952. She received British citizenship in 1947. She was Assistant Curator of the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection from 1954 to 1964. In 1972 she was invited as a guest lecturer to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.
Adelheid “Heidi” Heimann died on 24 April 1993 in London at age 89.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)