Background
Hannelore Baron was born on June 8, 1926 in Dillingen, Germany. Her father, Julius Alexander, was a Jewish textile merchant.
Hannelore Baron was born on June 8, 1926 in Dillingen, Germany. Her father, Julius Alexander, was a Jewish textile merchant.
Hannelore studied at Staubenmiller Textile High School in Manhattan (present-day Bayard Rustin Educational Complex).
In the late 1950s, Baron combined a variety of techniques and began making her first collages. In 1969, she held her personal exhibition at Ulster County Community College and started to make the box constructions, that would become her signature. In these works, damaged wood and metal, often tied or nailed together, enclose secrets that can only be guessed at: scraps of her past, mysterious games without rules, concealed objects. In their rawness and obscurity they form the necessary counterpart to Joseph Cornell’s elegant enigmas. In these works and in her collages, Hannelore was able to convey her sense of the fragility of life, the mythic substratum of human experience and broader concerns for the environment, the injustices of war, especially the Vietnam conflict and the physical pain of existence.
In the early 1970s, Hannelore established a studio and devoted her time and energy completely to her artwork until her death in 1987.
Quotations: "Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition."
Hannelore married Herman Baron, a book dealer, in 1950. The couple gave birth to two children — daughter Julie and son Mark.