Charlotte Mayer

Charlotte Mayer (4 January 1929 – 9 November 2022) was a Czech-born British sculptor. Mayer was born in Prague, the only child of Kurt Fanta and Helen Marie Stutzová. Kurt and Helen divorced in 1937, and two years later Helen married Ludwig “Frederick” Mayer. In 1939, aged 10, Mayer and her mother emigrated to the United Kingdom to flee the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Despite pleas from Helen, Mayer’s maternal grandparents, Růžena and Eduard Stutz, chose not to accompany their daughter and granddaughter to the UK, and remained in Prague. In 1942, Růžena was transported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and subsequently to the Treblinka extermination camp, where she was murdered. In a televised interview, Mayer stated that Růžena and Eduard were “the most important people” in her life. In 1945, Mayer studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the tutelage of Edward Folkard, Harold Wilson Parker and Ivor Roberts-Jones. She continued her studies at the Royal College of Art, enrolling in 1950. Her tutors at this time included Frank Dobson, John Skeaping and Heinz Henghes. While at the Royal College, Mayer met her future husband, the architect Geoffrey Salmon. They married in 1952. Mayer received her first public commission in 1953: Mother and Child, a carved alabaster piece for the maternity ward of Epsom General Hospital. The sculpture, however, was criticised as being “too modern”, and never put on display. Following a twelve-year hiatus to focus on raising her three children, Mayer returned to sculpture in the mid-1960s. Initially producing human figures, a visit to New York City in 1967 inspired a series of timber – and later steel – sculptures entitled Black Cities. Mayer’s fascination with modern cities continued into the 1970s, and the ring-like forms of Source, Cascade, Flow and Nebula stem from her observations of smoke rising from Battersea Power Station. Mayer also began periodically producing animal sculptures throughout the next few decades.