April, 2026

By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

The Nazis were coming for Victor Hammer.

It was 1939 in Vienna during the dark days that followed the German annexation of Austria. Hammer — well-known in European art circles as a high-society portrait painter, designer of typefaces, and printer of beautiful books on a handpress he’d built himself — didn’t believe he was in mortal danger. He and his wife Rosl were not Jewish, although many of their friends and patrons were, and their daughter was married to a Jew. But with top Nazi officials converging on Vienna, it seemed possible, if not likely, that Hammer would be pressed into service on behalf of the German propaganda machine. The vain and powerful Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, was said to be excited by the prospect of having Hammer paint his portrait, lending the Reichsmarschall some of the formal dignity that was already the artist’s trademark. When Victor Hammer painted you, you were preserved forever, as if in amber, as an exemplar of humanity — just the sort of legacy that Göring craved.

Hammer (pronounced “Hah-mer”) had his own legacy to preserve. “There were a bunch of Nazis who liked his style, or would have liked it, and he was not going to have anything to do with that,” says Lexington’s Gay Reading, who would become Hammer’s nephew by marriage several decades later. “He thought the Nazis would want to use him, and you couldn’t say no. So they got out of Dodge.”

The Hammers suspected their cook of being a Nazi and, perhaps, an informant. “So they acted like they were going to have a small dinner party,” Reading says. “They went out and bought food and had this woman cooking dinner. Then they said they were going to go for a walk and buy some flowers for the table. They went to the train station and got on a train for Florence, leaving behind all their belongings. They gave no hint that they were going to flee, because they didn’t think they’d be allowed to.”

From Florence, the Hammers soon made their way to the United States — first to Aurora, N.Y., where Victor taught at the now-defunct Wells College and established a press there. In 1948, the Hammers moved to Lexington, where he served as artist-in-residence at Transylvania University, married the librarian and letterpress book enthusiast Carolyn Reading (after Rosl's death from cancer), and finished his long career in a blaze of creativity before his death in 1967. From their elegant home and studio at 220 Market Street in Gratz Park, the Hammers presided over what became a high-powered artistic salon whose visitors included the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (with whom he also had a long correspondence), the balladeer and music scholar John Jacob Niles, and the experimental photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, among others. 

In part due to the antique, almost medieval quality of Hammer’s art (about which more later), he never achieved anything like the household-name status of many of his contemporaries in the art world. But he continues to be well-regarded around the globe as an important artist and a key contributor to typography and book printing. Hammer’s patrons and admirers included the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose bust he later sculpted in bronze; the American businessman Edgar Bronfman, whose portrait by Hammer still hangs at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, as well as Edgar Bronfman Jr.; the art historian Bernard Berenson and his aide, the writer Nicky Mariano; the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his son Dmitri; the missionary physician Albert Schweitzer, who encouraged him to build clavichords; and the pianist Rudolf Serkin, who bought the drawing of Hammer’s portrait of Merton and brought it to the Abbey of Gethsemani in New Haven, Kentucky.

Although he was 70 when he first arrived in Lexington, Hammer would later tell friends that he felt he’d done his best work here. “I was a little bit in awe of him,” Reading says during a tour of his extensive collection of his uncle’s paintings and drawings at Reading’s home in downtown Lexington. “He was an old man to me, but I knew Aunt Carolyn loved him. He was a gentleman of the old school. He always wore bohemian clothes to work in — smocks, scarves, little caps, that kind of thing — and when he wasn’t working, he was usually in a gray business suit and a tie. He spoke with an Austrian accent but his favorite language was Italian. I think he had a beautiful life here in Lexington. He wanted peace and quiet to work in a studio on what he wanted to do, and that’s what he got.”

Hammer never returned to the city of his birth. “He was so Viennese,” Reading recalls, “but he said, ‘Vienna is dead.’”

Born in Vienna in 1882, Hammer moved to Florence in 1922 to set up a printing press, building the press himself. In 1931, the press, by then called the Stamperia del Stantuccio, printed a new edition of Milton’s Samson Agonistes in one of the five new typefaces he created based on the Uncial script used in monasteries from the fourth to the eighth centuries. The most famous of these typefaces, American Uncial (also known internationally as Hammer Uncial), is now used throughout the world (particularly in Ireland because of its vaguely Celtic quality) as a display face for signs, advertising, and books, especially poetry.

“His goal was to create a typeface that every language would look good in,” says Paul Holbrook, the longtime director of the University of Kentucky’s King Library Press, where Hammer’s handpress is still occasionally in use to print broadsides of short texts, including a poem by the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, and other ephemera. “In German, for example, ascenders and descenders clustered together in certain words and spoiled the straightness of the line of type. Victor created a compressed-looking line of type that’s largely horizontal, in what he called a universal line. He said, ‘I want my line of type to look like a string of pearls.’”